Batman #23.3 – Review

By: Frank Tieri (writer), Christian Duce (art), Andrew Dalhouse (colors) and Taylor Esposito (letters)

The Review: This can be a pretty short review because there really isn’t much to say.  Batman #23.3 isn’t a bad comic, but there also isn’t any reason for it to exist beyond selling another issue to fans.  It doesn’t reveal anything new and interesting about The Penguin and it doesn’t seem to feed into any upcoming storylines for the other Bat-books.

If you are a passionate fan of The Penguin or if you simply MUST have something comic book-related to read for the next 10 minutes (and think that 10 minutes of mediocre entertainment is worth $2.99), be my guest.  The issue tells a done-in-one story of The Penguin.  He’s basically the same character here that he always was in the Old 52: Musty old crime boss.  He still has a top-hat, monocle and trick umbrella.  At the end of the day, he’s really a kinda dumb character; he was designed for children’s comics back in the 1940s and have never really been updated successfully like some other Bat-villains.

Flashpoint: Lois Lane and the Resistance #3 – Review

By: Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning (writers), Christian Duce (penciller), Walden Wong (inker), Hi-Fi (colorist)

The Story: No, no, I said we need to get the truth out there!

The Review: I had a literary journalism major as an undergrad.  One of the required courses I took was on journalistic ethics, which included a session where we discussed how much a journalist can insert himself into the story, a debate of an intensity and heatedness that I can’t even begin to fathom now.  The point is, most of the time the journalist puts the demands of the story before himself, staying out of the action so events can proceed on their most natural course.

Despite Lois’ assertion last issue that she “has become part of the story,” her role never really reached beyond that of observer and narrator, a cipher to whom other people can tell their stories.  And that’s fine, except like most journalists, she spends far too much time focused on the splashy, action-packed side of things (the escapades of the Resistance) and not enough with the actually important points (the Amazon war crimes).

When you take a step back, you realize that in the context of Flashpoint, the revelation of the Amazon internment camps and gene-tampering experiments have the biggest, game-changing effects on the plot as a whole.  Wonder Woman’s discovery of it horrifies her sufficiently to fly off and confront her aunt (who presumably engineered the whole thing), and Lois’ broadcast of it to the world may have been just the prod the world needs to step in and shut down this madness.