So, Huntress #10-12: Crazy nebbish killer cartoon guy offs a caricature kink-specialist prossie in a series of panels, generously he gives the photos of same to his perv book shop owning friend who collect such. Also some woman staying at a hotel where The Huntress prevents him from killing who he meant to is murdered off-panel. Sal polishes his gun. That street level drug pusher gang is still making a real nuclear bomb with the genius child they kidnapped. For no apparent reason they kill his reporter Mom and little brother. We see them go in but not come out, just a bang bang sound effect Well, that's gritty mature reality, if you can't handle it... this is what drug gangs do...



I think I am realizing it's not so much the 'dark' side that I find less than a perfect fit with costumed superhero comics so much as the extremeness outside of their own exceptional existence... extreme violent acts don't get much more extreme than working towards blowing up a piece of a NYC borough or two, complete with radiation illness afterward for many neighboring hoods. Nowhere in these three issues though is there any scene remotely like this cover on #10 (but on #12 they have a cute out I won't 'spoil').

Well, it's not all grim, The Huntress, ray of sunshine that she is, masquerades as the serial killer's Mom, confusing him into the deadly trap he intended for her... technically she doesn't pull any of the many triggers and we get the satisfaction of knowing no more comic book ladies need die at his hands. Next up the gypsy witch from earlier in the series appears only to Helena as a big misty face in the sky and tell her action is needed or Manhattan goes boom! Then the gypsy face disappears (doesn't help at all with her semi-Santeria allusive 'powers'?) The Huntress and Sal head for the hood HQ in a bulletproof van, Huntress posing as an executive crackhead gets close enough to grab the just finished (what timing) bomb, but not the maker kid she can't quite get him as well. Various gang members have seemed to get hit by bullets aimed at The Huntress, but the other gang members say they deserve it for being fooled by her. They bargain (van has loud speaker, of course), and at the last second the kid comes out and off they go. The end.



This is just not well written. The puzzle clues of the serial nebbish barely come into the finding of him, which we're told he wants anyway as he has a trap set up. The whole set up of a detective following clues that baffled others was all for nothing basically. The home-made nuclear bomb is some kind of generic number, not a dirty bomb, which would be a lot more home- make-able. For me from the point the mother and child are shown to be murdered by the gang holding the other child I was just depressed and going through the motions of seeing what happens next. I stopped caring. I don't expect a comic book writer to educate me on the decline of western civilization with random death, cliched traps and terror plots thrown in if he's not going to really dig down and come up with something that at least works on a surface mechanics level, and this concoction didn't. Any heartfelt 'statement' is undermined by the continual use of caricatures really anyway if not those extremes of villainy being reached for. Blow up a world of a reluctant guilt-plagued heroine, serial killers, gangs, mostly corrupt police (how the infamous puzzle serial killer got escape assistance), and dead moms and little kids... why should I feel any desire to see it 'saved'? Not having the deepest basis before, the series now seems more surface shallow and simplistic. I guess The Huntress landing some kicks and punches is supposed to make up for a lot, like Bronson in Death Wish I, II and II, and... that's all they can do, repeat the cycle of basic button-pushing only with new extremes, but they always run out of extremes, although never soon enough. Rather than sensitized the reader is more brutalized, but if you need a sledgehammer to make a point or register an emotion you are probably lacking in your craft or lacking in your own honest emotional input and investment. There is nothing real about this kind of 'mature' comic, it's pretty much the opposite of that. A Za-Zen lesson of showing a circle and pointing out the nothing inside it and the nothing outside it... and then saying there is no circle. 1+1=0, 2+2=0, 3x3=0. Keep the body count number rising and it will equal the same zero.

There will be no depiction of the mature real fallout to the young bomb-maker now orphaned, he is mostly just a prop, to be rescued, then not seen again. I see nowhere much for any of the characters to go from here, unless for The Huntress to break the barrier of deliberately killing someone like her partner has. She does visit a psychiatrist next issue, damaged, brutalized, sleepless running on empty character that she is. Oh, and the pebble board will be back.

Always kinda liked the Huntress. Maybe that was because I never read any of her ongoing series?

Well, George has directed videos (well, one or two) of women fighting; so, there is that.

New Huntress meets modern 'Dark Knight' as Bats travels from Gotham on the trail of a Colombian drug kingpin named Rage. The story starts out impressively picking up the story of the young science fair bomb-maker whose mother and brother were tricked and then murdered by the gang that kidnapped him. In one scene he looks in a window at a scene such as he lived a few issues back, a kid doing homework watched over by his mother, a scene he briefly sees in flashback as his, but will never live again. He wants to make all gang members pay!

And what does he know how to do? Make bombs. He begins a campaign against his enemies and is successful enough that rival gangs, blaming each other, escalate things to violence in the street. The Huntress protects more innocents but feels inadequate to stop all the open warfare until Rage appears and brings the factions together quickly for the sake of business. The Huntress decides that any peace is better than the alternative, and when Batman appears on the roof behind her and is poised to interfere she tries to stop him.


This story grabbed me from the first couple of pages, and there isn't a costume to be seen until page 10. The gangs seem a bit dated in some ways but show veracity in others. With the last page showing The Huntress and The Batman squaring off it must've been a hard wait for the reader to see whose argument might prevail and what will be done about the street level gangs situation. I'm sometimes tempted to say there are way too many gang-bangers in this comic, but the NYC area is densely populated. Maybe I think this in part because of how often the streets are shown as nearly deserted, which they would be during violence or late night. A few establishing shots of crowded streets somewhere wouldn't have gone amiss however, or heavy traffic.

Interestingly enough, there'd been a Pre-Crisis "Last Batgirl Story" published in Detective Comics #424. She'd been in the editorial cross-hairs for a long time, by this point. I still don't understand the contempt for the character, especially after Batman Family was one of DC's top selling titles with Babs at the forefront of it.



It really bothered me that Randall went so far out of her way to make Babs vulnerable. She'd been an accomplished crimefighter for years, but is somehow traumatized by one pretty ordinary bad dude to the point that she is ready to give it all up. If someone wrote a story where Batman was this traumatized by some run-of-the-mill crime boss, fans would have thrown a fit.

The women who were allowed to write comics for DC in the early '80s (basically Barbara Randall and Mindy Newell) both seemed to write the kind of heroines that affirmed all the bad stereotypes.



yeah...



My complaint with pretty much every Batman cover he drew in this decade!




"FINALLY, after all these years, Babs gets her own comic boo....oh."

Yup.

I can never decide whether this story makes me more sad or angry. Thanks for covering it.

beccabear67 ... I'm enjoying your thread that you started and wondering what Huntress you've like best Wayne or Bertinelli?