Talking Meme: The New 52!

navaan asked me to name some things I like from the New 52! I'll give you my four current favorite titles and tell you why each one has something I love in them.

1. Action Comics
My favorite take on Superman in the New 52. Greg Pak's Superman is very much Clark, rooted in Smallville (a fair number of his stories have revolved around Smallville, which contains a refreshing mix of names and faces from lots of different ethnic backgrounds), a decent guy and a hero. He's very much in the "You can't save them all!"/"WATCH ME!" vein of Superman heroics, and feels both young and mature at the same time.

2. Batman Eternal
This weekly series had a kind of rough beginning and I think it still suffers from some herky-jerky storytelling due to having a lot of different writers, but it has the advantage of having a bunch of very interesting female characters it's developing, including Stephanie Brown/Spoiler, Harper Row/Bluebird, Julia Pennyworth (taking over for her father while he's injured), and a Selina Kyle who's currently running the Gotham underworld and doing pretty well at it, thank you very much. Basically any title that brings us a Steph Brown who's resourceful, talented, and (maybe most importantly) was never tortured to death with a power drill gets a thumbs-up from me, but it's winning me over as a story of its own too.

3. Gotham Academy
This one's still really young and I'm not sure where it's going, but it's a very fun "Harry Potter meets Gotham" premise: Olive Silverlock and her friend Maps Mizoguchi are students at Gotham Academy, which may be haunted and definitely has a lot of secrets. I've spotted a bunch of little Easter eggs that make me really excited to see where this goes, and the art and writing style are refreshingly different from most of the rest of the New 52.

4. Grayson
I was pretty dubious about this one, which has a presumed-dead Dick Grayson going undercover in Spyral, the secret spy society, but boy have I been won over. Seeley and King write Dick Grayson like a dream, maybe my favorite version of Dick that I've read--not just in the reboot but in modern comic books. The tension in the book is whether Dick can keep his heroic ethics while working for the shadowy and frankly sinister Spyral, and so far the answer is a resounding "He's Dick Grayson, of course he stays a hero." The series also has a rebooted version of Helena Bertinelli, who works for Spyral but also seems like a good person and has definitely got chemistry with Dick. As a side, snarky note, I found it interesting and frustrating when I posted some scans from this title on Tumblr that a couple of people reblogged it and added some pretty angry commentary about how they "made Helena so damn ugly" in the reboot. So what does this take on Helena look like?



Oh, also "Grayson" has some really gripping spy plots that are very well-written! Basically, imagine Dick as an anti-gun James Bond (there was a really powerful issue about his refusal to use a gun) with all of the action and wit and--I won't say none because nothing's perfect, but only a tiny fraction of the misogyny.