Percy, Benjamin
AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:
3.5 out of 5
(2 books)
Nightwing Vol. 7: The Bleeding Edge
(Art by Chris Mooneyham, Klaus Janson, Amancay Nahuelpan, Otto Schmidt, Scott Hanna and Lalit Kumar Sharma)
As Bludhaven is flooded with remarkable new technology intended to ultra-modernise the city, Nightwing and Batgirl discovers that there is a dark power behind the technology bent on stealing the intimate details of everyone's lives.
The intrusion of technology into every aspect of our lives is absolutely the kind of theme I want to see explored in media, highlighting both its positives and its negatives and discussing how the digitisation of our entire lives affects us as breathing human beings. That's what this book goes for, but unfortunately it's something of a swing and a miss. In part because the message about technology is rather hamfistedly delivered through the medium of Nightwing being old-fashioned and anti-technology, something which in no way tracks with his character (he claims to miss Walter Kronkite at one point and I reckon 90% of this book's readership will have little or no knowledge of Kronkite). Dick was raised in the Batcave, so the idea that he's averse to technology just seems shoe-horned in to give a foil to the technology-based villain of the piece, Wyrm.
On top of the wonky delivery of the core conflict, the book overall lacks cohesion, jumping from Bludhaven to Gotham to, for some reason, the fairy caves under an Irish island. It felt so jarring to suddenly go from facing cyberterrorists in Gotham to an all-weirdo motorbike race run by a Celtic god that I wondered if I'd accidentally skipped a few pages explaining what was happening (turns out I hadn't).
But, with all that negativity out of the way, I would like to applaud this book's best element, which gives it heart that carries some of the less engaging aspects. That element is the relationship between Dick and Barbara. I've always been a fan of those characters as a couple and here they show just why they make such good foils for each other. As I say, it adds an emotional core that holds the book together far better than it really deserves.
3 out of 5
Predator Versus Wolverine
(Art by Ken Lashley, Greg Land, Jay Leisten, Andrea Di Vito, Hayden Sherman, Kei Zama and Gavin Guidry)
In the Canadian wilderness in 1900 the young outcast James Howlett encounters and bests an alien hunter. This begins a century of confrontations between the two hunters, with the Predator returning throughout Logan's career as a member of Team X, as Weapon X, during his life in Japan and as an X-Man.
'Batman Versus Predator' by Dave Gibbons is one of my favourite graphic novels of all time and may well be the perfect crossover story, so I was curious to see what Marvel could do with the potential of the Predators mixed with one of my favourite of their characters (anyone who grew up on the 90s X-Men cartoon loves Wolverine). In all honesty, I didn't have high hopes though.
As it turned out, this is actually very good. Where 'Batman Versus Predator' focused on Batman tracking a mysterious serial killer who was taking trophies, playing into the detective noir style of Gotham, here the focus is the animalistic hunting instincts of the two title characters. There's a savagery to this book that is very much in keeping with both the Predator and Wolverine.
I also like the touch of having the Predator encounter Logan in various eras of his life; when he was living in the wilderness post-'Wolverine: Origins' (reviewed here), when he was working as a black ops soldier, when he was the savage Weapon X, his time living as a samurai in Japan and his time with the X-Men (the 80s, by the look of the costumes). It means that we get to see how all the different versions of himself that Logan has been over the years deal with the threat the Predator poses. All that's missing is Patch and Madripoor but, honestly, I wasn't sorry to not see that included.
Overall, although not especially deep or clever, this is much better than I expected and is a genuinely worthy crossover between the Marvel and 20th Century Fox franchises (one of the better results of Disney owning more than they should).
4 out of 5