There’s so much to write about this month that I’m splitting the X-books off from the other titles.  You’ll find them in yesterday’s post, and in this one I’m going to cover… well, the DC books I bought from week three, along with a couple of other new titles.

The DC relaunch has been pretty successful so far, but for my money this was a faintly underwhelming week.  There’s a lot of books out this week of no interest to me – and other than some positive reviews for DC Universe Presents, I’ve seen little to suggest I’m missing out.  Based on the cover alone, I wasn’t going within a mile of Catwoman, and it seems pretty clear that one was a smart call.

Batman #1 – We’ve already had Detective Comics back in week one, which would traditionally be regarded as the lead Batman title, but I’m happy enough to have sat that one out.  This is the Scott Snyder/Greg Capullo book, and thankfully, it seems to be pretty much self-contained.  Some of the sidekicks are wandering around, but there’s no apparent attempt to tie in with events in the other Bat-family titles.

What you do get is a first issue that’s mainly concerned with introducing the cast and the setting, and (towards the end) with setting up a mystery for Batman to deal with.  Because he’s a detective, after all.  And it’s a solid enough Batman plot, from the look of it.

Batman himself needs no introduction, and Snyder doesn’t waste our time with an origin recap – there’s a passing mention of the death of his parents, but that’s about it.  The rest of the supporting cast are perhaps another matter, so the issue makes sure to set up his relationship with Nightwing, Red Robin and the current Robin, as well as the two major cops.  But most of all, this issue is about establishing Gotham itself, which, after all, is not just another interchangeable fictional DC city; it’s the one where the particularly crazy and disturbed villains tend to pop up.  And so much of Batman’s narration is based around the local newspaper’s voxpop responses to the question, what is Gotham?

Central to the issue is Bruce Wayne’s fundraising speech where he sets out his vision for Gotham.  Of course, there’s always a bit of uncertainty about how much you can trust what Bruce says in this sort of speech.  But broadly speaking, Snyder’s Batman, while remaining a decidedly austere figure, refuses to accept everyone else’s vision of Gotham as a bit of a psychotic dump.  For him, Gotham has the potential to be great and he’s making a difference.  This is not a version of Batman who’s fighting a futile or obsessive crusade; he claims, at least, to have a degree of optimism.  In a character who can verge on emo, that’s a welcome slant.

The art is lovely.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen Capullo working outside the style of Todd Macfarlane, but this moves into a nice blend of atmosphere and cartooning.  His Batman is a suitably imposing and shadowy presence, and the double-page spread of the Batcave – which could easily have been a waste of space – turns out to be fabulous.

I confess to being a bit sceptical about trying to follow any individual Bat-title – I just know that they’ll be dragged into some sort of hideous crossover at some point – but this is a strong, back-to-basics Batman comic.  It’s very well drawn, and it hits the right tone for the character without falling into overblown angst.  I’ll give it a few more issues.

Blue Beetle #1 – This is a complete reboot of the Jaime Reyes version of Blue Beetle.  Unlike most of the DCU titles, this is an outright origin story; the central elements of the series are the same as before, but Tony Bedard has taken the opportunity to jettison some clutter.

So the first four pages are a prologue explaining what the Scarabs actually are – something that the original series treated as a slow reveal.  Then we get an explanation of how a lost Scarab ended up on Earth, before the story proper gets underway, by re-introducing Jaime and his establishing supporting character Brenda and Paco, re-introducing Brenda’s aunt as the villain, and having Jaime getting caught in the crossfire of some villains hunting for the Scarab, so that he can (of course) end up becoming the Blue Beetle.

When Jaime was originally created, he was spun out of one of DC’s line-wide crossovers, and his origin was awkwardly hitched to that.  All that is apparently now out of the window, and a good thing too; Jaime now has an origin story which at least connects to his own cast.

Nonetheless, I have some mixed feelings about this.  There are certainly other differences from the previous series.  Paco’s gang connections are being played up much more strongly, for example.  La Dama has some actual henchmen for Blue Beetle to fight.  And some points are laid out in the first issue which the previous series took a while to reveal.  But for all that, the general shape of the story seems very similar to the original series, and, well, I’ve read that before, and not so long ago either.

This, of course, is not a problem that generally plagues me with DC titles, and I entirely understand why they’re choosing to go with a completely fresh start on a relatively obscure character like this.  I’m just not altogether sure it’s something I want to read again so soon.  Then again, perhaps this is a case where the first issue has no choice but to set up a similar starting point, and there’ll be more divergence as it goes on.  The fact that Bedard isn’t repeating the slow reveal from the previous series tends to support that – or maybe he just figures that there’s no point trying it again when everyone already knows the answer.  I’ll give it another issue to see whether it develops more of its own identity, but the first issue left me feeling that the book was promising a cover version of a story I’ve read before.

Near Death #1 – This is an ongoing creator-owned series by Jay Faerber and Simone Guglielmini.  Faerber’s best known for superhero books like Noble Causes, but this series marks a shift in crime stories.

It’s a high concept book if ever there was one: injured on an assignment, hitman Markham has a near death experience and is left convinced that he has to atone for his body count in order to avoid an eternity in somewhere not desperately pleasant.  Rather than disappearing and starting a new life, however, he seems to be starting off by taking advantage of his underworld connections to try and screw up other people’s hits.  It’s the sort of thing you can very easily see being pitched as a TV series.

