Batwoman Annual #1 – Review

By: Marc Andreyko (story), Trevor McCarthy & Moritat (art), Guy Major (colors)

The Story: Behind every good Batman is a Batwoman—ready to take him down.

The Review: Considering how sudden and dismissively J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman were shooed off this title last October, the least DC could do was offer a resolution to their long-invested storyline, which was also cut off when Williams-Blackman left. DC did one thing right in committing this annual to that task, but their inability to bring back Williams-Blackman for this special occasion almost guaranteed the annual’s failure.

Without Williams-Blackman, Andreyko basically has to guess how his predecessors would’ve ended their own story and execute it as best he can. Andreyko’s very capable of course, but this is asking too much of any writer, especially when Williams-Blackman had set up conflicts that require a careful, delicate touch to untangle. There’s simply no way Andreyko could’ve divined Williams-Blackman’s intentions to wrap up their plotlines as planned. Even so, that’s no excuse for him to throw sense and integrity out the window just to get the job done.

All-Star Western #17 – Review

By: Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray (story), Moritat (art), Mike Atiyeh (colors)

The Story: Catherine Wayne proves that no good deed goes unpunished.

The Review: I never read or review this series without a healthy dose of amazement—not so much at the quality of the work itself, but at the fact that I’m still reading it after a year and a half, when so many other titles have fallen by the wayside.  In fact, it’s even more amazing that this series has lasted long enough to give me a choice in whether to continue on.  Palmiotti-Gray clearly have something going for them, but I find it hard to say what it actually is.

There is something endearing about their total enthusiasm for the DCU.  You can’t deny they’ve lived up to the title of this series with their revolving door of interesting guest stars and plotlines.  But lately, that’s become the entire focus of All-Star Western, and this issue, featuring Vandal Savage, is no different.  Granted, we do get an interesting spin to DC’s oldest villain with the premise of Savage as disease-carrier and natural population thinner.  Sadly, Palmiotti-Gray have proven to be great at introducing a good premise, but not so great at developing it beyond that.

All-Star Western #16 – Review

By: Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray (story), Moritat (art), Mike Atiyeh (colors)

The Story: Hex is nonplussed to learn that he makes the perfect Byronic hero.

The Review: You can find a lot of derogatory things to say about Jonah Hex, but one thing you’ll never think to call him is a quitter.  In fact, we’ve seen plenty of instances where Hex prevails over a much smarter, bigger, better opponent just by virtue of never taking it lying down.  We’ve seen him in several crises that would be the death of any other men, yet he’s always managed to see them through.  So what does it take to send Hex to the brink of despair?

The answer, apparently, is stagnation.  Hex made his distaste for the city pretty obvious even from the title’s first issue, and his irritation can only get worse taking lodging in giant, empty house populated by the infirm and the mad.  His only companion in the city is an uptight pansy of a man and even he’s been institutionalized.  Now, with no horse, indeed, with not even two good legs to stand on, rather yet ride with, I suppose even Hex has cause for depression.

All-Star Western #15 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (story), Moritat (art), Mike Atiyeh (colors)

The Story: For once, Arkham tops Hex in the senseless violence department.

The Review: I don’t know how to say this without sounding a bit mean, but I always felt this title had an inevitable expiration date.  In the last year, All-Star Western hasn’t exactly made any breakthroughs with Gray-Palmiotti’s in-your-face style of writing.  Instead, it’s gotten by on sheer novelty alone for most of its run.  At some point, however, their plot would lose that veneer of originality, exposing the inherent flaws of the series.

I think we’ve reached that point in this issue.  The introduction of Hyde and the use of the Black Diamond initially promised interesting things for this arc, but here we realize that, as written, Hyde is just a well-spoken bruiser, and while the Black Diamond may be a necessary in the context of the story, it adds nothing special or new to the plot Gray-Palmiotti have chosen.

All-Star Western #14 – Review

By: Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray (story), Moritat (art), Mike Atiyeh (colors)

The Story: Not even Asian exceptionalism stands a chance in Gotham.

The Review: One of the more unfortunate side-effects of growing up is having all your favorite historical myths stripped away.  I would’ve been happy to spend the rest of my life believing that the proto-Americans and Indians spent at least the early parts of their relationship in some kind of harmony.  The truth, of course, involved a great deal more violence and a whole lot less comfort food.

