Random Back Issues #108 - Birds of Prey #37

This could be labeled "Joker: Last Laugh - Aftermath", assuming anyone was stupid enough to advertise it was connected to that event. I know it's hardly ironclad, and more likely an example of recency bias, but I remember an issue of Wizard where Last Laugh ranked as the worst event in a reader poll they ran. I hadn't read it, so the idea it could be worse than the Clone Saga (which ranked 2nd) was stunning and terrifying.

Anyway, Black Canary, Blue Beetle and Robin are trying to track down some of the last few Jokerized escaped super-criminals loose in Gotham. First up is, G-Nome who accumulates DNA of different things to copy their traits. Robin warns he's been to the zoo and aquarium since escaping The Slab, but the spiked tail thing reminds me more of a dinosaur.

I guess DC has that one island with dinosaurs, the one in the War that Time Forgot comics?

Beetle tries to tranq him, but it can't get through his tough outer shell. The Canary Cry stuns G-Nome long enough for Robin to stab him between some of the plates and that's that, although G-Nome doesn't revert to normal.

Oracle confirms most of the escapees are rounded up, and the only one left in the Gotham/Bludhaven area is, well, you see the panel directly above, right? Cue sepia-toned flashback of Barbara-Batgirl and Grayson-Robin taking him out in his only previous attempt at crime, where he was dressed as a fast-food employee with a name tag reading, "Hi! I'm Crazy How May I Serve You?" I'm wondering if that was from the Batgirl: Year One mini-series that I think Dixon and Martin did. Barbara's confident the guy will be more incompetent since being Jokerized, as the toxin 'amplifies your personality.'

Hovering in the Bug above a shopping mall, Ted's thermal scope reads someone standing over a trash barrel in the food court, people huddled on the ground around them. Smash through the skylight and find the person standing a "Weiner World" employee chained to a oil drum full of mustard gas.

Condiment King then gets all three of them with various condiments, spiced up to a 100,000 on the Scoville scale, which Wikipedia says is equal to a low-end habanero chili or Scotch bell pepper. The Carolina Reaper is at 2,000,000 units, but maybe it hadn't been created when Dixon wrote this in '02.

While Robin and Canary go into anaphylactic shock and Ted crawls to the ice cream store, Condiment King goes into his own sepia-toned flashback. He was assigned to the Arkham kitchen, where the food was 'bland, soulless, and drugged.' But then he had a conversation with Poison Ivy, and she told him all about spices and plants.

In some versions of her character, Ivy would be against people eating plants, wouldn't she? But I guess if you're using nature's gifts to kill humans, she'd give the thumbs up to that.

Ted overcomes the heat with a healthy dose of milk. Turns out all that book learning didn't fix Condiment King's glass jaw as one punch sends him to la-la land. His mustard gas bomb is set to go off, and with no time to defuse it, Ted uses the Bug to haul it out of the mall. Where it blows up over the city? I'm assuming the idea is the gas will dilute on the wind but that seems like a good way to broaden the effect over several city blocks. Maybe its overwhelmed by the smog normally hanging over Bludhaven.

C.K. gets hauled to jail and Canary heads home to wash her hair, while Tim wonders how to get BBQ sauce off Kevlar and Ted complains the Bug's gonna smell like a hotdog cart. There's a subplot about Barbara trying to get in touch with Nightwing, who is shutting people out after he beat Joker to death at the end of Last Laugh (Batman resuscitated him, because of course he did.) Bold of Dixon to assume we'll care that Nightwing is angry with himself for killing the Joker.

{2nd longbox, 105th comic. Birds of Prey #37, by Chuck Dixon (writer), Marcos Martin (penciler), Alvaro Lopez (inker), Wildstorm (colorist), Albert T. De Guzman (letterer)}

Birds of Prey

Yeah, I'm not typing out that entire title.

First things first, to get it out of the way: Ella Jay Basco does fine as this movie's version of Cassandra Cain. Which is to say, at playing a sassy teen, marginally competent* pickpocket that drives the plot.  Granted, her character bears no resemblance to anything I'd associate with the name "Cassandra Cain", and unless Kelly Puckett and Daimon Scott got some nice royalty checks for this, I'd just as soon they'd named the character something else, but that's not on Basco or her performance. She did what the movie asked her to do.

