Here’s a comic chosen at random from my collection.
Batwoman #29 by Marc Andreyko (writer), Jason Masters and Jeremy Haun (artists), Guy Major (colorist), Todd Klein (letterer), Darren Shan (asst. editor), Rachel Gluckstern (editor), and Trevor McCarthy (cover)
The issue opens with a flashback to 1929 Gotham (that comes up again later, if memory serves), and then Kate sees a therapist (at the suggestion of Kate’s girlfriend, Maggie). The first meeting doesn’t go well, so Batwoman goes out into the night to work out her issues on her own. This brings her to Maggie’s workplace, where they have a conversation about why Maggie wanted Kate to seek counseling. Kate would rather talk shop, so they discuss the villain de jour, Wolf Spider. That sends Batwoman to Arkham, where she confronts Wolf Spider, but again he gets the better of her, and the issue ends with him releasing a bunch of inmates for Batwoman to deal with.
What a tough row to hoe. I did not envy this creative team coming onto this book after J. H. Williams III left. Batwoman just doesn’t seem like herself to me, in comparison to what came before. While I did find the new antagonist a little interesting, he shouldn’t have had been such a problem for Batwoman based on what I’d read before, unless what they were going for was that Batwoman was too preoccupied to be effective, but, if so, that wasn’t made clear enough to me. Then there’s the art. What do you do when Williams III’s work on the series was, I think, universally loved and you have to follow that? I think Masters and Haun had a Herculean task, and they just fell short. I did like the McCarthy cover–it was evocative of Williams III’s covers–but I really hate it when the cover states something about the story inside that isn’t at all what we read. All in all, this team just wasn’t enough to keep me with the book.
Longbox Review 