MoritatRezensionen

Loved it. Felt it was better than the last one.

Using WWI reference as a framing device, Elephanmen: Volume Zero drops a raw cut of bloody meat in front of your eyes. A brutal, gruesome, look at the atrocities of war.

874

After reading this I don’t’ think I really want to bother with more in the series. Barbara seems to be doing too many things at once and I just don’t see how she is making time to even live and yet it seems to be going on the book. This story arc starts out with her having memory issues and saying things that no one else agrees on and yet nobody can put the puzzle pieces together until it is almost too late. Overall I think there has been way too much playing with people’s minds and memories and as a plot hook it has gotten old.

Digital review copy provided by the publisher through Edelweiss

This is a graphic novel who's story line is an overbearing, dying rich man taking his son on a search for the fountain of youth as told through the son's eyes.
I usually don't read graphic novel, but I won this in a giveaway, Thank YOU, but I eventually found it gripping and a great new way for me to read. The story is a bit difficult to follow due to the writing style which I found to be quite different. The illustrations are great and eventually the story line gripped me, but I still wish it would have had a better flow. The ending was uneventful.

The reboot of Batgirl that happened during The New 52 tweaked the Barbara Gordon that had less dark doom and gloom angst, and more intrepid spunky quirkiness. But when Rebirth was announced, that meant that this reboot, too, was coming to an end, and that the character was going to move on. So now I come to the end of Batgirl’s time in the New 52, with “Batgirl: Mindfields”.

I liked the emphasis on team work and female friendship in this collection, as Barbara has to bring more excellent ladies to her team as her mind starts playing tricks on her, all because of a super villain named Fugue. She starts having memories that may or may not be real, and Frankie, Black Canary, and newcomers Spoiler and Bluebird make it their mission to help Barbara figure out who the mysterious Fugue is. I am always going to be happy to see Dinah Lance pop up, and while it took me a little while to get on board with Spoiler and Bluebird I eventually found them to be fun superheroes that I would like to see more of down the line. But the supporting character that really gets time to shine in this arc is Frankie, Barbara’s techie roommate who brings not only a great new character to the scene, but also some always welcome diversity. It was fun seeing her start out as a roommate and friend, and watching her turn into a much appreciated and needed ally. Frankie and Babs have a realistic and imperfect friendship, but they always have each other’s backs and will always be there for each other.

But even though I liked those aspects of this collection, I will admit that for me this was the weakest of the series. While it had some interesting elements of gaslighting and memory manipulation, I found myself barely invested in the Fugue storyline, and was kind of disappointed that ultimately, Batgirl herself had very little to do. Yes, I do like the power of female friendship, and yes, I liked the ladies that Barbara has brought into circle of friends and allies, but as I read it I felt that Batgirl herself had the smallest role yet in a series that is supposed to be about her at the forefront. Had this reboot of Batgirl gone on for more than three issues I probably would have been just fine with the spotlight being shared as much as it was. But this was basically a third of the Batgirl of Burnside series that didn’t feel like a Batgirl story, but a Birds of Prey story (don’t worry, I will be going back to that series soon!). It also felt like Stewart and Fletcher were trying to make a very special finale by bringing back almost all of the antagonists that we saw through the run, to end in a Battle Royale of them vs Batgirl’s Team. But it didn’t feel as satisfying as it could have specifically because a few of them were fighting superheroines that they wouldn’t have any beef with! What is the pay off of having Yuki and Yuri, the cosplaying villains from earlier in the series, fighting with SPOILER, who just showed up? That isn’t satisfying to me, it feels like padding out the plot.

Also, we barely saw any Luke Fox in this. If you are going to make a huge thing of Barbara choosing Luke over Dick Grayson (I’m still a bit sore about that. I really like Luke and he and Barbara are perfectly fine together, but Babs and Dick is one of my OTPs in the DC Universe), you had better make her relationship with Luke something more than a couple of after thought moments that feel more like ‘oh yeah she’s with Luke, they should probably hang out’. I’m not saying that Batgirl needs a man, nor that a relationship with a man should be a HUGE component to this arc, but why the whole song and dance of her picking him if it’s just left off page?

I think that the ultimate weakness of the Batgirl of Burnside arc was that it was trying a bit too hard to be DC’s answer to “Ms. Marvel” when it should have been trying to be it’s own thing. “Ms. Marvel” works because Kamala Khan was a brand new character that had room to grow and evolve without any expectations or constraints on her, so she could be the spunky young adult with relatable personal problems while still feeling genuine. When you try to apply this model to Barbara Gordon, who has been through so much already, it might feel a little odd to see her fighting manic cosplayers or taking selfies for social media clicks. I do like that DC is trying to reach out to new audience members, and I think that Batgirl is a great way to do that. But I also think that sometimes they tried to make her something that she wasn’t, and it therefore rang false.