Margot Robbie's a good Harley Quinn. She seems to be having fun, certainly, which feels essential for a movie with a kind of absurd comic tone like this one. Ewan McGregor is doing. . . something. It was like a combination of Kevin Bacon in X-Men First Class and Jason Schwatzman as Gideon Graves in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. This sort of cheesy over-the-top thing where the guy is trying so hard to be "quirky" you can't tell if it's supposed to be part of the character, or it's just the actor. You definitely need the villain to be more evil than Harley (and given the crap she openly admits to doing when she was with the Joker, that's a long order), but I'm not sure you want someone out-crazying her.

Also, was I supposed to read Roman Sionis and Zsasz as lovers? Or maybe it's an unrequited thing where Zsasz is hung up on his boss, so he likes killing women to keep them away from what's "his", but I don't know.

Of the Birds, I like Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Huntress the best. She's very angry, but also extremely awkward with people in a way where you can tell she spent a lot of time around assassins and focused on killing. The whole, 'You got rage issues. I don't have rage issues!' part made me laugh. Jurnee Smollett kind of gets the short end of the stick, because she's the world-weary, sensible one. Has to play the calm exasperated center with all these complete lunatics running around her. 

You'd think that would be Rosie Perez' role as Renee Montoya, as a burnt-out cop, but she's too much of a loose cannon. She still believes in the work if not the institution of the police. Little disappointed we never saw her punch her captain. But we did get Harley shooting a bunch of cops in the face with beanbag rounds. That was good.

I didn't really like the back-and-forth nature of how the story was presented. Where the plot would advance, then screech to a halt so Harley could detail someone else's backstory. I liked it fine in the first Deadpool movie as an approach, but that movie picked better points to stop. Or maybe I just felt like the exposition was unnecessary. 

Like the one where Harley explains why she's attacking a police station looking for Cassandra. I knew why. Roman's guys caught her, and she's retrieving Cass and the diamond to get herself out of trouble. I didn't need what felt like an interminable flashback of her and Sionis interacting to connect those dots. It felt like the story had momentum, shit was happening, she was going to meet the kid and have to make a choice and then. . . it just crashes to a halt.

There were some structural issues, but it was funny in places, and I mostly didn't get impatient for it to hurry up, so count it as a win.

* She was getting caught by Gotham cops, who are presented as so stupid and incompetent I can't believe they manage to zip up their flies without getting their balls caught.

Sunday Splash Page #84

"One Punch Isn't Enough," in Birds of Prey #107, by Gail Simone (writer), Nicola Scott (penciler), Doug Hazlewood (inker), Hi-Fi Designs (colorist), Travis Lanham (letterer)

This is the last issue of the only story from Gail Simone's run on Birds of Prey I own. And I own this one mostly because a) they brought Ice back from the dead, and b) the Secret Six show up. In my defense, I think Ed Benes drew a lot of Simone's run, and there's only so much of his art a person can handle. Nicola Scott is a considerable improvement. Everyone still looks extremely pretty, but there's not anywhere near as much posing characters for maximum boobs and ass exposure.

This is basically the only appearance of the Six' brief roster configuration that included Harley Quinn. Ragdoll hints in this issue that he's going to try chucking her off a cliff like he did the Mad Hatter previously. Instead Harley wound up as a recurring character in Countdown, DC's attempt to replicate the success of 52, but without basically any of the creative talent from that one.

Might have been better off with the cliff. Man, Countdown was fucking terrible. They turned Jimmy Olsen into a giant Turtle Boy, had him fight Darkseid, and somehow made that suck. How do you even manage that?!

Ahem, where was I? Oh yeah, this was right after 52 and One Year Later, and Spy Smasher - seen getting wrecked in the picture above - has figured out Barbara is Oracle and has taken over her operation. She just fired Lady Blackhawk for disobeying orders by coming to pick them up, rather than staying at the plane. You see how that went.

Honestly, as disappointed as Huntress is in Oracle for letting this happen, I'm more disappointed in Huntress for not having Zinda's back and, I don't know, putting a crossbow bolt in Spy Smasher's eye? But Spy Smasher clearly has strong plot armor game, because when they were fighting the Six, she squares off with Deadshot, who passes up more than one opportunity to shoot her. Deadshot. Not shooting someone he's fighting when he has the chance. Right.

