Zatanna #11 – Review

By: Paul Dini (writer), Jamal Igle (penciller), Jon Sibal (inker), John Kalisz (colorist)

The Story: You know, puppets aren’t so scary when they feature hot women in fishnets.

The Review: One thing you may notice about television writers who get into comics is they tend to bring their teleplay habits with them, some of which don’t really suit the glossy page as much as the small screen.  Dini is one of those TV writers who has made the transition better than many of his colleagues, but even he can’t seem to escape completely from his past.

The most obvious leftover from his TV days is how much he relies on expository monologues—characters recalling events in flashback—to move the plot forward.  The past two issues featured Oscar Hampel blathering first about how he’d been wronged and then how he wronged others.  By the time Mikey gets done filling Zatanna in about she managed to track down her puppetized-boss in this issue, you get pretty tired of explanatory dialogue.  It’s an easy storytelling method, but it doesn’t do much to add tension or excitement to the story.

It doesn’t do much in the character department either.  With so much talk about the plot going on, none of the characters demonstrate much personality, even the usually engaging Zatanna.  Despite Mikey playing a big role in rescuing Zee, you still don’t know anything about her, which is a big problem for the title’s long-term livelihood.  If the supporting cast is weak, the burden of carrying interest falls solely on the lead—and if she falls flat, the whole story collapses.