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, Spencer and Drew discuss Batman Eternal 35, Gotham Academy 3, Grayson 5, Angela: Asgard’s Assassin 1, The Autumnlands: Tooth and Claw 2, and The Private Eye 9.
Spencer: So there’s been a lot of talk about who the “big bad” behind Batman Eternal is, but issue 35 makes me think that perhaps he’s been right under our noses since the very first issue. The one constant throughout this series, the one figure putting in an appearance in every arc, has been Jason Bard, and in this week’s installment we begin to dive into his intensely personal motives for targeting Batman. Indeed, “personal” is the name of the game this issue; Bard’s attacks on Batman continue to get more and more personal as he not only strips Bruce Wayne of his company and assets, but turns a trusted friend against him to boot. Fortunately, Bard’s about to get a taste of his own medicine; Vicki Vale is in Detroit, ready to dig up every last piece of dirt she can find on Bard. I don’t know whether Vicki was only faking her relationship with Bard to get close to him, or if she just had a change of heart after getting to know him better, but either way, it’s a delicious reversal.

Gotham Academy also blesses us with a particularly strong issue this week; it only took one page for the entire series to finally snap into place.
In previous issues I found it hard to connect with Olive when her past was so vague, but now that the mystery of Olive’s mysterious summer is finally solved (her mother was an inmate at Arkham who was put into a coma during the big Batman Eternal-related collapse) the series is free to move forward, and everything just works so much better now that the book has this solid foundation. Cloonan and Fletcher have begun to flesh out the supporting cast and allowing them to interact with each other as well, and this too does wonders for the book. I liked Gotham Academy from the start, but with issue three I feel like we’ve finally got the book I’ve been hoping for since this title was first announced.

Drew: In my estimation, that focus on the supporting cast might actually be more important than the reveal of Olive’s Occam’s razor of a backstory. This issue finally gets into the motives of our other characters, allowing them to be in real conflict for the first time. Those conflicts aren’t enough to make these characters enemies, per se, but enough to give their partnerships of necessity a kind of frenetic energy that surpasses anything this series has attempted in previous installments. There’s just something satisfying about getting a rag-tag team together to do some old-fashioned adventuring.

Speaking of inelegant transitions, Grayson 5 drops us so abruptly into the action, the act of figuring out what’s going on distracts pretty heavily from the story at hand. It’s clear writers Tim Seeley and Tom King are playing it for laughs, dropping us in a veritable dogpile of climactic cliches — Dick is literally working with his worst enemy to deliver a baby on a crashing helicopter — but it’s such a leap from the last time we saw him that I was certain I’d missed an issue. The story eventually gels into a pretty straightforward narrative of will (and hope) vs. nature, but that only makes me question the opening more. Spencer, were you as distracted by that in medias res opening as I was?

Spencer: It was obviously something that threw me off for a second, Drew — I think that was the point — but it didn’t distract me as badly as it did you. Grayson as a title has always indulged in a little bit of disorienting narrative shorthand — as befitting a book so full of Grant Morrison concepts — and while this is certainly the most jarring instance, the first two pages did a pretty thorough job of filling me in on vital facts and then getting to the real meat of the story — which, incidentally, is not the trek through the desert, although Mikel Janin and Jeremy Cox do a stupendous job of depicting its never-ending monotony and the toll it takes on the cast.
Instead, this issue is still primarily concerned with defining Dick Grayson, this time by emphasizing his compassion, determination, and optimism. Dick won’t let Midnighter or Spyral have the baby, and keeping that child safe is all the motivation he needs to transcend his limits and even fool the Midnighter’s abilities — and for all his high and mighty posturing, Dick is certainly looking out for that baby’s interests more than the Midnighter. Of course, while I love seeing this side of Dick, it’s not really anything I didn’t already know about the character, and Seeley and King are far from subtle with their message — this isn’t the most vital or elegant issue of Grayson by a long shot, but even at its weakest this book is a lot of fun.

