So the jaw-droppingly stunning work of writer/artist J.H. Williams III and his co-writer W. Haden Blackman have left Batwoman for good, thanks to the hilariously consistent editorial meddling of DC Comics. Williams can be seen working with Neil Gaiman on the new Sandman: Overture stuff, but that leaves the question of what’s next for Kate Kane. DC’s conflict with the outgoing team was that they needed to be more involved in the New 52 overall, and thus they weren’t allowed to take her in the directions they wanted to go – namely, getting married and doing her own thing, which was part of what made her adventures so interesting. Now, DC has granted their own wish, and the result is about as generic as it sounds.
They’ve wasted no time getting Kate into the mix, as Batwoman #25 is a tie-in to the Zero Year business that flashes back to the new origins of Batman. Writer Marc Andreyko is working with a quartet of artists for this issue, suggesting a lot of scrambling to make a deadline after Williams & Blackman quit. Trevor McCarthy, Andrea Mutti, Pat Olliffe and Jim Fern are all on hand to try to fill the void (although we don’t know who did what), and when I first opened the issue, I was actually cautiously optimistic, since the art was still solid. But it feels like the issue is transitional, as if we need to come to expect more standard comic book fare than the more experimental efforts we’d grown to appreciate. Nothing inherently wrong with standard comic book fare, but we’ll miss what we’ve lost.
This is a standalone issue, giving us Kate still at West Point (with a professor who looks suspiciously like Henry Jones Jr.) learning that her Uncle Phil has been killed by the Red Hood Gang. Her return to Gotham coincides with the threatening hurricane and the Riddler deciding to cut the power to the city right as it’s about to hit. Interspersed with Kate attending the funeral and the wake at her cousin’s house, aka Wayne Manor, we see Maggie Sawyer as a Metropolis cop being assigned to help out Gotham City during the crisis, and eventually the first looks exchanged between the two. In the midst of that, Kate decides she wants to go fight crime, ostensibly because she’s a soldier in training and she thinks she can help stop looting. So she steals away in the middle of the night, then swipes one of Bruce’s motorcycles to head into town. Cue running into a crew of chucklefucks trying to rob a high-rise, and Kate getting involved to stop it, save a kid in the crossfire, and beat up jerks.
This could just be a matter of the creators being rushed onto the job, and there’s a chance things could improve once they get a regular artist and a rhythm going, but the story feels pretty by-the-numbers, and the dialogue seems really on-the-nose much of the time. It’s not actively bad – the low-rent criminal losers are kind of amusing in their incompetence – but it lacks the excitement and intrigue Batwoman used to bring. It’s possible there’s just going to be a sense of irreplaceable loss we’ll just have to learn to accept. What used to be a flourish of creativity and a visual feast will now just be one more Bat-comic.
Maybe now, Batwoman will get to punch Owlman in the face at the end of Forever Evil, but I’m not sure her greater involvement in the New 52 at large is worth the loss of Williams & Blackman. If nothing else, though, hopefully Director Bones of the DEO will step up to the plate in a big way, too. It’s hard not to root for a cigar-chomping guy with invisible flesh to show up more often.