Although the Indians proved to be hospitable at the beginning, one of them made the covetous mistake of stealing a small silver cup from Richard Grenville’s first group of British settlers.  Grenville, perhaps feeling he ought to set boundaries straight from the beginning, responded by sacking and burning the whole Indian village.  And as any history book will tell you, life between the red and white people plunged sharply downhill from there.

All-Star Western #13 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (story), Moritat (art), Mike Atiyeh (colors)

The Story: Can we all just agree that it’s all clowns that creep you out, not just the one?

The Review: Pre-relaunch, Gray-Palmiotti wrote Jonah Hex solo for a long—surprisingly long—time, and they seemed to find plenty of success that way.  For Hex in the Wild West, cooperation wouldn’t seem natural or necessary anyway.  But in his urban environment, Hex could use the help.  Without Arkham’s intercession, he’d probably just get arrested and executed in a few months; without Tallulah’s randiness, he’d probably go crazy from the city life.

All this is to say I’m glad Arkham and Tallulah are officially part of Hex’s trio for the foreseeable future.  Although none of them would probably call it as such, they’ve developed a very functional teamwork.  Probably no one can cover Hex in a scrap as well as Talulah, and when it comes to tending to the innocent harmed, or offering some intellectual insight into the happenings, or fending off law enforcement (“I’ll explain to the authorities as best I can,” he sighs resignedly over a bloody mess at a circus), Arkham’s the man.

All-Star Western #0 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (story), Moritat (art), Mike Atiyeh (colors)

The Story: So close to getting away with just one crazy scar, yet so far.

The Review: I must say, the timing of this review seems a bit unfortunate, given how I came just shy of calling Gray-Palmiotti mediocre just yesterday.  But All-Star Western happens to be one of those titles where I feel their specific talents flourish, where they feel so at home with the material that they can produce a #0 issue superior even to that written by Scott Snyder’s pupil himself.  It just happens to be a happy union between certain creators and certain characters.

Of course, I won’t attribute the success of this issue entirely to the writing.  Hex has the benefit of a very involved, very interesting origin story, one with some famous elements: fighting for the Confederates, adoption by the Injuns (Apache, specifically), and the inevitable scarring moment.  Gray-Palmiotti run briskly through them all, which helps out any new readers, but old fans can find some value in the way the issue clears up the chronology of Hex’s life events.

All-Star Western #12 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (story), Moritat (art), Mike Atiyeh (colors)

The Story: Real women speak with their fists—and guns.

The Review: All-Star Western is yet another one of those titles you’d think I’d have abandoned by now, and yet here we are.  Considering that the western is hardly the barnburner of a genre it used to be, it’s even more remarkable this title has lasted this long on my pull list.  But maybe it’s precisely the rarity and specialized nature of westerns that has protected it from a more rigorous standard of judgment.

Then, too, Gray-Palmiotti have delivered some fairly original material on this series.  Hex in industrial Gotham would’ve been good times enough, but with the addition of Dr. Arkham as sidekick, as well as mixing it up with lineage villains like the followers of the Crime Bible or the Court of Owls, we’ve gotten a pretty lively title on our hands.  Gray-Palmiotti may not have done anything worth alerting the presses about, but they’ve got the guts to try new, interesting things on a consistent basis (Dr. Jekyll as Hex’s next client?  I’m game.).

All-Star Western #11 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (story), Moritat (art), Gabriel Bautista (colors)

The Story: It’s like Yankees versus Red Sox, only with organized crime.

The Review: Now that the Court of Owls arc on Batman has reached its unforgettable end, it feels like a bit of an anticlimax to be reading a tie-in delving into the Court’s history after the fact.  Or, it would but for the fact that the Court of Owls is not meant to be a one-story creation; Scott Snyder clearly made it available to the DCU as a whole to mine its potential.  Palmiotti-Gray have an opportunity to enmesh the Court of Owls into the world beyond Batman.

It seems pretty natural, then, that their first thought would be to pit one Gothamite secret society against another, and you’d be a fool not to choose the Religion of Crime as the Court’s opponent.  Considering the biblical origins of the criminal cult, they have a venerable history which, as they claim with a condescending sniff, “predates Gotham.”  While the Court has already become an urban legend in the city, inspiring old wives’ tales and nursery rhymes of their presence, the European-born followers of the Crime Bible see the Court as American rookies in their game.

All-Star Western #10 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (story), Moritat (art), Gabriel Bautista (colors)

The Story: Anyone care to guess the one thing that puts a merry smile on Hex’s face?

