Batgirl #1- Well Barbara Gordon is finally gonna be Batgirl again. Somehow she's gonna walk again and be jumping off of rooftops. In a world where Bruce Wayne was folded in half and got to walk again, it always seemed funny that Barbara Gordon's one shot to the spine kept her in a wheelchair. Gail Simone is writing, so it should be well-written, and it's always refreshing to see a female character written by a talented female writer. I don't care for the artist. It looks like Adam Hughes will be doing the covers, but with Adam Hughes on the outside, I don't feel good about the inside matching in aesthetic sensibility. That just pisses me off a little bit. It's books like this one is shaping up to be that I'm glad most shops let you flip through a book before buying it.
Justice League #1 - Geoff Johns and Jim Lee and this is the book that is setting the stage for the entire relaunch. There's not a lot to determine quality based on the solicitation. However, we do get to see a first look at the costumes where everybody gets collars, even Wonder Woman, whose costume doesn't have shoulders, gets a choker that looks like it'll injure her throat if she looks down. Green Lantern gets no redesign except for his collar, Flash gets some Lightning bolt elements. Superman's shield gets a major redesign, he gets a high collar, and the red trunks are gone. My opinion is that Superman doesn't look like Superman anymore but some guy that's pretending to be Superman. The biggest offense to me is Cyborg who looks like he was thrown in there to have a black guy on the team. I stand by my whitewashing comments and really think we'll see him thrown into the background. The Justice League doesn't need a scientist, they have Barry Allen. Gadgetry? You have Bruce Wayne. Technology? Superman has an entire Fortress filled with alien stuff from all over. Please excuse the rhetoric, but Cyborg is a super-token.
Suicide Squad #1 - A fellow member of Sketch Charlotte remarked about this cover on Facebook and my first thoughts were that someone saw all the cosplay girls dressing up as the Arkham Asylum version of Harley Quinn and wanted to see how far they would go. Harley's costume is entirely impractical but I'll agree that it needed reworking as when rendered in a naturalistic style, the original Bruce Timm costume doesn't translate well. When the Arkham version was sitting around and getting good fan response, why redesign it? The team consists of King Shark, an old Superboy villain from Hawaii, now apparently a hammerhead and Suicide Squad regular Deadshot, also redesigned, and you have a reprise of the team of villains that the government sends in because who cares if criminals die, and after all, why do we need to even worry about their civil rights? Seriously, the concept behind this title is one I stopped caring about somewhere around fifteen years ago, but that pretty much sums up my relationship with most superhero books.To be continued….