I am glad that Barbara got to go beyond the angst and live her life a little lighter. As “Batgirl: Mindfields” wraps up her time in Burnside, I am very interested to see what she gets to do on her own in the Rebirth Arc. I was ultimately satisfied with the series as a whole, and hope that an even better iteration can be created now that a more fun loving Batgirl has been introduced to us.

I received this book from Edelweiss and DC Comics in exchange for an honest review.

1 star, because I can't go any lower.

I really don't like the overly-simplistic route in both story and artwork this series has taken. It's terrible. I don't know if DC is doing this to try to gain some young female readers, but if you ask me, it's pandering and degrading.

Bring back the smart Batgirl/Barbara Gordon and not some ditzy girl who's more concerned about missing a date with some "hot college guy" and the latest social networking trend.

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

New Killer Star just isn't as good as Kicking and Screaming. Part of this is that it's kind of a hodgepodge: one four-issue story arc, one side story of the band visiting Gotham Academy, one flashback story (set before Kicking and Screaming), and one part of a story about Dinah being (re)united with Batgirl and Huntress to (re)form the Birds of Prey.

And part of that is that none of these components are particularly satisfying. The main four-part story is about Dinah being kidnapped by a ninja clan or something who want to know the martial art secret previously known only to Dinah's mother. There's a lot of backstory invoked here, some of it new (I don't think the New 52 Birds of Prey ever said a thing about Dinah's parents) and some of it old, but all of it isn't very illuminating to the Dinah of the present. I want to read about the band having wacky martial arts adventures on the road! But mostly the band is separated from Dinah during this adventure, and the story feels like it's ignoring the premise of the book more than it's using it.

The art, too, is disappointing. Sandy Jarrell isn't a bad artist, and neither is Moritat, but neither of their work compares to that of Annie Wu, the primary artist on volume 1 of Black Canary, who only draws two issues here-- they just lack the dynamism, fun, and sexiness that Wu brings. I know Wu did some well-received Kate Bishop Hawkeye comics for Marvel, but I don't know what else. She's clearly an up-and-coming dynamo (or ought to be), so I'll have to keep on top of her work.

The side stories are okay. I feel like the Gotham Academy one stops abruptly in a weird way; I look forward to reading Gotham Academy in full some day and getting a feel for this in context. (Black Canary's manager Heathcliff was a Gotham Academy student, and his girlfriend a member of the Gotham Academy cast.) The flashback issue is a solid but unremarkable story; I did love how the attendees of the Gotham deubtante's birthday party the band is hired to play at include obvious supervillains like Hugo Strange, but the band isn't allowed to be rude to them. An old comrade of Dinah's from Team 7 shows up, too. It turns out he's 100% a retcon, never actually appeared in Team 7, but that book's characters were so forgettable I didn't even suspect!

Finally, there's the first issue of the new Batgirl and the Birds of Prey series. I feel like DC is learning the wrong lessons from the way the New 52 was received, which is probably because the fans don't understand their own opinions. The problem (as I've said before) isn't that the backstories/premises of DC characters were rewritten, it's that they were rewritten badly. The New 52 incarnations of Dinah and the Birds of Prey were more boring than the post-Crisis one. So now DC is "fixing" that by reuniting Dinah, Barbara, and Helena. The problem I have with this is that the New 52 was finally managing to accumulate an interesting history of its own!

These Black Canary comics are great in conception if not always in execution, and the Fletcher/Stewart/Tarr Batgirl of Burnside books were clearly building up a female super-team that would have been the basis for a new Birds of Prey book, with Batgirl, Spoiler, and Bluebird as field agents (plus sometimes Black Canary), and Frankie as their Operator. But that history, which grew up organically, is just being tossed aside in favor of nostalgically bringing back a team from fifteen years ago... even though in the new continuity, Helena is a government agent and not a vigilante, and has no association with Dinah and Babs. It's just weird and sort of frustrating that once DC gets a viable premise for a new Black Canary book and a new Birds of Prey one, they clumsily toss it all aside in favor of nostalgia. The idea that Barbara actually was Oracle at some point in this new history, something someone never mentioned in the 52 issues of Batgirl or 34 issues of Birds of Prey is particularly retrograde. Yes, I think it was a mistake to toss away Oracle, but bringing her back in a weird way that makes the New 52's complicated history even more complicated isn't the answer.

Um, so as to the actual issue, it's fine. Mostly set-up. I guess I'll see what is done with it when I pick up the trade from the library someday in the far future. It's just a real shame that a premise with as much potential as Dinah-Drake-leads-a-rock-band-that-fights-crime-with-martial-arts is tossed away after just two thin volumes.