The Review: Don’t tell anyone, but I actually don’t care too much for these short features Gray-Palmiotti keep inserting at the back of this series.  This is no reflection on the concept of back-ups themselves; Nick Spencer’s Jimmy Olsen bit was a fantastic bonus to Paul Cornell’s already solid run in Action Comics, and was even better collected.  But the All-Star Western short features have been mainly jumbled, pointless, underwhelming at best and dull at worst.

The tale of Bat Lash generally follows in this vein.  Despite fun art from José Luis Garcia-López (colored by Patrick Mulvihill), the story makes only a weak attempt at fun by portraying Lash as the most hustlin’ swinger in the Wild West.  The idea isn’t bad, but Gray-Palmiotti just try way too hard to sell Lash’s bon vivant manner, to the point he just comes across as the dirtbag you don’t even care enough to hate: “Aside from my enviable gambling skills, did I mention that I am also devastatingly handsome?”  By the end of the feature, you have no idea why it exists in the first place, other than to take up space no one knew what to do with.

All-Star Western #9 – Review

By: Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray (story), Moritat (art), Gabriel Bautista (colors)

The Story: Hex sure has had an interesting mix of women in his life, hasn’t he?

The Review: In an era of decompressed storytelling, Palmiotti and Gray’s done-in-two style of narratives is something of a pleasant novelty.  Most of the time, they do a neat job of wrapping up their plots in the couple issues they set out for themselves, but every now and then, it feels like they cut their tale off just before it gets to fully stretch its legs, leaving it slightly unresolved, aimless, or a bit inconsequential.

That’s the feeling you get on this whole “August Seven” affair.  We only just got acquainted with the other four of these highly cultured and bigoted individuals, and before they ever execute another move, Hex and his pals (to use the word loosely) shut them down.  Obviously, the imminent danger to a ship full of immigrants required immediate action, but for all the effort Palmiotti-Gray took to build up the Seven, the Southerners prove rather weak-chinned in a real fight.  And without further ado and little sentiment, Hex and Arkham say so long to their New Orleans companions and go on their own merry way.

All-Star Western #8 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (story), Moritat (art), Gabriel Bautista (colors)

The Story: Hex discovers that on occasion, violence can be a turn-on.

The Review: The thing about genre fiction, which includes the western, is that the stories are frequently restricted by conventions.  They have certain archetypes fans easily recognize, and their plots tend to follow well-established patterns and formulas.  Breaking out of these ruts can be quite difficult, considering the limited range each genre offers.  With the western, the limits are even greater since it has restrictions on both geography and time.

This title has defied the traditions of its genre by moving the story outside the usual dusty, frontier town and placing it within urban settings.  While we’ve gotten a lot of entertainment out of observing Hex’s unique brand of “country mouse, town mouse” conflict, it’s more important to note that putting him in cities like Gotham and New Orleans means he encounters the kinds of problems we can relate to, making him more accessible to us.  It also means he has to re-discover and re-use parts of his humanity he hasn’t had to deal with in a while.

All-Star Western #7 – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review.

The Story: Well, if you’re going for a name change, “Scarface” is nothing if not apt.

The Review: You don’t get too much genuine historical fiction in comics unless some time-traveling weirdness is involved.  Even then, writers don’t do much more with the period other than use it as an excuse to put their characters in costume and maybe throw in some anachronistic gags—most of which involve utterances of modern curse words, to the shock or confusion of the antiquated people around them.

All-Star Western provides an opportunity for Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti to land in a period and stick with it for a while, exploring all the issues it has to offer.  We got some child laborers in the last story arc, and a brief foray into early Chinese-American life with the “Barbary Ghost” feature, but so far, these plotlines have only scratched the surface of the post-Reconstruction era, which by all accounts was a very volatile time for the (re)United States.

By taking Hex to New Orleans and introducing him right off the bat to the plight of immigrants under siege by Southern xenophobes, Gray-Palmiotti may be making their first, genuine attempt to deliver a more historically sophisticated tale.  That said, they don’t go much further than having the heroes express pity for innocent victims (“These people killed children!”) and the bad guys dabble in metaphor-laden bigotry (“…the human filth hits our shores with the vigor of an invading army.”).  But these are comics, after all, not socio-political treatises.

All-Star Western #6 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist), Phil Winslade (feature artist), Dominic Regan (feature colorist)

The Story: Don’t expect an informercial, but Hex wants you to save the children.

