Sunday, January 10, 2016

Batwoman: Vol 3 World's Finest by JH Williams III, W Haden Blackman and various artists


Rating: WARTY!

I covered some general issues I had with this series in my review of volume one. I enjoyed that issue despite the problems, but this one fared far less well. The only reason I eve read it was that I had all four volumes out of the library at once. if I'd had to buy them as single issues every month at the store, I never would have finished the collection in volume two, much less read all four collections.

Well I'm sorry to have to report that for me, this series which started out so well in volume one, went quickly downhill in volume two. I thought that three might pick things up. It featured Wonder Woman. She and Batwoman had to go to the depths of the ocean to try to track down Medusa, although what Medusa had to do with ocean depths was a mystery. Supposedly that was where she was in prison, but she wasn't actually there and in the end it turned out that she was right back where they'd started: in Gotham City, which was, let's face it, pretty darned obvious when you think about it.

They had to track down Perseus to discover this fact about Medusa, although why he would know goes unexplained. The real problem with this, though, was that Perseus was a direct rip-off of the Kill Bill character Sidewinder, played by Michael Madsen, who wore a cowboy hat and lived in a trailer out in the desert middle of nowhere just like Perseus did. Sad.

Volume three, therefore, seemed to be nothing but filler and had nothing of interest to offer. The artwork continued to be wooden and uninspiring although it wasn't abysmally atrocious. In some parts, because of the choppy story-telling, it was actually hard to tell which of the "civilian" characters was which, they were drawn so much alike. The only redeeming factor was the way Batwoman approached Maggie Sawyer towards the end, kissed her full on and asked her to marry her. This was a full page spread and was beautiful. It was Batwoman coming out in a whole different way. I loved that, but it wasn't enough to rescue a novel which seemed more interested in portraying Batwoman as a smug poseur in page after page, instead of really getting down to a solid story. This may impress die-hard fans of the genre, but it takes both none of that and a lot more than that to get me into a story. I can't recommend this one.