In a world where first issues tend to be languidly paced, the opening of Near Death is extraordinarily abrupt – Faerber races straight into the titular experience by page 3, and is out of by page 7, leaving him plenty of space to drive into the first story.  I can’t help thinking that the crucial scene which sets up the concept feels a bit rushed, and in an ideal world this would have been an extended first issue in order to give it more space.  But then this is a creator-owned book from Image, so that may not be a realistic option.

The concept sounds like it could be a bit maudlin, but there turns out to be more of an angle on it.  Markham may have a newfound conviction that he needs to turn around his cosmic balance sheet, but it’s not because he’s suddenly become a nicer person; it’s simply that the experience has (literally) put the fear of god into him.  There’s an interesting theme in there; if this is the only reason you’re doing good, does it really count?

Artist Simone Guglielmini isn’t a familiar name to me; from the look of it, he’s worked mainly in his native Italy.  The work here is strong, though – it wouldn’t be out of place on Criminal, he’s got a good sense of detail to establish a setting, and the crucial double-page spread that has to sell Markham’s epiphany is perfectly laid out.

I’m not sure how open-ended a concept this is – surely Markham can’t continue to string along his associates for long, not without them looking like idiots.  But that doesn’t seem to be the direction Faerber’s taking with this.  A potentially interesting idea, and worth a look.

Ultimate Comics X-Men #1 – Yes, I know, but I don’t count this as a proper X-book.  It’s part of the Ultimate line, and those are the books it’ll be interacting with.

This is the second attempt to relaunch the Ultimate imprint.  The first one was Ultimatum, which was nothing short of catastrophic, and pretty much killed a lot of the goodwill that the imprint had built up.  This time, Marvel are taking a different tack, giving the line to Jonathan Hickman and Nick Spencer, and pushing it as a line where two upcoming writers get to do their thing.  Which is fair enough, but where Ultimate X-Men is concerned, Nick Spencer still has the unenviable task of trying to raise my interest in these characters from the grave.

One of the challenges with these books is to justify the existence of a second version of the same characters.  Too close to the original, and what’s the point?  Too far removed, and how is it the same concept?  Luckily for this book, the Ultimate Universe doesn’t have an equivalent of M-Day, so Nick Spencer is still writing a world that’s full of mutants.  It’s also a world where (following a miniseries I didn’t read) everyone now knows that mutants were actually created by accident by a US government experiment.  And, following Ultimatum, most of the mutants are in internment camps.

This… is where I start to have trouble.  Yes, it’s superhero comics.  Yes, it’s heightened reality.  And yes, the internment policy does at least seem to be controversial.  But still, it’s something I can’t quite buy from any vaguely recognisable version of the USA.  It’s just too much to suspend my disbelief in.  It’s an attempt to crank up the tension that actually takes it beyond credibility, so that it stops working.  At any rate, it’s not a version of the concept that I have any particular interest in reading.  Granted, it seems to be something that Spencer inherited from Jeph Loeb, but hey, a hereditary disease is still a disease, and there’s nothing here to suggest they’re moving away from it.  On the contrary, it looks like this is going to be a book about an underground terrorist group consisting of Kitty Pryde, Iceman, the Human Torch (?), and some of the cast of Ultimate X (well, I’m guessing that’s who the unexplained guys in the motel room are).

It’s done competently enough, if you can live with the central premise, but there’s nothing here that interests me.

Wonder Woman #1 – Wonder Woman is a difficult character to make work.  I’ve long been of the view that, at her core, she’s not a very good idea.  As originally conceived, she’s a garbled pile-up of pseudo-mythology, wartime flagwaving, and dubious protofeminism.  Much of which the general public is wholly unaware of, and plays little to no part in her iconic status, which depends simply on her being far and away the most recognisable female superhero.  I honestly doubt that 99% of the public could tell you anything about Wonder Woman other than that she’s the generic superhero, female model.

To their credit, Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang are trying to do something very different with their take on the character.  This is brave.  Azzarello has described it as a horror comic, and he’s actually not far off.  More precisely, he’s going back to the character’s links with Greek mythology, and doing a story about mythological figures – centaur assassins and such forth – in the real world.  There’s no camp in this take; they’re more out-of-place and vaguely disturbing.  The opening centaur-making sequence is, well, downright gory for something in a Wonder Woman comic, where graphic animal mutilation is not something you expect to see.

We have centaurs attacking a woman for reasons that aren’t explained until the end; Hermes gives her a magic key that teleports her to Wonder Woman for help.  No attempt is made to introduce the character, presumably because the assumption is that everyone knows who she is – which is true, though how many casual readers will know about the mythological connection, I’m not so sure.

Nothing much seems to have changed in Wonder Woman herself (though since she’s not really introduced, we wouldn’t know); it’s just a very different sort of story to use her in.  But it doesn’t work for me.  I can see why this is getting good reviews purely in terms of the visual storytelling and the boldness of taking Wonder Woman in this direction.  But it doesn’t work for me.  It doesn’t give me any reason to care about the characters, who are all essentially stock figures; and I just can’t get over the tone clash of shoehorning Wonder Woman into such a dreadfully humourless and po-faced story.  I’m clearly in the minority – and Al liked it a lot – but I just don’t get it at all.