The Amazons, to me, are some of the most boring characters in the DC Universe. The reveal that Ollie’s been captured by the Amazons? If I’m honest, that’s a bit of a turn-off. Not that it really matters now, over a decade removed. I suspect it was, because… everything is… but couldn’t say for sure. I wasn’t around the “comics internet” much back then, so I dunno if this was spoiled ahead of time. The reveal that it wasn’t Ollie all along was… well, c’mon… we knew that was going to be the case. Of course Batman had to hop in and stomp all over Hal’s toes… but, considering their contentious relationship during this time, we can probably allow it. I really enjoyed Hal trying to reason with Dinah… and the callback to The Final Night was definitely appreciated. The fact that she fully-believes Ollie to not actually be dead might make you wonder why she’s still beating the holy hell out of all’a da bad guys… but, I suppose we could chalk that up to frustration and confusion. So… whatta we got here? Dinah’s taking Ollie’s “death” really poorly… and taking out her frustrations on any nogoodnik she can get her hands on. Pair that with some fantastic art from Cliff Chiang (and the Wedding Special’s Amanda Conner) and you’re looking at a really good time. These two issues, while not perfect… and have some of my lesser-liked Winickisms present, were a helluva lot of fun… and overall, highly enjoyable reads.
Sure, he’s sometimes “sex mad”, he uses foul language for absolutely no reason… at times where it adds nothing to the story, his dialogue can be a bit cringy, he does the “soapbox” thing a bit too often… I swear, this is all coming around to a compliment… and, his pet causes sometimes interfere with the overall narrative of the story, but… when he’s “on”, he’s really quite good. It’s only after forcing myself to read his work with an analytic eye (as analytic as I can be), that my position has changed. I said all of that, so I could say this… if you were to ask me what I thought about Judd Winick three years ago, I’d have given you that same knee-jerk “he stinks!” reply. Sure, there were parts that weren’t very good… but overall, it deserves far better than a knee-jerk “It stinks!”. It wasn’t until I challenged myself… forcing myself to revisit it (and actually read the whole thing) that I came around to a more well-rounded stance on it. Last week we took a look at the Titans crossover, Total Chaos… a story that, up until last week, I would have just said “it sucked”. What I didn’t expect this to become was an opportunity to challenge my preconceptions about certain creators/characters/stories. If you’ll allow me to briefly go “off topic”… when I started this blog, it was to celebrate books that I already loved… and discover new (old) books that I’d never gotten around to.
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