(2015, DC)
Up until this Robin War I hadn't read any stories featuring Damian since his death. I hated the little scamp at first, as we were supposed to, but through some great writing from Morrison, Tomasi and whomever wrote those issues of Teen Titans he was in (I forget at the moment), I wound up being quite fond of him. His death was preordained, but it still stung.
I avoided the whole journey Bruce took to bring him back. I'm not the biggest fan of resurrection stories (Resurrection Man excluded), but I am glad he's back as he brings something unique to the Bat-family. All the Robins do for that matter. It's what's making the "Robin War" mini event work.
What's not working so well is the Court of Owls. Introduced early in the New 52 Batman cycle by Snyder and Capullo, the Court has become somewhat omnipresent in Gotham ever since. I guess that's the point, but for a secret organization that went undiscovered for 90 years (or whatever) they seem to be fairly well known and not at all concerned with sticking to the shadows.
In this particular case, they're... honestly, I don't know what the eff they're doing. Their plan seems to be acting as proxy for DC's plan, which is to reintroduce Nightwing to the DCU. But who, and why? I dunno.
This issue was a hot, unfocussed mess (certainly didn't feel like a Damien-focused entry), ending with an utterly nonsensical dramatic reveal and Scott McDaniel's art has seen better days. This one seems like they took his rough breakdowns and just decided to ink and colour over them. They feel unpolished and kind of lazy. I was hoping for a little Nightwing throwback but it doesn't seem like creativity was even considered. This one's perfunctory, at best. I'm all set for the Robin War to wrap up any time now.
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BONUS KETCHUP:
Alias: Jessica Jones Vol. 4 (Marvel)
This volume tells Jess' origin (cheekily tied in with Spider-Man and Dearedevil and masturbating to Johnny Storm -all enjoyable but continuity problematic at best) and gets into her Purple Man story. It's a decent enough tale but it has very little weight compared to how superbly it was done for the Netflix show. The live action series took the basic concepts Bendis introduced and, in rare form for Hollywood, drastically improved upon them. Alias is greatly entertaining. It’s definitely worth reading and it for certain informs the show; but it's inferior to what the Netflix team managed to accomplish in almost every respect (the only aspect from the comic I wish they could do on the show is have Jessica date Scott Lang in season 2... but they've already established a relationship between Scott and Hope in the Ant-Man movie, so it isn't gonna happen).
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