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, Drew and Patrick discuss Batwoman 27, Batman and Two-Face 27, Justice League 27, Avengers 25, Indestructible Hulk 18.INH, George Romero’s Empire of the Dead Act One 1, and All-New Invaders 1.

Drew: History is complicated. That’s not exactly the message of Mark Andreyko’s Batwoman 27, but it might as well be. His run, with it’s abrupt start after an aborted arc by the previous writers, was always going to have a complex relationship with the series, which he sets to address directly in this issue. Only, he addresses it in a dream sequence, so not only is it not clear what is memory and what is dream, but he doesn’t do much besides show it to us. We see Bane reciting lines from that previous arc, but it comes alongside talking rabbit skeletons. More distressingly, we see Colonel Kane expressing profound shame in Kate (“I wish it had been you who was killed”), which flies in direct opposition to Greg Rucka’s version of her coming out story. Is that a nightmare fantasy, or an accurate memory (or somewhere in between)? This series has never truly addressed its pre-New 52 history (which we might have assumed meant it hadn’t changed), but this at least suggests that we might not actually know anything about Kate’s past.

We also see Alice, with the implication that Bones still has her, reminding us that we never really got closure on that whole “let’s break Alice out of the D.E.O.” arc. Did that happen, or what? The issue ends with Kate being discovered by Maggie’s daughter, suggesting there there’s a lot we don’t know about (or maybe that what we think we know isn’t actually true). We don’t yet have a whole lot to go on as far as what has changed, but it may turn out to be quite a bit.

Speaking of surprise Secret Histories, Batman and Two-Face 27 continues to fill in some of Harvey’s New 52 backstory, which includes being a criminal defense attorney before becoming District Attorney. I love that idea — this is Two-Face, after all — but the compression makes him feel like an amoral mercenary. We see him railing against Batman in court in order to get off his criminal client, and a few pages later, we see him working with Batman to help bring down his old clients. I guess it’s very much like Two-Face to do either the right thing OR the wrong thing, but I’ve personally always been partial to the notion that Dent himself was a man of very strong character with a dark side, not a totally spineless sleaze. There’s enough going on here to forget about Batman, but Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason take pains to contrast all of the grief-stricken vendettas to Bruce’s own sense of loss. Patrick, I’m curious how well that sequence worked for you.

Patrick: It’s an interesting set of pages for sure. It’s like Tomasi wants to set up the parallels between Batman and Two-Face, but is focused on the Batman of right now rather than the platonic, elemental “Batman.” In that way, seeing Harvey’s uncontrollable duality literally framed by Bruce losing Damian finally answers the question of how this story is even part of the same series that arguably dwelled on Robin’s death for seven consecutive issues. I’m still not all that moved by Harvey as a character, but his more superficial qualities are starting to link up to Bats in a very real, pretty cool way. Plus, some of Gleason’s duality-obsessed drawings are super fun and effective.

Over in the “I can’t believe this thing is still happening” corner, Forever Evil plows on through Justice League 27. You know that chromatic sequential music and swirling camera motion that accompanies the opening of every treasure chest the Legend of Zelda games? That’s what this issue is. It’s all hype to — and eventually the reveal of — the new Cyborg design. But, like most new things in the New 52 these days, this is actually just a return to old designs. It hardly matters: there weren’t enough stories in the first 26 issues to get me attached to this version of the character anyway. Geoff Johns also quietly kills off one superhero team — the Doom Patrol — while teasing another — The Metal Men. It’s very inside pool, and has gotta be discouraging for anyone that was hoping to have some fun adventure stories in Justice League – nope: it’s always going to be playing with all the toys, no matter how little you care about them.

Avengers 25 might be guilty of the exact opposite: trying to get too much mileage out of the same characters and concepts without changing anything. The issue opens with the corpse of Hank Pym, an intriguing enough image as far as comic book openings go. But then we flash back to four hours previous, and we discover that A.I.M. has used a dimensional auger to pull a parallel Earth’s Avengers into our world. Turns out, these Other-Avengers were experiencing an Incursion and were likely just moments away from having their whole planet destroyed. The point is, I hope you haven’t had your fill of either Incursions OR alternate versions of the Avengers, because it looks like these guys will be causing trouble in New York for a while. I had a sneaking suspicion that we were just introduced to a different set of alternate Avengers, but upon review of issue 24, it turns out I was thinking of Iron Man from the year 3030. I mean, no matter what, it’s one more Iron Man in the mix. This issue almost does whatever it can to ignore the previous, so it’s hard to tell what critical mass Jonathan Hickman is building up to here. I don’t know – we’ll appeal to the comments: how many Iron Mans is too many Iron Mans?

