Review: Gotham City Sirens: Song of the Sirens hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

I increasingly like the concept of Gotham City Sirens, even if the poses in which main artist Guillem March and others portray Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy remain ridiculous; in as much as March draws Catwoman especially with her tunic unzipped well past her breasts, you'd think Selina would have gotten that zipper repaired by now. Still, writers Paul Dini and Tony Bedard presenting Songs of the Sirens as a buddy comedy works well, so much so that it's amazing to think these characters weren't intended as foils of one another in the first place.

Birds of Prey as written by Chuck Dixon was good, but the title now seems incomplete as compared to when Gail Simone took over and added the Huntress to the Oracle/Black Canary mix. There's not a one-to-one comparison to be made between the Birds and the Sirens, I don't think, but certainly the personalities in the two groups play off each other in similar ways -- Catwoman, our protagonist, is much like Black Canary in that Canary is often torn between Huntress's emotion and Oracle's reason; so too does Catwoman find conflicting aspects of herself in both Ivy and Harley.

This makes for fascinating reading, as when Catwoman and Ivy try to determine who's framed them for murder, or when Catwoman and Harley fight Catwoman's crazed sister. Add to this the fourth unofficial member of the Sirens, the Riddler, desperate for friendship and yet paralyzed in his mistrust of the Sirens. In the book's first chapters, Dini convincingly makes Gotham City's villain collective seem like a community, even without need for mention of the nemesis they all have in common. That the Gotham City Sirens and friends seem so natural together, despite more than fifty years in which these characters were not a team, says something for the strength of the concept.

Another unofficial Siren in this book is Commissioner Gordon, who teams with the Sirens and even by the end of the book knows where they live. Reflective of some of the disconnect between the various "Batman Reborn" books at this time, one might think Gotham City almost peaceful based on Gotham City Sirens, as opposed to the chaos found in Batman and Batman and Robin, as if all of Batman's rogues did actually go straight after Batman's death. Gordon comes off as quite the smart cop here, recognizing Ivy's innocence of a murder; his lack of concern about the villains make them seem rather soft, to an extent, but the alliance itself is interesting.

Yet this second volume Song of the Sirens is greater as a whole than as its individual parts. The Marc Andreyko story (after Bedard's Blackest Night crossover issue) is a great one-shot tale, focusing on Poison Ivy but with great moments for all the Sirens and for Commissioner Gordon. Dini also writes the two-part Sirens/Riddler team-up that's by far the star of the show, displaying both the Sirens friendship and their villainous nature. The next issue by Dini, bides its time in waiting for new writer Tony Bedard to arrive, with a joke more gross than funny stretched out over too many pages.

Bedard's issues, in which Catwoman battles her sister, are satisfactory in that they resurrect a plotline left hanging since Ed Brubaker's Catwoman series, but they don't rise to the level of Dini's early work here, nor do the guest artists match March's artistic style. Bedard very unnecessarily changes aspects of Catwoman's origin from Her Sister's Keeper when Brubaker brought those elements back. Poison Ivy is largely absent from Bedard's two chapters, and in all the book loses some of the verve that it had in the earlier chapters.

One other aspect I did like about this book, however, is the ways in which it fits into the ongoing Paul Dini Bat-universe. Songs picks up on a villain last seen in Dini's Heart of Hush from Detective Comics, and also has a cameo by the Broker, Dini's new character that's also appeared in Streets of Gotham. A quick look at solicitations doesn't reveal a greater role for the Broker any time soon, but I like how Dini keeps mentioning him, and how in both of Dini's titles, there's an underlying theme that all the conflict between heroes and villains circles back to Gotham City real estate, something both illuminating and absurd at the same time. I also appreciated Dini's quick nod to the Riddler's role in Batman: Life After Death; it's nothing essential, but I appreciated that it was there.

There's only one more issue by Bedard in the collection that will follow Gotham City Sirens: Songs of the Sirens, and then new writer Peter Calloway takes over. I'd just as soon have Paul Dini remain the writer of this series [edit: which, I'm willing to venture, is probably cancelled post-Flashpoint per the DC Relaunch anyway], but if that's not possible, I don't mind a new writer coming on. I can't say Gotham City Sirens is at the top of my pull list -- the tone's still a little too silly, and a book about Batman's villains will never be where the main story of the DC Universe is "at" as compared to the main Batman titles -- but Sirens is cute and charming here, a far cry from my original concerns about the series.

[Contains full covers. Printed on glossy paper.]

Coming up, more talk about the DC Relaunch, to be sure, and the Collected Editions review of Batman and Robin: Batman Must Die!

