Look, there are a lot of comics out there. Too many. We can never hope to have in-depth conversations about all of them. But, we sure can round up some of the more noteworthy titles we didn’t get around to from the week. Today, Patrick and Drew discuss Superior Foes of Spider-Man 7, Talon 14, Batwoman 27 and Aquaman 27.

Patrick: For my money, Superior Foes of Spider-Man has been the best supporting leg of the whole ‘Superior’ movement, but not because it does anything to prop up the overarching plot in any way. Superior Foes embraces the villains-as-protagonists conceit with fearless abandon, usually relying on humor to make the medicine go down a little easier, and sometimes delivering genuine pathos. Issue 7 is a Beetle origin story — the rest of our Sinister Six don’t feature in the issue at all. Unlike most origins, this is not one of unfortunate circumstances or loss or anything like that. Janice grew up the daughter of an organized crime goon, and aspired to be something greater than her father: a supervillain. The American Dream, right? It’s a shockingly relatable journey, and while the issue mines some laughs out of the absurdity of her earliest heists (like stealing all of her friend’s birthday presents), the rubber really meet the road when Nick Spencer and artist Rich Ellis show how damn driven she is. I love this splash of her day-planner (it reminded me of Charles Soule’s ‘How I do it’ post on his blog last week).

The rest of the issue is equally dense – each page averages about 10 panels, making the final splash of Janice in the Beetle suite all the more impactful. It’s a wonderful story with so much incident that it ably conveys just how hard Janice worked to become that supervillain.

We’re just now witnessing the end of an even longer origin story in the form of Talon 14. The series has never been much for having a status quo, but by issue’s end, it seems like James Tynion has rebooted Batman Incorporated. That’s sorta fun, and I like the idea of that being part of the DCU, but there are maybe a few too many miraculous revivals in a single issue — both Calvin Rose and Felix Harmon are essentially killed only to be… just sort of back. Casey literally blasted Harmon in half, but his body started to pull itself back together (though, that doesn’t explain why it looks like someone also stitched him back up…).

Drew, what do you make of all these resurrections? Also, I get that it looked cool, but why did Calvin light himself on fire again?

Drew: I think it was to protect himself from the effects of the “cryo-bomb” that he sets off, which I’m afraid is about as satisfactory as any explanation I have to offer is going to be. This issue used so much off-the-wall pseudo-science to justify itself, it might as well have all been a dream. Seriously, why does Casey make a point of saying specifically that they’re keeping Harmon at absolute zero? It’s literally the only temperature that cannot exist. How are they looking at a thing that would cease to exist — even if it were theoretically possible — when photons bounce off of it? Why aren’t they all more interested in what happens to matter when it is brought down to absolute zero? That’s like, a way bigger deal than anything the Court could ever do. Physics aside, the herky-jerkiness of this issue got to me long before those final reveals — what happened to that SWAT team that arrived? — making this issue feel more like an experiment in increasing tension via random images than any kind of narrative.

That may be an awkward ending, but Mike Andreyko and Jeremy Haun find plenty of awkwardness to mine from beginnings in his sort-of debut on Batwoman 26. They had the unenviable task of replacing a beloved — and distinctive — creative team after what many fans regard as an unfairly truncated run. It’s probably a smart move, then, that they immediately take the series in a different direction, though one might ask why DC didn’t just launch an entirely new series. It’s easy to point at the loss of J.H. Williams haunting art as the biggest change, but I can’t get over the loss of the grandiose, operatic storytelling. Tense family drama and expansive meditations on morality are replaced with quippy fluff and a talkative dude in a spider costume. It’s exactly as familiar as it sounds, in spite of being utterly unlike the Batwoman we loved so dearly. Patrick, I really wanted to like this issue — if for no other reason than to confirm for myself that I’m not unduly biased against the idea of it — but to no avail. Did you fare any better?

Patrick: Oh, it’s all a weird departure from the Batwoman we know and love. This was a lot smoother issue than the previous — Kate’s Zero Year outing was kind of a mess — but it makes me question what it takes for me to read a comic at all. I appreciate that there’s a little gay content in the beginning — that alone might get me interested in a different series — and the fight sequence at the end is actually nicely grounded and exciting. Still, it’s hard to welcome a series that “might be sorta okay” after so many issues of transcendence.

Even with the departure of Geoff Johns from Aquaman, issue 26 feels oddly stagnant. Much of the dynamics between Arthur and his subjects are identical to how they were before the Death of the King arc. Little things have changed: Mera and her people are now living side-by-side with the Atlaneans. They appear to have reached a contentious understanding wherein nobody’s really happy about Aquaman being the King of Atlantis, with Arthur probably being the least excited about it. He continues to be bad the job because he’d rather have Mera water-cannon him off to the coast of Iceland to wrestle crustacean leviathans. Unlike the Batwoman we were discussing above, this issue doesn’t really make any steps towards asserting itself as a new take on the character, and the twisty ending threatens to re-visit the mystery of Atlantis’ origin. I think I might be detecting a little more earnest sweetness in the way Jeff Parker writes both Aquaman and Mera, but we’ll have to wait and see if this sincerity extends to the rest of the story as well. There is an interesting scene in the first couple pages where a reporter comes to Amnesty Bay asking questions about Aquaman. It’s a short scene, but it reminded me of that infamous Blogger Scene from Aquaman 1, only with a lot more honestly, and a lot less snark. That’s refreshing and all, but, like, am I ready to just retread the same kind of story with  a slightly more sincere set of sensibilities?
The conversation doesn’t stop there, because you certainly read something that we didn’t. What do you wanna talk about from this week?