Comic Shop Comics: January 3rd

Batman #38 (DC Comics) Oh hey, I got the Tim Sale cover this week! Hooray! It seems downright tragic to me that, due to variant covers, DC commissions and publishes two Tim Sale Batman covers a month, but Batman readers may not ever actually get them (Like, I think this is the first time I got one in my pull).

It strikes me as similarly tragic that Sale is just drawing covers for Batman, rather than interiors. As I know I've said at least a half-dozen times before, it would be great if they called upon Sale to draw the interiors for a done-in-one issue, of which this is an example...although, in this particular case, the specifics of the story don't seem to be of the sort that would make it an ideal showcase for Sale's talents.

What are those specifics? Writer Tom King and artist introduce us to maybe the worst Batman villain ever--"Master Bruce," a young boy who has his parents murdered and carves the names Thomas and Martha into his own cheeks. As a one-off, I'm sure it's fine, but, given King's habit of long-term plotting, I have a feeling Master Bruce and Master Bruce will meet again.

Bombshells United #9 (DC) Emanuela Lupacchino's cover seems an issue late, as Batwoman faced off against the minotaur last issue. This issue, drawn by Siya Oum, is split between two passages. The first, an extended flashback, details the origins of the Bombshells-iverse's version of Black Adam, which isn't too far removed from previous ones, with the exception that here the wizard Shazam is female and Adam meets, loves and loses his Isis in the ancient past. How exactly he got to be so big--he's a giant in the book's present--isn't explained, although his Shazam does say that if he continues to use the magic for ill, it will warp his powers.

In the second half, someone comes out of the Lazarus Pit in the labyrinth, using up one of its three resurrections. It...is not a character I would have expected to see resurrected.

Nightwing #36 (DC) Artist Bernard Chang just about broke my heart with those last two panels of page 15. This is something of a feat, given that as dramatic as they are in the context of the story, as emotive as Chang manages to draw that face, the subject matter is still, essentially, completely ridiculous.

Star Wars Forces of Destiny: Leia (IDW Productions) This is the first of five one-shots--in another era, this might have been issue #1 of a five-issue-miniseries--tied to Disney's female focused Forces of Desinty animated shorts. Each will feature a different female lead (or, in two cases, two of them), and, more noteworthy, each will have a female writer and artist (or, in this case, a writer/artist).

I likely would have passed, given how much Star Wars I have in my life these days and that this is at the IDW price point of $3.99/20-pages, but it is drawn and co-written by Elsa Charretier, the incredibly gifted cartoonist from Marvel's under-read Unstoppable Wasp series (and who also did some notable work for IDW's Star Wars Adventures comics. That, and it's set on Hoth and features tauntauns. I kind of love tauntauns, and often think of them fondly during Ohio winter's.Charreteir's partner Pierrick Colinet gets a co-writer credit, even though he is a boy.

I hope to talk more about the book and the suite of weekly books elsewhere in the near future, but for now suffice it say that it is an elegantly told, elegantly drawn Star Wars comic appropriate for readers of all-ages...which one would assume all Star Wars comics would be these days, but, well, Marvel's weird about this stuff sometimes.