Kieron Gillen and Marguerite Bennett are likewise looking to better define their title character in Angela: Asgard’s Assassin 1, and while they successfully manage to merge the insatiable warrior seen in Guardians of the Galaxy with the Heven backstory revealed in Thor and Loki: The Tenth Realm, they do so while keeping Angela at arms length. Gillen and Bennett never get into Angela’s head, preferring to let omniscient narration and stories from her closest friend inform us of Angela’s true nature, building her up as more of a force of nature than a person in the process. Both artists are a tremendous asset as well; Stephanie Hans’ otherworldly paintings are breathtaking, and Phil Jimenez’s beautifully choreographed fight sequences leave no doubt as to Angela’s skills and power. The story itself is rather slight, but considering how much Angela has been shuffled around since migrating to the Marvel Universe, I can understand Gillen and Bennett wanting to solidify their take on the character before getting to the plot.

Drew: In that case, I wish we had gotten to know Angela better. Not only do we never really get a glimpse of her personality, but her actions are almost all reactions, meaning they, too, reveal relatively little about who she is. The most I can get out of this is that she’s a woman of her word and holds others to that standard, but that’s a pretty far cry from a fleshed-out personality. I appreciate that this is only the first issue, but my big question going into this was “who is Angela?”, and unfortunately, the story presents little more than “action anti-hero,” which I kind of already knew. Without more to draw me in, this issue left me cold.

When I was in high school, I remember my English Literature teacher dividing all of literature into the basic modes of conflict: Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Self, etc. The Autumnlands: Tooth and Claw 2 somehow features all of these, as the magic-worshipping society of our protagonist reels in the wake of their city’s destruction. Not only is their sense of society and identity upended, but when they finally come to meet their savior — the Great Champion they’ve worshipped since the dawn of time — none of them can believe that he isn’t a beast. Their incredulity serves as a sly commentary on the nature of religion, but the real tension here comes from the city’s fall from grace — without flight to protect them, our wizards are open to all kinds of attacks from the surface-dwellers. The Great Champion is able to save them this time, but what of the next threat?

That’s a decent cliffhanger, but it’s got nothing on this week’s The Private Eye 9, which leaves our heroes with a rocket pointed straight at them. Actually, the whole issue trades in high tension, with enough misdirection to make your head spin. Wins become losses, losses become wins, but my favorite fake-out has to be that nobody in the future recognizes a Zune. This is a fairly action-heavy issue, so there isn’t much plot to comment on, though there is an interesting flashback to the funeral of P.I.’s mom, where he sees a man he thinks might be his father dressed in exactly the outfit P.I. wears in the present. It’s not entirely clear what that means for P.I., let alone how it fits into the commentary on the internet that so defines this series, but that doesn’t make me any less curious about your wildest guesses, Spencer.

Spencer: P.I. as a character has always been rather elusive — we just don’t know enough about him to fully understand his motives — and this situation is no different. If I had to guess, though, I’d say that we just saw the spark of what led P.I. to become a journalist; a missing father and a mother lost to a tragic, unsolved accident are certainly reason enough to devote one’s life to solving mysteries. As for the rest of the issue, I can’t help but think about how important one of Gramps’ lines felt to me.
Internet or not, people can’t be trusted to give accurate answers — whether they’re hiding behind online screennames or literal masks, there’s always the temptation to lie, and even when people try to be entirely truthful, the truth can often be subjective. Just look at Raveena and DeGuerre, both of whom have wildly different takes on what kind of person Taj was; both think they have the answers, but who’s really right? If P.I. is looking for answers — be they about his parents or about Taj or about the internet itself — he may be in the wrong business. Maybe he would have been better off becoming a theoretical physicist; at least then he might know how to stop that rocket.
The conversation doesn’t stop there, because you certainly read something that we didn’t. What do you wanna talk about from this week?