Detective Comics

Surely this title would be written in eighty-foot letters of carved granite on any landscape of comics history. With Batman's demise, this book is now about the previously largely-ignored character of Batwoman, aka Kate Kane. The current incarnation is a complete reboot of the character and thus far doesn't have any obvious connections to the old '50s character. Kate is an out lesbian socialite known publicly as an acquaintance of Bruce Wayne's but little more. Kate's father is a colonel in the US military and largely serves as her version of Alfred. With Detective Comics #854 we see Kate receive the personal blessing of The Bat himself and then off we go across pages splashed in Batwoman's signature colors: black and fire engine red.

To be honest, I was a little worried about picking up Detective Comics and having it be about someone other than Batman. This comic, though, is as Batman as it gets. Kate is someone whose personal life is a shambles. Her family relationships vacillate between loyalty and resentment, her dating life is a mess and just like Batman she has enough vendettas of her own that her favorite tools - the violence and fear she educes in her enemies - could just as easily be put to evil ends as good. To say that Detective Comics undergoes a massive change by making her the spotlight character is both understatement and overstatement. Is it the same now that it's about Kate Kane? No. Is it still about all the same things it was about when it starred Bruce Wayne? Yes. It's still about revenge and healing and tragedy and questions of identity, of whether the hero wears the cowl or the cowl rides the hero. It comes at them from a very different perspective, though, with a main character whose youth teeters on the brink of turning sour and whose own question of whether she's the bat or the socialite is still very much open to debate.

My favorite scene so far has to be when she and her father and stepmother are at a charity event in issue 856 and Kate is asked to dance by Maggie Sawyer, the captain in charge of Gotham City PD's Major Crimes Unit and another out lesbian. Flirtatious banter between the vigilante socialite and the love interest whose relationship to crime couldn't be more different? Classic. It's the ballroom scene from Batman Returns turned inside out and upside down.

Finally, the artwork is flawless. I am routinely left grinning when I read a page and then go back over it to study the art. It's the sort of book that makes me wish I had any talent at all. Absolutely magnificent work on every single page. I have awakened my boyfriend in the night to have him look at a two-page spread of Batwoman descending from the rafters to take on a room full of thugs because right then, in that moment, I felt like I needed to show it to someone before the action was over.

Cthulhu Tales

I am a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft and have enjoyed many of the works that are based on or built on the Mythos but not, by any stretch, all of them. The ever-ambitious BOOM! Studios have at least three Mythos-related books out or otherwise available at the moment: Fall of Cthulhu, Necronomicon and this title. I've read Fall and Tales and to be honest the former failed to impress me. It felt like trippy palace intrigue that had various bugbears of the Mythos find-and-replaced into the names on the script. It didn't feel, to me, like something Lovecraft would have written. Nyarlathotep would never be so small as to masquerade as a human, for instance. It would be too huge and too overwhelming to even think of it. It's like saying a person could masquerade as a flea.

Cthulhu Tales, on the other hand, feels like something Lovecraft might have penned. The stories aren't of impossible creatures fiddling around with humanity, they're largely of humans stumbling blind into some awareness of some Incomprehensible Beyond and suffering for it. They're stories of the madness that leads to tragic action as well as the madness that results from knowing too much. My preference is for the latter and to find it at all in the current horror-means-gore entertainment environment is a rare gift. Also, because I have the attention span of an adolescent flea I find its style of containing multiple short stories within each single issue to be a good fit with my own reading style. Some of the stories are definitely of the "fire and forget" variety but some really stuck with me and after some of them I found myself genuinely disturbed. Sweet.