The Review: Not that Jonah Hex is a blisteringly popular character in the DC galaxy of stars, but he does have a certain, cultish appeal, one that’s a little difficult to pin down.  He has that scar, of course, and he’s a sharp shot, but plenty of heroes have scars and great aim.  If you can pin down one thing that separates him from the rest of the pack, it’s his grit.  When a thing gets in his way, he just pounds it into submission—there’s no finesse, grace, or elegance about him.

More than that, he makes no apologies for being what he is, nor does he feel the need to change his ways so long as it works out for him—and it always does, since Hex will be a monkey’s uncle before he changes for anyone.  So when a giant, underground bat-monster attacks, does he try to come up with some fancy, elaborate plan to take it down?  Nope.  He just runs into it head-on and kicks it in the face.  Make no mistake—he’s a man’s man to the core.

And yet we see in this issue that he’s not exactly the same as when he first rode into Gotham.  He’s gotten to the point where he not only tolerates Arkham’s presence, he actually banters with the doctor now, which is probably more consistent conversation with a body in his whole life.  What’s interesting about their dynamic is that neither on his own has much of a funny bone, but when they rub shoulders, that’s when the humor comes out.  Who knew Hex could be dry (“We just…battled a prehistoric bat…”  “Ah didn’t see a whole lotta we back there.”), or Arkham sassy (“Do mind your manners, though.”  “Don’t ah always?”  “No, not always.  In fact, please let me do all the talking.”)?

All-Star Western #5 – Review

By: Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray (writer), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist), Phil Winslade (feature artist), Dominic Regan (feature colorist)

The Story: Instead of seeing the situation as a death trap, Arkham, consider it an adventure!

The Review: I think the real fun of these buddy stories—although calling Hex and Arkham buddies is admittedly a stretch—is not only the misadventures they can get up to, or even the energy that comes from their interaction, but seeing how each one affects the other over time.  Obviously, that kind of thing works best when you have characters who are polar opposites, and you can’t get more polar or opposite than our two stars here.

In the long run, it’s doubtful Hex will change much under Arkham’s mild-mannered influence, but we can see that this extended companionship with the bounty hunter has definitely opened the stodgy recluse of a doctor to a whole new world of experiences: the numbing horror of hard exercise, the value of violence in a pinch, the rush of excitement and hysteria that you only get when you know death is imminent.  It might be too much to hope that Arkham will take to these things as habit, but he should buck up after a while, and grow hardier for it.

Besides, it’s great fun to see his usual, intelligent composure completely undone as he tackles the sweatier side of the emotional spectrum.  In short order, he expresses paralyzing fear (“Oh God…I fear I’ve soiled myself.”), biting sarcasm (“I should have anticipated your keen intellect would factor into our liberation from this hellish…”), and screaming panic (“Hex?  Where are you?  HEX?!?!”).  Breakdowns are often entertaining to watch, and Arkham’s is no exception.

As it turns out, Arkham’s outbursts turn out to be the saving grace for both men at the bottom of Gotham’s cave network, although the sudden appearance of the Miagani (Grant Morrison’s tribe of Batman-inspired natives) doesn’t really seem as such.  On the other hand, you got a cowboy in Hex and now a passel of Injuns before him—can circumstances be any more perfect?  Palmiotti-Gray aren’t the most inspired of writers, but this scene is very clever, and quite enjoyable, too.

All-Star Western #4 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist), Phil Winslade (feature artist), Dominic Regan (feature colorist)

The Story: Gee, it’s good to be together again.  I just can’t imagine that you’ve ever been gone!

The Review: The beauty of Jonah Hex and Dr. Arkham’s partnership is not only how well they work off each other, but also the uneasy tension that remains, and will perhaps always remain, a part of their dynamic.  At any rate, the dynamic between the duo has easily been the best part of this title, so it was a bit dismaying to see them part ways so suddenly last issue.  It’s actually hard to imagine one without the other now, like Sherlock and Watson, or Starsky and Hutch.

For that reason, you’ll be glad to see them back together again, when Hex’s latest commission brings him face-to-half-face with Arkham once more.  While you can’t describe their reunion as anything like happy, you can see how their relationship has evolved over the course of three issues.  Arkham’s no longer surprised by Hex’s lack of social graces (for example, calling a nun “Sister Hardcase”), and even demonstrates a measure of influence on the bounty hunter.