Green Arrow and Black Canary: « Previous in sequence

As I’m sure you all remember, I am a big Dinah Lance, aka Black Canary, fan. There’s something about her carefree and badass attitude that I really enjoy, and I was excited to find that she had her own “New 52” arc in the DC Comics world. While I love her in the supergroup Birds of Prey, it was nice seeing her get some time to shine all for herself in “Kicking and Screaming”, the first in the “Black Canary New 52” series. We also got to see a new group of awesome kick butt women in the form of her band: Paloma, Lord Byron, Ditto, and Bo Maeve. So when I finally grabbed “New Killer Star”, I was thinking that I would get more adventures of this group of awesome ladies.

But….. Unfortunately, that was not to be.

We pick up with our poor Dinah Lance being held captive in a strange prison-like setting. Her bandmates don’t know where she is, and the fate of the band hangs in the balance. It was a little hard seeing the group separated, as I feel like they only make each other stronger. I was also a bit frustrated that we kind of found ourselves in a situation that I wasn’t totally on board with, as Dinah being held in a strange prison by strange demon cultists perhaps because of who her mother was seems so old hat to me. I appreciated seeing a bit of the mother/daughter drama and baggage regarding Dinah, but it kind of felt like it came out of nowhere, as I don’t THINK that there was all that much in “Kicking and Screaming” (I could be wrong, I just don’t remember any)? By the time Dinah and her bandmates were reunited for a final showdown with the demon cult, we get taken into a completely DIFFERENT direction with a speculative arc that takes Black Canary into a potential future-scape of her life. And when the story does eventually get wrapped up, we still have a couple of side stories that have nothing to do with the original story arc, some of which aren’t even “Black Canary” titles. It felt like a bit of a mess, to be honest, which was such a disappointment because I so enjoyed “Kicking and Screaming”. I’ve looked around and it looks like one of the problems is that the DC “Rebirth” event happened, in which the titles in DC were rebooted yet again. So of course this was going to interrupt this fairly new series. The wrap up came fast and it was hard to swallow.

But there were things that I did like in “New Killer Star”. We got a fun side story in the “Gotham Academy” storyline involving the band’s tour manager Heathcliff, who was a former student at that boarding school. So we did get to see the band in action in that story, as well as my favorites from “Gotham Academy” like Maps and Olive. It turns out that he and Pomeline may have had a thing!!! I’m super down for all that, so that was a fun little crossover story. There is a stand alone story with just the Band that doesn’t involve aliens or demon cults, which gave me the girl power camaraderie that I felt the actual arc didn’t have. We also got a nice little insight into the new “Birds of Prey” arc, which brings Batgirl and Black Canary together again, as well as bringing back Huntress to round out the group. I highly enjoy “Birds of Prey”, and while it was a bit disappointing to see that yes, indeed, Oracle is a thing of the distant past, it was also good to see her recognized not just as something negative. But my praise for these things ultimately goes to show that the actual final arc for Dinah in her main comic series was a bit too weak to stand on it’s own two feet.

So while the stand alone stories were good fun and everything I was looking for, the actual finale to the “Black Canary New 52” arc fell kind of flat. And it worries me that some of the “New 52” series I’ve been following will end just as abruptly. All that said, I will look back fondly on “Black Canary” and her band as a whole, because when it was strong it was super fun. It will be interesting to see where “Rebirth” takes all of these characters. But for now I bid adieu to my girl Dinah, and hope that when we meet again she’ll be everything she was in this.

Frickin' awesome. Good art, with dark stories tackling human rights, racism, xenophobia, treatment of veterans. Great stories. While mostly taking place in the future. This one also had a rocking pirate adventure. Do yourself a favor and read it.

Barbara Gordon is burning the candle at both ends for sure in this TPB. As Batgirl, daughter, the head of a team of kick ass women like Frankie (aka Operator), Spoiler, Bluebird, with some assistance from Black Canary and Vixen (and with a little help from honorary kick ass woman Luke Fox).

Someone, again, is also trying to mess with Barbara's life, and her head. Using her implant. (Um... firewall anyone?? Heh).

On the one hand, at times there was so much going on that it was a little overwhelming to read. On the other hand I did think that the stories within were very interesting at points and I thought that they went into some thought-provoking places.

This TPB was an all around fun romp with a side of interesting.

I got this galley through Netgalley on behalf of DC Comics.

I read this series many a moons ago but didn't appreciate what was going on here. A subtle and coy way of expressing the segregation humanity foolishly projects on itself based off of something as simple as race, color and creed.

This is only the first 7 issues, I'm looking forward to a walk down memory lane.

This is a dark and painful but beautiful story. The art is just stunning and plays a huge part in creating the emotions and reactions to this story as you find yourself believing that elephants, rhinoceroses, crocodiles and giraffes can be merged with humans and look like they are possible.
The story is deep and dark and show humanity at it's worst and sometimes at it's best, but mostly worst. I really found myself feeling for the Elephantmen featured in this first book, even the clear villain and I wanted them to have better lives than they had.
This is an uncomfortable book, not my usual fare but so wonderfully done that I want to read more.