Review: Batwoman #1 - #6
OK, this book is also super-good. I get a little breathless when I think about it. I don't have a lot of ways to preface my take on it: I get gooseflesh when I read it. No other book in my bag does that to me. When I said earlier this week that Frankenstein has almost everything I want from a comic, that deep, gut-punch of sincere sentiment and chilly thrill is what's missing and Batwoman is the only book under DC's banner that can deliver it so consistently, effectively and beautifully. If this book came out every week I'd buy two copies. Ten years from now there are going to be people who say that Batwoman got them to start reading comics. It has the power to make new readers out of non- which was a part of the whole point of the New 52.
When the eponymous Batwoman was the star of Detective Comics a couple of years ago I said that I could think of no way in which she does not fit the bill of being Batman's stand-in and I am prepared to say that, by now, Batwoman exceeds it. She's more Batman than Batman and I love it so much.
First and foremost, Batwoman features a lot of really strong and, importantly, mature relationships between the characters. Kate's relationship with her cousin, Flamebird, is a beautifully crafted mirror of the relationships between Batman and so many of the Robins, yes, but it has a life of its own. Flamebird isn't someone Batwoman recruited into the lifestyle of a superhero and she isn't Kate's child, either. The tensions and affections between them are unique to that among cousins, at least as experienced in my huge, sprawling, Southern family: they're not quite peers, not quite siblings, not quite rivals, not quite close, not quite one step removed from one another, not quite competitors and not quite helpers, either. Watching their partnership evolve is fascinating and believable and it portrays difficult emotional hurdles and sentimental strain without turning it into overwrought melodrama. Much like I cited in my valentine to Frankenstein, the emotions these characters feel drive them to action rather than self-pity and that is often the major dividing line between books I like and books I don't. These characters want to be heroes. They want to go out and kick ass and solve mysteries and fix problems. Doing that does't always do them any good, though, as Flamebird's story so shockingly illustrates.
Likewise, the relationship developing between Kate and Maggie is a unique twist on the old Batman/Gordon team. Williams and his co-creators have managed to depict a deep and intricately knotted complex of emotions at work between the two women: lust and manipulation and trust and betrayal and something like a new love. There aren't a lot of comic books that can pull off intertwined action sequences and sex scenes that end in a near-fatal mutilation and an orgasm on the same page but this one did.
The art of course remains unbelievable. Gods, I'm getting gooseflesh remembering it. This book remains full of mind-blowing two page action spreads, visual cues all the more effective for their understated presentation, finishing touches that shock the reader with the thought and creative discipline that must have gone into ensuring they wind up in the corners and backgrounds of pages that in any other book would be dominated by the gorgeous central actions and poses of the characters doing the talking. The pages that seamlessly flow from the emblem of Batwoman to that of Flamebird; the toy Batmobile in the bottom-corner of the scene in which Batwoman bursts through the window of Maria's father's apartment; the way the borders of the panels of that scene are also the folds in Batwoman's own cape...
Gods, I am seriously getting a little choked up just thinking about it! This book is so good! This book is so good that I am getting a little freaked out.
The stories are every bit as compelling as the characterization and art. It does fall into DC's new trap of making every story be about protecting or training or seeking to avenge a child - a consistent-across-the-brand sign of how the comics buyer has aged over time and DC is trying to do something to track that moving target by telling stories that appeal to their parenthood rather than their dreams of youth - but let's face it, the story of La Llorana is also damned creepy and I thrilled to see Batwoman's response to sorrow be confidence and certainty. The whole D.E.O. angle is not what I expected but I am only too happy to follow it wherever it goes.
Bottom line, this book is fine art. It's the Mad Men to most other books' Days of Our Lives. It is a remarkable accomplishment and it had better be selling like hotcakes.
Klarion
Posted to Comics, Review on 16 February 2012
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