Comic Shop Comics: October 5th

Betty Boop #1 (Dynamite Entertainment) I am usually quite loathe to spend $4 on 20 pages of comics, but I thought I would at least try the first issue, as this is written by Roger Langridge, and he did a pretty dynamite (get it?) job on unlikely, licensed titles like Popeye for IDW and The Muppets for Boom. I will write about this at greater length elsewhere, for money, so I'll just say here that it is unfortunately not also drawn by Langridge, whose style is all but ideal for the subject matter (although artist Gisele Lagace is a pretty great artist), that I was surprised to find it rated "Teen+" despite the content being perfectly all-ages) and that Howard Chaykin's variant cover is so weird looking, and makes Koko fairly horrifying looking.

Anyway, more later and elsewhere.

DC Comics Bombshells #18 (DC Comics) Props to writer Marguerite Bennett for Batwoman's exclamation of "Oh sweet Dorothy Kamenshek," which sounded extremely Lumberjanes, and which I had to look up: That's Dottie from A League of Their Own, the movie that popularized the era's female baseball players, whose uniforms inspired Batwoman's Bombshells redesign. Bravo.

This issue, entitled "Uprising Part 2" and drawn by Laura Braga and Mirka Andolfo, concludes the the Mera vs. Siren battle for the fate of Atlantis, seemingly brings some closure to The Joker's Daughter vs. Zatanna sub-plot and introduces the next storyline, which will involve an African kingdom and the Queen Mari of Zambesi, aka Bombshell Vixen.

Also, this universe's Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, whose romantic relationship is as explicit as it can get in a DC comic, totally do it, but in a way that's more cute than titillating. After suggestive talks of bondage and undressing, they kiss, and then disappear under the covers, little cartoon hearts floating above the sheet.

I just saw this morning that Bennett will be writing the next volume of a Batwoman comic, which surprised me in that DC had seemed to take some pains to retool Detective Comics into a Bat-team book in which Batwoman was the central character. I can't think of a better writer for the series than Bennett though (maybe Devin K. Grayson?), who has been writing a pretty great Batwoman for 18 issues of this series so far. I might personally prefer any of the great artists who have worked on Bombshells join her on the Batwoman ongoing, but then, I would only miss the likes of Braga and Andolfo drawing the scantily-clad 'ships of World War II battling the Nazis.

Paper Girls #10 (Image Comics) The first page made me curious about what a Cliff Chiang-drawn comic based on the old arcade game Joust might look like (awesome, I decided). The last page, like just about every last page of Brian K. Vaughan's recent comics, was awesome and made me look forward to the next issue. In between? I got nothing. It's still a big, complicated time travel story that is a little like Y: The Last Man in the way it draws a central mystery out, but it lacks the plotting immediacy and character dynamics of Y. It's good, I like it okay, the art's great, Vaughan knows his way around a cliffhanger, but, ah, it's never a terribly satisfying, engaging 20 pages of comics. I should have waited for the trade. Why oh why didn't I just wait for the trade?

Cool Halloween-colored cover, though.

Superf*ckers #3 (IDW) Perhaps tiring of saying "Jack Krak is the motherfucker," Jack decides on a new catch-phrase: "I'm going to say the N-word!" The N-word here is "Noodles," which still seems to irritate Ultra Richard. That's the first page of the James Kochalka main story, in which some stuff happens, but what isn't that important really, is it? The back-up is by Box Brown, and involves a sexy malfunction of Computer Fist's computer fists, and Grotus getting into shenanigans with them.

I still haven't gotten #1 yet–IDW? Local comic shop? Diamond? Whose fault is this?–but Grotus was the focus of last issue's back-up as well, making me wonder if perhaps Grotus is going to star in all the back-ups.