Comics Fondle

Mike W. Barr comes really close to winning me over with this issue, a stand-alone Christmas special featuring the Outsiders feeling lonely. There’s poor Metamorpho, whose ex-girlfriend’s father won’t let him talk to her. Geo-Force–in a rare sympathetic moment–can’t get a hold of his brother on the phone, since Markovia is a shithole (why he […]

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Maybe I just don’t like team books… or at least team books where the group fight scenes are the main focus. Because these two issues of Batman and the Outsiders actually feature quite a bit I do like–the relationship between Katana and Halo, Barr’s wonderfully goofy Bruce Wayne, and Black Lightning’s breakdown-in-progress.
There’s also quite a […]

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What’s really depressing about the New Teen Titans and Outsiders crossover is how bad both parts turn out. It’s a beautiful example of how having two different writers write two different parts can turn out terribly wrong. It’s also an example of how having two different artists can show off just how good the first […]

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There’s something disturbing about Batman and the Outsiders #4, a blasé sexism–Halo’s got all these superpowers, but she’s real weak and real dumb. Barr handles Katana differently, making her quite masculine. Also, his descriptions of Halo sell her out as being pretty first, a superpowered enigma second. It’s particularly bad since, with Katana being the […]

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How did series survive when their first issues were so weak? Batman and the Outsiders #3 is far from poetry, but it’s light-years ahead of the first two (origin) issues. Barr begins to develop the characters–mostly Halo and Katana–and his characterization of Batman finally becomes interesting. He posits a Batman who is not only thankful […]

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