It doesn't matter in the long run, since Canary rallies all Oracle's friends to give Smasher the boot next month, and about three years later, during Simone's Secret Six ongoing, Spy Smasher tries to pull a power play on Amanda Waller, and the Wall basically burns her to the ground. Because Amanda Waller's the best! When she's not being the worst.

This is just kind of an odd book to look at, given the characters involved and where things go from here. Hawkgirl and the Kate Spencer Manhunter are on the team, but I don't think they stay beyond this story. Knockout and Barda have a good brawl, seem to part on good terms. Until Scandal makes a careless comment to Knockout in bed and sends the redhead off to prove something. Which never happened, because she was sacrificed on the altar of Jim Starlin's Death of the New Gods. Ice was brought back, but other than Guy kind of botching his attempt to ask her to move in, I'm not sure anyone used her until Judd Winick's Generation Lost. You also have Misfit, the teen redhead with teleporting powers who briefly called herself Batgirl. This is story where her "DARRRRK VENGEANCE!" call comes from. I can't remember what happened to her, either, other than she had a brief rivalry with Black Alice, and they got briefly tangled up in some lead-up to Final Crisis.

Anyway, future wasting of various characters' potential aside, this is a pretty good story itself. Very much in the vein of Suicide Squad, where the team goes in on a mission where they aren't being told everything, and it all proceeds to go to hell. There are other players opposing them, in this case the Six, there's a lot of tension within the group (I think Spy Smasher brought Manhunter in, so the old guard aren't sure if they can trust her). Nobody likes the boss, and it just turns into a mess. The Six turn on their employer, because he's a complete sleaze, and they don't get paid. They are really bad at their jobs.

Sunday Splash Page #83

"Dinah Can Use a Sidekick, Right?" in Birds of Prey #40, by Chuck Dixon (writer), Rick Leonardi (penciler), Jesse Delperdang (inker), Wildstorm FX (colorist), Albert T. de Guzman (letterer)

I only own about a dozen issues of Birds of Prey. Nothing against the book, it's just that none of Oracle, Black Canary, or Huntress are characters that really move the needle for me. They're in that large subset of "don't got nothing against them, don't got nothin' for 'em, either" characters. Basically all the issues I do own involve other characters making guest appearances. During the Dixon run, that boils down to Power Girl, Ted Kord, or in the case of this issue, Spoiler.

This is from a stretch where one of those three seems to show up fairly regularly, but there's also a lot of event tie-ins. This issue, for example, is part of Bruce Wayne: Murderer, where, if I remember right, Cass Cain's dad killed Vesper Fairchild and made it look like Wayne did it, because. . . reasons. He was trying to get Cass back? Someone paid him to do it? I can't remember.

Oracle has Canary helping her with the investigation, without explaining why exactly she's so interested in proving Bruce Wayne's innocence (although I think it's implied Dinah figures it out). Which is one of the things that bugs me about Oracle, Dixon's version of her at least. She plays a lot of double standards. She gets to know everything about you, but you're lucky if you know anything about her. She sends you on a job, she only tells you what she thinks you need to know, regardless of how little of the full picture that is. It's amazing to me anyone puts up with that, but they do.

Beyond that, the other two threads are that Ted Kord finds out he's had a bunch of heart attacks, and then get attacked by a little robot sent by some dude who wants to take over his company, and Canary helping Spoiler by kicking Steph's dad and the Riddler out of her house. Which is admittedly pretty cool, when Canary Crys the Riddler's gun to pieces. I think this starts a brief stretch where Steph tries to get Canary to teach her the ropes, since Batman's off on his bullshit again, but it never really goes anywhere.

Rick Leonardi had taken over as penciler the issue prior to this, and I think Jesse Delperdang is a really good inker for him. The two seem to have worked together on several Batbooks around this time (Nightwing and Batgirl being two where I've seen them), and it's what I'd call Leonardi's strongest work. It avoids that common trait of his work where the lines are so faint figures and faces are almost impressionistic at times. Just a hint of facial features and your mind fills in the rest. There's none of that here, but maybe having Dixon or Kelly Puckett as the writer leaves an artist more room to work than Chris Claremont (although that wouldn't explain some of the stuff I've seen the last few years).