Batwoman #5
“Eschatology,” part 5
Writer: Greg Rucka
Artists: DaNi
Colorist: Matt Hollingsworth
I gave it a chance. I really did.
I stuck it out for the whole first story arc, but now I can safely say:
This book just isn’t for me.
There is no way to talk about the story in this issue without getting into specific details, so I’m putting a Spoiler Warning here.
Losing My Religion
The Daughters of Lilith—they’re the group I’ve been calling “the Darkseid cult”—are preparing for the arrival of their lost Alice. At their Convent, Mother Superior unlocks a big, creepy-looking door, which she and an unnamed blonde girl enter.
Batwoman (Kate Kane) and the Question (Renee Montoya) are on the trail of the other Batwoman (Kate’s thought-to-be-dead twin sister Beth). Their first stop is the rich guy who was working with the Daughters and whose name I can’t recall (nor does the book remind us). He’s been worked over pretty good by Beth, who wanted to know where she could find her “mother.”
Beth gets to the Convent first, where Mother is reading from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Beth seems to revert to an almost child-like state and lies down on the bed. Meanwhile, Kate and Renee arrive. Renee is apparently “destined” to fight Master Slay, the leader of the stone-faced monks whose name I just learned. Kate enters the Convent to find her sister.
Here things get really weird. Beth thinks she’s Kate, because if she’s actually Beth, then she has to live with all the horrible stuff she’s done. So it’s better if she’s Kate, and then she just has to save Beth, who is actually Kate. I don’t want to belittle mental health struggles—I would never do that—but I really had a hard time following this scene.
In the end, the good guys win… or do they?
I really don’t know.
Running Up That Hill
It’s funny. When I look around online, I’m apparently in the minority when it comes to my opinion of this book. I thought it started off well enough in the first issue or two, but then the wheels started falling off. And now at the end of the first arc, I feel like the wheels got reattached, but the mechanic chuckling to himself has me second-guessing whether that’s true or not.
I knew from the start that Beth was going to turn out to be alive. Rule number one: if there’s no body, they’re not dead. And then the reveal of which of the sisters was running around as the trigger-happy Batwoman was painfully obvious. I’d still like to know how much Batman did and didn’t know, because right now I’m torn between whether he’s clueless as to what’s going on with his cousins, or he’s a dick. Either way, I’m not sure if there will actually be an answer coming.
Have I mentioned before that I’m so over Darkseid? Because I am. I still don’t get why we need a cult devoted to him in a Bat-family book—isn’t he a little too “cosmic” for the Bats? So the fact that we are nowhere near done with the Daughters is exhausting to me. There are so many more interesting things we can be doing with Batwoman. She’s military trained. She’s got experience with vampires and other supernatural stuff. She’s got close ties with the Question and all the weirdness that she brings. So why, why, why do we have to keep dealing with a cult devoted to Darkseid instead of literally any of those other things?
Credit where credit is due, at least Kate felt like herself for the first time in this series. Smart, driven, quick on her feet. Showing some agency. I just wish it hadn’t taken this long to get to that point.
I know the book has a brief detour coming up where Kate returns to Gotham just in time to take part in the Bad Seeds event, but then it’s going to be right back to Greece and this whole “Parent Trap by way of a doomsday cult” story. I’m just not sure what they can do to excite me about this book at this point. I feel really bad saying that, I genuinely did want to like it, but it just has not landed for me at all.
Black No. 1
Trying their hardest to make this storyline work is our creative team of Greg Rucka, DaNi, and Matt Hollingsworth.
Rucka is a great writer who has put out a ton of books that I loved. This just isn’t one of them. This feels like the work of a completely different writer. The pacing is off, the characterization is all over the place. I’m not the kind of person who wants my hand constantly held during a book, but when we’re at issue #5 and I’ve just learned some of the villains’ names, that’s not a good thing. I kept waiting for the “old” Rucka to show back up during the course of this story arc, and it just never happened.
The art by DaNi has been a very mixed bag. There are times when her work is absolutely amazing, and there are others when it’s so sketchy and unfinished-looking that I’m not sure what I’m looking at. Take the scene when Mother Superior enters the locked room. There’s a creepy prophetic mural on the walls, but I couldn’t even tell you what most of the images on it actually were. On the other hand, she actually draws Kate and Beth’s Bat-suits as distinctly different, which is impressive, considering they’re both made up of black and red.
Speaking of colors, the work of Matt Hollingsworth does its best to hold the whole book together. It’s a dark tale that takes place in the shadows of night, so there’s not much that’s bright anywhere within. Again, there are lots of blacks, reds, and grays. At least it’s generally pretty easy to follow what’s going on, as long as the art itself is clear.
No More Tears
Batwoman #5 wraps up the story arc with more of a whimper than a bang, reuniting estranged sisters but offering almost no resolution on any of the major plot points. Add the overly sketchy art and dark colors to the issues with the story, and you have a pretty rough time.