Gosh, the Marvel guys sure do love their crazy sci-fi concepts huh? Indestructible Hulk 18 concludes the Humanity Bomb story with the explosion of the titular bomb. This messes with the speed of the passage of time in the blast-radius. That’s right! Hulk ain’t done with time stuff yet. There’s a moment later in the issue where Banner’s voiceover reads “Normally, solutions are pretty straightforward. Hulk sees problem, Hulk hits problem.” Maybe I’m something of a simpleton, but I find myself wishing for more straightforward obstacles for Bruce Banner – all of the things that cause Hulk the most trouble end up being bat-shit crazy sci-fi shenanigans. Just because a threat is more severe doesn’t make it more emotionally resonant. Luckily, it looks like this new Inhuman has the power to make Hulk cool with his rage? Drew does that sound like more or less fun than radio-active time bombs?

Drew: Oh man, I actually really liked this issue. The concepts were absolutely off the wall, but I loved every one of them. A time-bomb time bomb? Brilliant. Even the inhumanity cocooning worked for me — a rarity in these Inhumanity tie-ins. Jessup is an inhuman? Sure! That he becomes supernaturally calming (an exaggeration of a quality that we’d previously seen in him) works perfectly for me, and I love that that could actually work to put Bruce in danger.

George Romero’s Empire of the Dead Act One 1 is similarly full of wild ideas, which it mostly pulls off beautifully. Set five years into Romero’s Dead universe (and featuring a protagonist who’s apparently the sister to the Night of the Living Dead‘s own Barbara), the story finds a Manhattan settled into some kind of normalcy. Gone are the overwhelming hordes of Romero’s films, replaced with a more existential dread: the haves of the upper west side live in relative luxury, while the have nots downtown scramble for rat meat. The social commentary is a little on-the-nose (Editor Bill Rosmaren is pretty open about this in the issue’s back matter), but it’s also timely, and artist Alex Maleev pulls it off with a style to excuse most of my grievances. I’m a little less certain on my feelings about vampires, which appear out of left field here (Rosmaren is a less clear about their role in this social commentary), and may muddle what might otherwise be a zombie-filled parable about the woes of social stratification. Or maybe a werewolf will show up and they’ll all do the monster mash. I’m certainly going to pick up another issue to find out.

Patrick: I was also seduced by a sneaky number 1 this week. Coming on the heels of Black Widow and Avengers World, I had pretty high hopes for All-New Invaders 1. The issue follows Jim Hammond, the original Human Torch (who interestingly, isn’t human), as he tries to lives a normal life in Blaketown, Illinois. Blaketown’s a small town, but its quaintness borders on the absurd – Jim works in a mechanic’s shop, eats at a diner, walks through a town square complete with a statute of some dude on a horse. I suppose it’s fitting for the character, but it sure feels like writer James Robinson is pulling his ideas of small town living from the 1950s. Even the gas pumps at the local gas station look like their of the entirely wrong decade.

Eventually, an alien being comes to town and demands Jim’s piece of the “Gods’ Whisper” – each of the Invaders is reported to have one of the pieces, and while we don’t know what the thing is or what it does,”Gods’ Whisper” is a pretty good name for a MacGuffin, so I’ll let it slide. I’m a big fan of Steve Pugh’s art from his work on Animal Man, but the coloring, provided by Guru-eFX, has a nasty habit of trying to imply depth on just about everything. Pugh actually does a remarkably job of show depth without any color work, and the pile-on effect makes all the characters seem sorta doughy.

Maybe I’ll loop back around and pick up that Zombie book. How doughy did you say the zombies were?The conversation doesn’t stop there, because you certainly read something that we didn’t. What do you wanna talk about from this week?