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Review: Gotham City Sirens: Union hardcover/trade paperback (DC Comics)

I thought the Gotham City Sirens series looked silly when DC Comics announced it. They'd canceled the long-running Catwoman series, which in its heyday was an astoundingly good crime noir series that transformed Selina Kyle from dismissible sex symbol to complex anti-hero. Consider that the Catwoman series prior to the Ed Brubaker incarnation sent Selina to women's prison so as to present a gratuitous shower fight, with steam dutifully covering everyone's naughty parts; Brubaker's stories, instead, dealt with alcoholism, guilt, and a grittier Gotham City than we'd seen before even in the Batman titles.

I'd long since stopped reading the previous Catwoman series before the women's prison storyline came around, but I knew that spelled the death knell of that book. There's something that seems to me rather tone-deaf about these kinds of "bad girl" books, a category in which I initially lumped Gotham City Sirens.

Despite the stereotype that comic book fans are male loners at home with their comic books while their peers are out on dates, we know that comic books fans are instead regular people, often adults, of both genders with social lives and a variety of interests. That is, art can be titillating, and so can comics, but when faced with something so ham-handed as Catwoman fighting naked women in the shower, or Hawkgirl wearing lingerie underneath her costume in The Maw, I wonder if the creators believe their audience to be that comic book fan stereotype. At times comics companies seem to think that books can survive on sexual innuendos that might titillate only the most basic of their readership, and I'm skeptical whether that strategy ever actually works.

But whereas indeed Gotham City Sirens has a naked Poison Ivy, a half-naked Zatanna, and for some reason Catwoman no longer ever seems to zip up her costume above her breasts, it also has one other aspect to sell it as more than just a "bad girl" book: writer Paul Dini.

[Contains spoilers]

We know from his years of work on animated Batman series that Paul Dini loves these characters. If Dini's depiction of Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn, the so-called Sirens, is prurient, then it's prurient with the best of intentions, and he loves them for their minds as well as their bodies.

What I quickly found in Union is that this book is not Chuck Dixon or Gail Simone's Birds of Prey, nor is it Ed Brubaker's Catwoman. The twists in the story aren't terribly complex, nor is there much really gripping drama nor noir moodiness; in fact, the book has an overall air of comedic zaniness to it. I'd describe Sirens as a funny book about Batman's villains, perhaps unfortunately named since the characters in question include the Riddler and the Joker in addition to the three women. When one considers that Arkham Reborn is also a book about Batman's villains, positing this book as a comedy seems an unlikely fit; in essence, however, I'd say Sirens is about as close to the madcap tone Paul Dini achieved in some of his best Batman: The Animated Series episodes as we've seen so far in the DC Universe.

Union takes a while to get started. The purposefully-ridiculous villain that brings the Sirens together is perhaps a bit too silly. Guillem March's art, which is beautiful toward the end of the book, is too distorted here, and makes the whole first chapter feel hastily done. Then immediately Ivy and Harley turn on Catwoman to try to learn Batman's identity; then immediately after that, Hush captures Harley, and Catwoman and Ivy have to save her. It's all very obviously in the service of bringing the characters together, and in that way seems forced and predictable. Even the Sirens' initial fight with the Joker fails to distinguish itself from what we've seen before.

And then Paul Dini reveals the Joker in question as Gaggy Gagsworth.

It's not so much that I give Paul Dini credit for remembering and re-using a sidekick of the Joker who only appeared once at least fifty years ago, as much as how compelling Dini makes Gagsworth in this book's sixth chapter. The Joker is not the antithesis of Batman necessarily, but Gaggy turns out to be an altered version of Robin Dick Grayson, a circus performer who might've had a good life if the Flying Graysons hadn't replaced him in the circus, and then if the Joker hadn't later outgrown him. The irony is thick here in that Gaggy disguises himself as the Joker just as Dick has now taken on the cowl of Batman; even more moving is the way in which the Joker seems to have "put away childish things" by disowning his sidekick (after the death of Jason Todd, maybe?), while Batman's now working with Robin number four.

The book's concluding chapter is a single-issue story where the Sirens spend the holidays apart, and Dini steals the show with his depiction of the family we never knew Harley Quinn had. In a New York-style tenement building, Harley's mother takes care of Harley's lazy, no-good brother and his two kids. Like Oprah, perhaps, one never imagined Harley even had a mother, and then even more amazing is just how normal Harley and her mother's relationship is. Next, Harley visits her father, a con artist in prison, and Dini and March tell more about Harley in one panel than in years of comics -- a panel in whicih Harley's father displays a smile that's not exactly, but very much like, the ever-present smile of the Joker.

Gotham City Sirens: Union works, ultimately, when it's not trying to do too much -- throw the Sirens together, give them a whole bunch of villains to beat, pit them against one another. Rather, the single issue profiles -- of Gaggy, of Harley, writer Scott Lobdell on Riddler -- make this book, giving us unexpected insights into Batman's foes. I wouldn't necessarily put Gotham City Sirens at the top of my "to read" list, but the thought that Dini puts into these stories, especially at the end, satisfied my misgivings about what this book could have been.

[Contains full and variant covers. Printed on glossy paper.]

Timeline updates and more coming this week -- stay tuned!

