It's Monday, which is bad, but the weather's nice, which is good. And there are comics to discuss, which is, well, context-dependent, but it's good in this case. Also, Alex and I are going to try and hit a small comic con this weekend, if plans hold.
So the whole thing with Nightwing being taken prisoner from the end of last issue was just a hoax by Seer. That kind of gets a casually tossed in resolution at the start. But Oracle is sure she fixed her firewall this time, so it's time to track down the Tutor with the tracking bug they slipped on him last time. The tracking bug he found, so he's ready for them and Steph falls under control again, and starts attacking Cass. Who uses Steph to knock out all Tutor's other followers until Steph can snap out of it. Tutor is captured and taken to Barbara's old friend the psychotherapist we met last issue. Who is Spellbinder. Whoops. Never trust a guy with the last name "Dante".
I'm unclear why the Magistrates, who spot the Batgirls as soon as they head out across the rooftops towards the Tutor, do not attack. I guess the more accurate question is why Seer doesn't let them. She was perfectly OK with them attacking in issue 2. I thought maybe she has a plan for Tutor, and was going to let the Batgirls catch him, then take him away, but again, the Magistrates let Steph and Cass drive off (and where the hell did their car come from if they went by rooftops to get there?) with him.
This is a book where the smaller characters bits are working for me, but the larger plot is falling flat. The first third of this issue is Cass and Steph taking the day for themselves, before that night's mission. So Cloonan and Conrad have them interact with Mr. Dhaliwal (whose cookpot Cass returned last issue), who owns a bookstore, and continue with Steph's half-assed investigating into whether Mr. Greene, the sour-faced old man is this "Hill Ripper" person. They also meet Dante on the street and both of them can tell something's off.
The whole thing kind of plays into their characters, and Corona's selectively loose, exaggerated, expressive fits there. Cass is reserved, and Corona draws her in mostly draw clothes that don't have much loose fabric. She keeps her arms and legs in close, any free hand seems to be a fist, and she can be really intense. Steph, in contrast, is all over the place. Bright clothes, really baggy jeans, arms and legs flailing about. Much more energetic, much less controlled.
Corona's art is better suited for this than the fights, where his tendency to not always ink himself very strongly means Stern's colors overwhelm his lines and details get lost. Plus, while he gives them large capes, he doesn't really do anything with them stylistically. Nothing like a Breyfogle or Jones using the capes to make them seem larger than life, or like living shadows or anything. The capes are just long pieces of fabric that seem to be in the way.
Also, it would be nice if Stephanie actually got to do something useful. So far, Cloonan and Conrad aren't doing much to disprove Stephanie's fears that she's a liability to the team. At the bare minimum, she should be more competent at following a suspect and trying to gather evidence than stumbling out of bushes and crashing into passerbys.
This book is on a real tightrope with me, and I'm not sure how much more time it's got.
Dio is Kettlehead's prisoner, and as he had a bag experience with love, he's not going to let her retrieve her lover's ashes before hauling her off to Mistress Tako. Fortunately, Gordi and Becsu finally caught up, and Becsu jumps in, cutting goons to pieces with the power of her sword and the extremely large butt Mahfood gives her. Finally the guy with only one eye gets tired of all his buddies getting chopped to pieces and decides to just try and kill Dio with a poisoned blade. Becsu jumps in the way (that, with Mahfood going to black-and-white for those panels, feels a little like he's aping Frank Miller), but that leaves no one to protect Dio.
Except Turtleneck Jones, who's back from the dead and shoots the guy in the head. Kettlehead decides he's had enough and makes a rocket shoes escape. Becsu's dying words are to ask Dio to travel to Earth and meet the Grrl Scouts so she can be trained for. . .whatever her mission is. But it looks like they're still going to retrieve Billy's ashes first. I'm guessing that'll be the last issue.
Which is good. This book is all over the place with weird shit, to the point I was debating describing it as "dream logic", but I think the thing that holds it together is that Dio is always trying to find Billy's ashes. Even when Natas seems to be dead (he starts putting himself back together at the end of the issue) and she's a prisoner, she's still asking if they could please go retrieve Billy's ashes before she's hauled off to her likely painful death.
That devotion to loved ones is recurring thing for the whole story. Gordi betrayed Dio out of love for his family, and agreed to help Becsu save Dio out of friendship. Becsu is, I think, protecting Dio at least partially because of the importance of Chouko to her and her tribe. Heck, even Matty, the one-eyed guy, hit his limit because his friend got killed. At that moment, the money no longer mattered, only his dead friend. There might be something similar between Turtleneck Jones and Natas, but I'm not clear enough on their whole deal to be sure.
It's interesting to watch the shifts in color across each issue. This one starts out with a lot of blue on most of the characters, with the backgrounds being a sort of off-white/cream color thing, all through the early stages of Becsu's fight with Kettlehead's guys. Then there's another of the "legal pad" pages of Dio and Billy's relationship, a two-page spread of Tako and the Teeth talking. That's mostly black-and-white, minus Tako's faded bloodstain cloak and Teeth's red speech bubbles. Then two pages of Turtleneck Jones escaping the cops that are mostly black and green backgrounds, with orange for the characters. After that, Mahfood goes back to the fight and yellow and orange dominate everything else. The speech balloons, the characters, any little lines used for emphasis on action.
I don't have any idea why Mahfood switches it around like that. It's just neat to watch.
Oh, and the panels from this issue are from the brief back-up story, where Gordi and his son find a polybagged '90s issue of Macho Tailfin, which cracked me up with such lines as, 'We'll be in and out faster than a crackhead sells his 8-ball jacket for his next hit of rock.'
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