For his part, Hex keeps a pretty cold shoulder towards the doctor, but whether consciously or no, he has also come to take advantage, if not rely upon, Arkham’s presence in his life.  When the two of them discover a cavern of mining slave-children in the depths of the Gotham sewers, Hex not only clues Arkham into what he’s planning (an unthinkable move for Hex in the past), he gives Arkham a role to play in his plan: “Start movin’ the kids out when it looks safe.”

That last line is evidence that for the mercenary attitude Hex projects (he ostensibly accepts this quest for missing children only after being offered an obscene amount of money), he has a soft spot somewhere in his body.  Even he can’t be totally untouched by the pitiful sight of a boy, left malnourished, ghoulish, and mindless after years of slaving.  And who knows?  Maybe we’ll see more of his sensitive side the longer he sticks with Arkham, but don’t bet on it.

All-Star Western #3 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist), Jordi Bernet (feature artist), Rob Schwager (feature colorist)

The Story: A rough beat for a Gotham cop is…pretty much everywhere in Gotham.

The Review: One of the more intriguing elements to this series has been the “fish out of water” story placing Hex within the trappings of an increasingly urbanized city.  Gray-Palmiotti haven’t played up this aspect so far, but they’ve made it clear Hex can’t wait to get the men on his list and leave this crummy town.  At the same time, the plot has slowly revealed that even if Hex has no use for the city, the city needs him.

This issue makes that need very clear.  Commish Cromwell turns out a pretty decent guy, and now armed with the knowledge of how far the Religion of Crime goes, he plans to clear out the roots of evil before they implant themselves into Gotham’s fabric (terrible mix of metaphors, but this isn’t Shakespeare, so…).  Unfortunately, all his hopeful plans, as so much does in Gotham, comes to naught.

From the very start we saw the number of high-powered men whose rings identified them as the followers of Cain, and last issue showed they’ve already laid down their plans for taking control of the growing city.  Add that to the fact they’re well aware of how much Cromwell knows about them, and you can easily predict that no matter what, the Commish’s time in office would be limited, even if the Crime believers have to go all Rambo to do it.

All-Star Western #2 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist), Jordi Bernet (feature artist), Rob Schwager (feature colorist)

The Story: As long as there are donuts at the end of it, sign me up for the Religion of Crime!

The Review: At first, it wasn’t clear why of all the new 52, this one had the rare price point of $3.99 while even the most popular titles clocked in one dollar lower.  But now it’s clear that even in this latest era of DC comics, the co-feature has its place—which is fine, so long as their stories feel self-contained and substantial on their own merits, rather than novel pieces of filler material.

Unfortunately, the latter is exactly what “El Diablo” winds up being, with the titular character a mix between Hangman (of Archie Comics fame, star of a short-lived DC series) and your typical wandering vigilante who happens upon a frontier town in its hour of need.  A cowboys and zombies mash-up was only a matter of time, and here it comes off just as ludicrously as you can hope for: “Once the dead have been called, only a demon can kill the cursed.”

Not surprisingly, the co-feature, with forgettable art from Bernet, appears thin and uninspired compared to its bigger counterpart in this issue.  Given your druthers, you’d probably forego the distraction of El Diablo for more of Jonah Hex and Dr. Arkham’s mystery in early industrial Gotham.  This is especially the case when considering the interesting new developments in the story that don’t quite get to play out as far as you’d like.

Gray-Palmiotti do a good job linking up all of Gotham’s major historical threads together by introducing the Religion of Crime and its Bible into the investigation.  Speaking as someone who apparently never read the original work where these concepts came from, I appreciated the brief explanation Arkham gives us early on: “…a dark faith…of crime based on the story of Cain and Abel…”  It’s nice to actually have some substance put to the names.

All-Star Western #1 – Review

By: Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray (writers), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist)

The Story: Sounds like y’all have need of a pop-eyed cowboy ‘round these here parts.

The Review: DC has devoted itself to many genres in its publishing history, even those that have fallen out of favor in modern times, like the western.  Give credit where it’s due, because only DC continued supporting Jonah Hex, far from a paragon of popularity, through seventy ongoing issues, keeping its place on the stands between Iron Man and Justice League, and developing a respectable following, such that he even got a movie out of it.

Then, too, you have to give credit to Palmiotti and Gray, whose rollicking, anything-goes style of storytelling has produced a stunning variety of strong work.  That style will serve them well as they take the character which made them famous and mash him into the world of Gilded Age Gotham.  Hex always carried a reputation for being Batman of the frontier, and now he can play up that image in Batman’s home turf, long before the Dark Knight himself has been conceived.

