110 DC Bombshells Vol. 4: Queens

I love the Bombshells.  I love their look.  I love their backstory.  I love the concept.  But I think I'm done with the book.  There's something about it that just doesn't rub me right.  I don't know if it's the digital first format that limits the storytelling.  I don't know if it's the size of the cast that limits the storytelling.  I don't know if it's trying to tell an overarcing story that limits the storytelling.  There's just something not right to me and I can't place my finger on it.  I think what I'd like to see is a bunch of smaller stories focusing on one or two Bombshells at a time.  It feels to me like there's too big of a canvas that these stories are taking place on and the focus is off.  It's too bad because I thought this series started off strong.  

DC Bombshells Vol 4: Queens

Writer: Marguerite Bennett

Artist: Laura Braga, Mirka Andolfo, Marguerite Sauvage, Richard Ortiz, Pasquale Qualano, Sandy Jarrell, Matias Bergara

DC Comics

064 DC Comics: Bombshells Vol 3: Uprising

I love the Bombshells.  It's a clever re-imagining of the ladies of DC Comics.  DC has the best when it comes to super-heroines and it's fun seeing them in this context.  What started out as just cool art has taken on a life of it's own. 

This is the third volume of the Bombshells series.  And as much as I love the Bombshells, this book is a mess.  The trade paperback format is not the way these stories are meant to be read.  I say that because these are digital first stories, so they all need to be a certain length and they need tell a complete story, or at least a complete chapter, in that frame.  I think each chapter is about ten pages.  So that limits what you can do.  In a normal comic, in ten pages, you can spend a page or two per scene, jumping here to there and back and it feels organic.  And you can do that because your typical comic is 20-22 pages.  That limitation here calls for stilted storytelling.  Now, it wasn't so bad in the first two volumes of Bombshells.  They were giving us a big story there.  Now that that story has ended, we have this volume which kind of loses direction.  There's an overarching story here, but you have to look for it because it often takes the back seat.

Without a lot of focus, and with an enormous cast, this book is just a mess.  There are some neat points, there are new Bombshells introduced, but it's all too much.  What I'd like to see are tighter stories focusing on a smaller (rotating) cast.  Use them all, but only when it makes sense.  Don't cram every Bombshell (and then a few new ones) into a story for the sake of cramming them into a story.

 DC Comics: Bombshells Vol 3: Uprising

Writer: Marguerite Bennett

Artist: Miraka Andolfo, Pasquale Qualano, Laura Braga, Sandy Jarrell

DC Comics

060 Torchwood: World Without End

I was a big fan of the Torchwood television show.  If you're not aware of what Torchwood is, it's a spin off of Doctor Who (as well as being an anagram of Doctor Who).  Captain Jack Harkness, former sort of companion, headed up an agency who investigated alien incursions in and around England.  It ran for four series on tv, with most of the original cast dying.  The two main characters left were Captain Jack and Gwen Cooper, and they both star in this new adventure.

This is my first Torchwood comic.  There was a series published by Doctor Who's former publisher IDW, but if it was ever collected in trade format, I never realized it.  And I'm not sure if this is Titan Comics' first Torchwood comic, but like I said, it's my first.  And this definitely picks up where former comics left off.  There are new characters here I don't recognize.  Jack is now operating out of a ship.  He and Gwen aren't currently working together.  But it's easy enough to put who's who in order.

I didn't enjoy this book.  It took me a minute to figure out why.  It wasn't the story.  The story (of which this collection reprints the first half) was fine.  Well, it was fine during the parts I could follow.  It was the storytelling.  It's written by John Barrowman and Carole Barrowman.  It's sooooooo choppy and that it doesn't flow.  At all.  It's too choppy to make a lot of sense.  They've written a handful of comics together by the time this book came out, so they should know how to tell a story in this format, but they just don't.  It's like they write each panel as it's own separate story or something, forgetting that you need to logically progress from the previous panel and on to the next.  It's very choppy, there are big gaps in storytelling, there are things that happen that just don't seem to make sense, they pick up one plot point and drop it just as quickly as they pick up the next.  It's just not a fun read, though it is nice to look at.

Torchwood: World Without End

Writer: John Barrowman, Carole Barrowman

Artist: Antonio Fuso, Pasquale Qualano

Titan Comics