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Review: Catwoman: The Long Road Home trade paperback (DC Comics)

Catwoman: The Long Road Home ends on a note that is irreverent, difficult, disturbing ... essentially, many of the things the Catwoman series has been all along. Throughout his run, writer Will Pfeifer's portrayed Catwoman Selina Kyle as just this side of self-destructive, and he finishes the story with the same wonderful ambiguity he's provided all along.

At the end of Long Road Home, we find a Catwoman returned to her thieving roots -- not, even she admits, because she wants or needs to steal, but because it's her nature -- and, we sense, because she's a little mad at the world. And yet, the world may not even be her target; when Selina admits that she gave up her baby Helena not because she had to, but because Helena interfered with Selina's Catwoman identity, we understand in the end Selina's truly angry at herself.

Pfeifer and artist David Lopez do an admirable job ending their Catwoman run. Pfeifer, who's had his stories interrupted by no less than One Year Later, Countdown, Amazons Attack, and Salvation Run ends the Catwoman/Salvation Run crossover with breakneck speed (with no ending, really), and someone who hadn't read Salvation Run would be largely confused.

Instead, Pfeifer turns quickly back to the story of Catwoman's hunt for the Thief, an essentially anonymous character with a grudge against Catwoman. It's readily apparent that Pfeifer intends the Thief as a symbol more than a character; Selina's beating of the Thief suggests a break with her old life just as she, in contradiction, perhaps becomes an even more devious thief herself than before.

There's much to be considered here, and much we won't really understand the implications of for years to come. I always thought giving Catwoman a child was a bad idea, since we all knew the writers would never let her keep it; now we find a Catwoman -- maybe good, maybe bad -- who takes as much of her own motivation her guilt over giving that child up. Will Catwoman remain a petty thief, forgetting her East End hero days? Will Helena ever be seen, heard from, or mentioned again? Has this past storyline been the next step in the natural evolution of the Catwoman character, or a sign of this character returning to the Batman-villain status quo? It'll be a while before we know the answer.

I congratulate Will Pfeifer and David Lopez on a steady, respectable run on the Catwoman title. Ultimately, I feel perhaps the concept ended up being greater than what any writer could plot for the character, but Pfeifer and Lopez's consistent quality on this title is something to be admired.

[Contains full covers]

Next up, we're heading back toward the Countdown to Final Crisis with a stop first to finish the Jack Kirby Fourth World omnibuses. See you next time!

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Review: Catwoman: Crime Pays trade paperback (DC Comics)

I've come to realize in thinking over Will Pfeifer's Catwoman: Crime Pays that what I've been expecting isn't exactly what Pfeifer's delivering. Whereas your average Teen Titans storyline, for instance, is a six-part tale where every chapter builds on the next with a conclusion that ties up threads from the beginning, Pfeifer's story is more of a picaresque, moving Catwoman from escapade to escapade often with no real tie between them.

This manner of storytelling is largely annoying for a trade reader, because instead of anything much really happening in the story, it often just feels like Pfeifer's wasting time. If it were not for the fact that Pfeifer writes a really nuanced, respectful Catwoman character, and artist David Lopez, I might not bother, but it's apparent on every page that these two know what they're doing (even if the reader doesn't always).

For instance, Crime Pays starts out with Catwoman on the trail of a master thief who's stolen all her belongings, including her own bed while she was sleeping on it. (How? We never find out.) Because she doesn't have a costume, Catwoman robs a billionaire with a collection of villain memorabilia (we never see said billionaire again). Catwoman goes to apprehend the thief, but is whisked away to the Salvation Run planet (we never see or hear from said thief again). Catwoman only briefly interacts with other villains on the planet before whisked off to an alternate reality story (which factors on the main story, in the end, not even a little).

It's disjointed, to be sure. And lest I paint with too broad a brush, Pfeifer is using many of these events to explore Catwoman's broken inner psyche after giving up her daughter, something Pfeifer does quite well. It also couldn't be terribly easy for the writer to fit in his own storylines between Amazons Attack and Salvation Run. But both the "costume stealing" storyline and the "alternate reality" storylines especially feel like softballs -- issues to fill space rather than ones with real bearing on the Catwoman story overall.

Catwoman ends with the next trade. In my opinion, this has been one of the all-time greatest character reimaginings; if you consider the purple-costumed Chuck Dixon/Bronwyn Carlton series that preceded this (which had, at some point, Catwoman fighting in the showers of a women's prison), the crime-noir, sensibly-costumed run that began with Ed Brubaker and ends with Will Pfeifer was nothing short of brilliant. Pfeifer's putting Catwoman talking about alternate realities and multiple earths signals to me it's time to bring the story to a close, but hopefully DC Comics will keep the character much as is. Co-feature, anyone?

[Contains full covers, "What Came Before" page]

We'll finish up Catwoman next time, and then on to some Jack Kirby Fourth World goodness.

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