Hex obviously feels out of place amidst this urban setting, and just because he’s a cowboy surrounded by Gothic architecture.  Or because he sticks to a distinctly Confederate wardrobe in a very Yankee-ish city.  You have to remember, in the sparsely settled territories, Hex was pretty much the only law of the land, which he could exercise freely.  Gotham already has a law enforcement system in place, and it doesn’t take kindly to those who step on its toes.

You’ll find it hard to tell if the moon-faced police chief, Cromwell, has a bone to pick with everyone simply because he’s a fastidiously insecure fat man, or because the seeds of Gotham’s infamous corruption have already been sown in him.  Cromwell obviously cares more about his department’s public image than doing everything necessary to find a serial murderer, and his willingness to fall back on cover-ups is a bad sign of things to come.

But since the murderer in question seems mainly interested in targeting your common whores, maybe Cromwell has little motivation to discover who’s behind it all.  Serial killers with a fetish for prostitutes are nothing new, not even ones who leave foreboding, bloody messages on the walls behind them, and not even ones who perpetrate their sordid acts during the Industrial Revolution.  I’m just saying, if you want a villain with a groundbreaking M.O., he’s not here.

The Spirit #15 – Review

By: David Hine (writer), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist)

The Story: Oh, Honey—you were too good for him anyway.  Or is it the other way around?

The Review: If you’re any kind of optimist, you’ll believe that even in the most depraved of individuals, there’s a soul lurking around there somewhere.  Fiction spends a lot of its time trying to uncover the elusive humanity in people, and has about as much success as us doing the same thing in real life.  Sometimes characters end up redeeming themselves; other times you just have to accept them as lost causes.

Hine has this remarkable way of making you empathize with even the most hopeless of characters.  As atrociously as Honey Steel behaves fronting for the mob, you still can’t avoid being unaffected by her passionate claim that the Spirit loves her, only to find the valentines she believed to be from him came from someone else entirely.  Since Hine shows us how much Honey cherished those epistles, we actually feel the weight of a years-long betrayal with her.

Even though Hine emphasizes that she brings most of her troubles on herself, he always leaves room for sympathy.  After all, how can you not relate to a person who winds up in a grim state of life because she took her youthful indiscretions just a little too far?  As long as Honey could believe Denny, the remaining symbol of her innocence, would love and watch over her even from afar, she could continue her unsavory lifestyle.  Once that sweet fantasy gets shattered, any hope she has of salvation is gone, and the burdens of the life she lives collapses in on her.

As is traditional in a Spirit comic, names give everything away.  Honey Steel: sweetness coating a much colder, harder personality.  It drives her to gun down the only man she loves, and it keeps you emotionally in tune with her as she does so.  Then you have Honey’s ruthless, loyal bodyguard, Charlie Soft.  He may shoot you as indifferently as he looks at you, but there’s a devoted, even gentle heart under all that brawn.  When he reveals a longstanding trick on Honey that spiritually rips her apart, you see the innocent romance of his intentions, making you despise and feel sorry for him all at the same time.

These complications all turn around into a very Shakespearean brand of tragedy: the missed cues, impulses taken too far, the most unfortunate of timing, all of it narrated by Hine’s almost clinical voice, which actually serves to underscore the emotions within the story.  He sticks to the facts, only occasionally dropping the barest hint of judgment (“Charlie was quite the teacher.”), allowing us to make what we please out of the characters’ behavior and dialogue.  He uses his narration to frame the action and drama, rather than move it along, and he does so expertly.

The Spirit #13 – Review

By: David Hine (writer), Moritat (artist), Gabe Bautista (colorist)

The Story: Do I choose the super-hot puppet, or the super-hot real lady?  Decisions, decisions…

The Review: When it comes to fiction, you can’t (or you shouldn’t) really expect incredible realism, but you do expect whatever it is you’re reading or watching to mimic reality as best it can.  But when it comes to genre fiction, you’re much more willing to let certain things slide.  For romance, it’s the ludicrously chosen lovemaking moments; for sci-fi, it’s all the pseudo-science babble; and for pulp, it’s the private eye’s rambling, uber-macho monologues.

