Tomorrow I'll be out of town for shopping and I'll be making a trip to the comic book shop to pick up Death if X 1,2 and 3 if they still have a few issue 1s still around along with the new Unworthy Thor

I agree the characterization of Adam Strange is great, and although it's not my favorite version of Hawkman the character work is pretty good and the art is fantastic. What I didn't like however was the ill defined flashbacks. The way the last issue worked out it appeared that Adam had been transported to Rann right in the middle of some giant war and teamed up with Hawkman, and when we pick up this issue it starts that way too making that feel like the present only to get, "Before, on Thanagar..." and we get Hawkman as a beat cop. Initially I thought this was just to establish how Hawkman got to Rann in the same way that the last issue showed how Adam got there, but then it goes back to Rann without any title for before or after and we see Adam arguing with his wife about a terrorist attack so apparently this is "before" as well but the transition was not clear and it made the narrative very muddled.
Otherwise though it's a fun book.

Supes looks like he's about to kiss Batman.

I'm glad they made up after the movie.

I usually work out major portions of my reviews in my head before I start writing them, like the opening sentences, an outline, a few key points. But mulling over Catwoman: Election Night #1 hasn't really been stimulating a lot of insightful or thoughtful wordicisms or deepities, and not much in the way of a critique beyond "this is not good." So I'm just going to jump in and speak from the gut and try not to get too off-topic about old stories like "The Lady Rogues" or my theory about the two Bronze Age Catwomans.

SPOILER WARNING! I guess I'd better put in one of these, just as a courtesy. I'm not even sure the big surprise is supposed to be a big surprise, but I'm going to include the warning, just for the convenience of the readers who don't want the big surprise to be spoiled, even if it's a BIG OL' CLICHE and SUPER OBVIOUS from very early on.






Summary: Selina Kyle is an orphan who survived a box-cutter attack by her fellow orphans (Midvale this ain't!) and became Catwoman, the Famous Feline Footpad. One of her tormenters disappeared soon after on the day she was supposed to be adopted. The other tormenter was adopted, changed her name and ran for mayor of Gotham City against Oswald Cobblepot, commonly known on the street as ... the Penguin. Selina starts to wonder if there isn't more to the mysterious disappearance than anyone had suspected all those years ago ...?

Plot: Cobblepot and Constance Hill (the orphan who grew up to run for mayor) are both making a big deal about Miss Kitty's Home for Wayward Girls, the orphanage where Selina and Constance spent some of their formative years. Cobblepot says they should build a wall around it to protect Gotham from undesirables (or something like that) and Hill wants to save it from the wrecking ball, and the orphanage has become a focal point of the campaign. Catwoman starts investigating both of them. (She's suspicious of Hill because she's too perfect.) With a little help from Batman, she finds out the Penguin is involved in a real estate swindle. And on her own, she puts the pieces together and figures out that Hill killed the girl that disappeared all those years ago and the body is still on the premises at the orphanage. Yup. That's the story. The Penguin and his "wall" are the stand-ins for Trump, and the ambitious women who will do anything to succeed, up to and including killing a fellow orphan, is the Hillary equivalent. There's a second story with a political focus that had one element that made laugh every time they used it - the hat-gun - but was otherwise pretty silly. No Catwoman in the second story.

Art: I liked the art a lot! In a lot of ways, Catwoman: Election Night #1 reminded me of the first year and a half or so of the New 52 Catwoman series where I read it for the art even though it frequently wasn't very good.

Conclusion: I wanted to like this, even if it was just in the way you like a silly Silver Age comic book where you can appreciate the charm even if the story is irredeemably silly. I liked the art, and it was nice to see the return of Catwoman. I didn't mind the clumsy political commentary. Comic books are full of clumsy political, sociological and historical commentary. The Penguin as Donald Trump bugged me a lot at first because I love the old Penguin so much, so clever, so classy, so literary. But the Penguin hasn't been that character for a very long time. He's the Iceberg Lounge Penguin now, and he's frequently crass and vulgar, like Trump, and it seemed like a great idea the more I thought about it. And I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt about the Constance Hill character because her similarities to Hillary are almost non-existent, but they called her Hill, short for Hillary, and the skeleton buried in her past is just too evocative of Hillary Clinton's alleged skeletons. It's kind of lazy that Constance Hill is not more like Hillary. But that didn't really bother me, just another clumsy comic-book political point. What really got me was the cavalier way the story treated a child murderer. That's your story, Finch. I really hope nobody was surprised when Constance Hill turned out to be Selina's tormenter from the orphanage. or that she killed the girl who disappeared. And the story ends very abruptly! We don't even find out how the election ended or who became the next mayor of Gotham City in the wake of these two major scandals! To me, the psychology of a child who murders another child just to be adopted is the interesting thing here. Constance Hill is a very disturbed woman. That's your story: How she got from murdering her friend at the orphanage to running against the Penguin in a Gotham City mayoral campaign. And I thought Selina's vendetta against her was a little unsettling; she seemed to be a little gloaty about taking down a disturbed woman who needs psychiatric help. I was trying very hard to enjoy this despite (or maybe because of) the cheesy political commentary, but the cursory treatment of the child murder was a big turn-off in a story that wasn't really working anyway.

Rating: 5/10

right you are. Edited.