The opening pages have the Spirit staking his claim on Central City against all the mobster vermin that threaten to take it over.  His speech, in almost any other circumstance, would be incredibly corny, but in this title, with Hine’s expert handle on pulp narration, you just get pumped up to hear the Spirit say, “They’re all wrong.  Dead wrong.  This is my city.”  The smash cut to our hero giving the beatdown to thugs across the red light district is icing on the cake.

Hine also brings his characteristic twist of drama into the proceedings.  The Professor’s puppet fetish is of course driven by personal tragedy from his past, although Hine smartly leaves events open-ended: was Esmerelda (the model for the Professor’s first lady-bot) really his first sweetheart, or just love from afar?  Did she betray him, or was he just paranoid of her doing so?  And was her subsequent death truly “an accident,” as the Professor states?

These are some juicy questions, but Hine never answers them—at least, not directly.  He sprinkles the issue with subtle clues you can weave together for your own conclusion: how the eyes in Esmerelda-bot’s disconnected head follow the Professor around the room; how he covers her unblinking face while trying to seduce Ellen Dolan; and the haunting final embrace between him and the restored automaton (“I love you…I’ll always love you” never chilled you more).

The Spirit #12 – Review

By: David Hine (writer), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist)

The Story: You ever get a feeling from dolls that their eyes keep following you around the room?  Well, you should be worried—because actually they might kill you.

The Review: With any genre of art, you’ve got a few ways of going about it: stick to conventions for a traditional, if formulaic, work; stretch the boundaries and give a new spin to the genre’s spirit; or bring in elements from other genres for a mash-up category all its own.  An ongoing comic has the luxury of using all three routes as it sees fit for the story it wants to tell.

For the first leg of his run on The Spirit, Hine gave pretty standard fare as far as pulp stories go: mobsters and their dicey business, femme fatales, private eye cases.  But lately he’s grown more confident in offering more dramatically challenging material, and now he’s even bringing a bit of retro (even uber-retro, since puppeteers and their servant golems are old news for fiction) sci-fi stuff to the table.

By itself though, the robot mannequin concept would seem gimmicky and out of place in a title so obviously rooted in straight-up detective work.  But Hine smartly doesn’t give too much focus to the puppets themselves (although the Spirit doll is all kinds of creepy fun), but rather to their creator, mad-scientist assassin, the Professor.  What started out as a rival mafia premise is slowly becoming more of a character piece, the kind of thing Hine’s proven himself very good at.

The little layers Hine gives to the Professor this issue elevate the old man from creepazoid to a sympathetic figure.  Even though we know nothing of his history, the way Hine writes his behavior and reactions, especially to Ellen Dolan, says a lot about what a life starved of love he’s had—it certainly explains the robot-dame he has as his escort, and why her physical affections towards him in the end result in her beheading.

The Spirit #11 – Review

By: David Hine (writer), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista & Pia Guerra (colorists)

The Story: The Spirit takes on Central City’s illegal immigrant problem, mafia style.

The Review: A good story can be told given any length.  In fact, when page or word limits constrain a writer, it forces the writing to cut the fat and keep only the material that works—which, given the babbling style of some writers, can be a very good thing.  But you can’t deny the benefits of getting more room for storytelling: it allows you to get better immersed in more detailed, richer settings and characters, and seeing how they evolve.

With the second feature now cut from the title, Hine has more freedom to deliver a more involved, plot-driven story, unlike the character pieces he’s given us before.  Not that those weren’t good, but they did end up relegating the Spirit to a kind of symbol in those people’s lives.  In this issue, the Spirit gets a sticky, but fairly clear-cut case, giving him a more active role in showing why he’s the hero of choice in Central City.

What’s more, the supporting cast also gets involved.  Usually Dolan gets relegated to expository duty, delivering the newest details of a case for his vigilante partner to tackle.  Here, Dolan’s balancing act as ally of both justice and crime lets him use his own brand of power to take down the human trafficking ring popping up in his city.  Kudos to Hine for getting Ellen involved by way of her ties to progressive community action groups.  In one issue, you get the vigilante, government, and citizenry working together to remove the same plague.

The addition of the Octopus’ manpower to their efforts is a surprising element, but great for bringing some character to these Zoot-suited bozos.  It goes to show that even in the crime world, there are degrees of despicable behavior.  You got to love Mr. Ovsack’s explanation of how he’s on the high road here: “Our drugs are clean, we don’t sell guns to kids, our girls are all over eighteen.”  But Hine wisely reminds us that mobsters are mobsters, as the factory explosion (with all the immigrant workers still inside) grimly shows.

The Spirit #10 – Review

By: David Hine (writer), Moritat (penciller), John Kantz (inker), Gabriel Bautista (colorist)

The Story: No one’s very fond of the cockroach, but Roscoe Kalashnikov is crazy about them—not in a good way.  And yes, his craziness involves guns.

The Review: Considering the ongoing nature of comic books, you’d think writers could afford to let their stars take a break from the limelight now and then to build up other characters.  When even incidental personalities get fleshed out, stories take on a whole new depth of flavor; you become that much more convinced this world exists out there, somewhere.

The Spirit is ostensibly about the titular hero’s never-ending struggle for justice in a city that resists it, but really, the star of the series is the traumatized city itself.  David Hine makes a pointed effort every issue to delve into the backgrounds of his featured characters, to the point where the Spirit feels like a guest in his own title.  The results are a Central City that genuinely feels populated with people, all with their own bag of inescapable hang-ups, damning flaws, and redeeming virtues.  It really brings home what the Spirit faces every day.

Take Roscoe Kalashnikov—great name, by the way.  The origins of his personal set of crazy are delivered matter-of-factly, in the voice of someone who has clearly embraced his screwed-up childhood.  But as the story progresses, Hine expertly teases out the stains still painfully lingering on Roscoe’s psyche, letting you get an almost sickening firsthand view of the guy’s total meltdown.  It’s a bit like reading Lolita—even as Roscoe pushes himself down the path to his own undoing, the little bits of honest-to-goodness insanity peppering his thoughts and behavior still invoke your sympathy.

The story takes on new meaning in light of recent current events.  I should stake my claim right here that Hine’s story is no intended statement on the Arizona shootings, but there’s an interesting reflection regardless.  You have a man with some disturbing psychoses that he represses, absorbing rather than healing the damage.  When the literal drop-in of one of fiction’s most potent plot devices—a loaded, silenced gun—comes his way, the unexpected consequences, hastened by the impulsive use of drugs, end up devastating him and others very quickly.  The beginning of the issue emphasizes Roscoe’s desire for power to put to use the self-control his father twistedly trains into him.   But once he gets it, you see how incapable he is at handling it, revealing the weak grasp of self-control he really has.  It may be an old story, but Hine executes it in gripping fashion.

The Spirit #9 – Review

By: David Hine (writer), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist), Paul Dini (co-feature writer), Mike Ploog (co-feature artist)

The Story: The feud between the Ottoman and Bauhaus families ratchets up when the Spirit discovers a connection between Ophelia Ottoman’s murders, her dead husband, and a long-lost treasure.  But since this is Central City, that connection isn’t as clear-cut as you might think.

The Review: When DC included the Spirit in its First Wave revival of pulp heroes, it seemed like a good fit, but also kind of sudden.  The Spirit had recently been re-introduced under Darwyn Cooke’s pen and enjoyed success on the first leg of his series, but lost steam after Cooke (and his powerhouse retro-penciling) departed.  The Spirit was on the brink of losing his place in Central City to the Flash, who was about to be resurrected in the pages of Final Crisis, before he got transferred from his DCU-prime ongoing to another in the First Wave universe.

The Spirit now lives in a world kept perpetually in a kind of post-Prohibition era, and he thrives here more than he did in a land where metahumans walk the land and the Internet reigns supreme.  His skills as a detective and punch-up vigilante get better display when he’s forced to get down and dirty to do his work.  While the Spirit lacks the Bat Man’s viciousness and Doc Savage’s intellect, he keeps enough tricks up his sleeve to face down any sticky situation.  His scheme to give a pair of lovers a chance at freedom while ensuring they pay for their crimes is both inspired and twisted.  The final scenes leave you smirking at the Spirit’s triumph, but anticipating the blow-up that’s sure to come somewhere down the line.

This is the kind of thing Hine does a particularly good job at: portraying the Spirit as Central City’s last, best hope, but pulling back to show the enormity of what the Spirit has to face.  Even as the A-story is running full-speed, there are signs laced throughout hinting at just how deep crime goes in this world.  Even though each story arc may last only a couple issues and is fairly self-contained, a sense of a much bigger, almost omniscient foe looms at certain beats of the issue.  Each case acts as a puzzle piece, but one that fits at unpredictable corners of the bigger picture.  It’ll be very exciting when the Spirit figures out exactly what he’s really up against.