Batman’s “death” has helped generate a lot of new comics, from Red Robin to a revitalized Batgirl, to a new Azrael and a bunch of others. So let’s try separating the wheat from the chaff.

First up, the worst Batman spinoff probably has to be a tie between Azarel and Batwoman. It’s a tough competition because both of them have horrendously incomprehensible art, which at least Batwoman tries to write in as the character’s hallucinations. Both focus on characters that few people could be paid to care about, and neither seem to fit too well into the ongoing events in Gotham. Batwoman is slightly likelier to survive, even though it’s just as stupid, because it has more comprehensible villains and artwork, and the big Bat in the name.

Second up, most improved, would be Batgirl, who is finally not a deaf mute wearing a costume that looks like it was done by Hannibal Lecter, but gets back to the classic idea of Batgirl, taking Stephanie Brown from Spoiler to death to Batgirl. And it works. The covers are nicely classic too and the writing is good. Not great, but this is Batgirl, not Watchmen anyway.

Then there’s Red Robin, which despite an annoying hero and an awkward premise and a dumb costume, saves the day by bringing in Ras Al Ghul for a touch of Donnie Brasco.

Streets of Gotham was fantastic when Paul Dini was writing it. Now the issue has tanked with the cliched priest, I guess DC confused Gotham with Hell’s Kitchen and decided to borrow from Daredevil, and inflicting Huntress on us was a little too much. Just when Dini had taken Zsasz to the max, we get the wacky antics of Huntress and Man-Bat for a sitcom no one wants.

At first the idea of Superman leaving earth and going out into space seemed like a terrible idea, but World of Krypton or World Without Superman is actually a smart idea. That’s not to say that it’s hugely entertaining, Kryptonians have never been all that interesting because they remain one of those generic smarty advanced civilizations with lots of crystals and robes no matter what the series does to try and flesh them out, but taking away Superman’s physical uniqueness, puts who he is into better contrast. Usually writers have done this by taking away Superman’s powers, but that basically leaves him weak and useless. World of Krypton instead surrounds Superman with a whole city-world full of people who share his powers and a society in which he has to play a role.

World of Krypton’s tack on it, particularly making General Zod something more than a one note villain, is interesting. The Kryptonians of Kandor are not ideal or monstrous, they are as uneven as humans are, with prejudices, fears and hopes. All that gooshy warm humany stuff. While the public embrace of Zod is not entirely plausible, he has come off as more of a sociopath than anything else, not really a team player, it does insert him into a real role in his society.

The Supergirl part of the story is weakest, not just the recycled War on Terror is bad stuff, or turning General Lane into a bigger monster than General Zod, but turning her into a confused pawn in everyone’s game who’s hopelessly indecisive and incapable of knowing what she wants. And I won’t even mention the Flamebird and Nightwing garbage that seems like nothing more than a sop to the kind of stories that Valerie D’Orazio would like DC to do. But World of Krypton itself is interesting, even if a bit slow moving.

The complaints are in and they’re vocal. Comic Con got too big and too crowded. The small comic book publishers are being squeezed out. The Twilight fans have taken over the place. So have the more annoying 501 and California Browncoats who aren’t even from comic book franchises. In other words like conventions before it, Comic Con just got too big for its own good. Comic book fans were happy enough when Hollywood began scooping up properties, well okay they mostly weren’t happy, but when Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy drove it to raid and pillage every single creative property on the planet, comic books got their share of the going over. And then Comic Con became another stop on the Hollywood promo tour, which brought in the TwiHards and a whole lot of other people who don’t care about the comics, but about the Hollywood stuff. The Twilight fans are getting a larger than fair share of the blame because sexism and ageism makes it easier to shut them out, as opposed to fans of the equally retarded Harry Potter books, which have a cross gender fanbase, and includes people older than 13. The bottom line is that success and watering down of a niche go hand in hand. Comic Con hasn’t just been watered down, it’s been flooded.

After the massive disasters of Final Crisis and Batman RIP, just about anything would be a palate cleanser, and since nothing could possibly be worse than that final issue of Batman RIP, when you realize that the whole thing makes absolutely no sense and never will, that it’s Attack of the Amazons all over again, the only way was up. And so with its bright colors and offbeat attitude that blends pop art with plenty of the traditional dark matter in Batman’s world with a Kurt Busiek style approach to telling the crimefighter’s story, I have to say Batman Reborn works. And Grant Morrison may be slumming, but it’s a lot better than the highminded senselessness of Batman RIP. Sure it doesn’t matter in the long run. Sooner or later, Bruce Wayne will be back, and Nightwing will make his own comeback. So will the regular Robin, no matter what happens in Red Robin. Comic continuity is fluid and brand is destiny. But for now it’s diverting. The real status quo can’t be changed because Batman isn’t X-Men. The big pieces have to go where you left them. The man in the red cape saves the day. The man in the blue cape is a tormented billionaire who’s made himself into a deadly weapon. But DC finally gives the Robins some limited upward mobility. Up, up, through the glass sidekick ceiling and away we go.

A few pages into Issue 26 of Buffy Season 8, I was rubbing my head as if I had a headache, or wanted one. Then I had to check if I had missed any issues, because the story seems to have jumped into third gear out of nowhere. We went from random blunderings and an issue dedicated to Dawn becoming a little wooden girl, to Buffy and the Slayers running around all over the place for no real reason while being hunted by armies of demons with tanks. A lot of Slayers seem to die, though that’s not clear either, and then everyone’s on a sub. While I welcome the story finally getting into gear, after wasting who knows how many issues on Fray, Buffy’s lesbian fling and Harmony, along with all the other junk, but it’s a little like someone waking up at the last minute, grabbing whatever’s handy and running off to school. Jane Espenson is occasionally funny, but it’s hard to buy the new revised world in which Keith Olbermann is discussing vampire slayers on his show, funny as the idea might be. Issue 26 seems like it should have been more than one issue, there’s too many things going on and too few of them make much sense.

Looking again at Angel Only Human and comparing it to the Angel Aftermath issues, I have to wonder, what the hell happened here? The Angel Season 4 or Angel After the Fall run was fantastic and you can still see that in the issue of Angel Only Human. You have the snappy writing, the characters are right, risky choices are made and yes people look like themselves. Then there’s Angel Aftermath, which looks like it was cobbled together by outsourced labor overseas or deranged fanboys. There’s the ugly art that actually makes George Jeanty’s work on Buffy look good. Everything looks ugly, cheap and poorly done, and you have to guess which character is supposed to be which. Then there’s a ridiculous story involving angels, even though angels and the classic heaven and hell model doesn’t seem to fit into the Buffyverse. All the great work and the positive energy built up by Brian Lynch’s work on After the Fall was squandered by Kelley Armstrong in Aftermath, discarding the usual characters and surrounding Angel with third rankers we don’t give a damn about, not to mention a jaguarwoman. Angel Only Human shows what Lynch and Urru can still do. IDW would be doing the series a favor by dumping Angel Aftermath and avoiding any disasters like that again.

Or at least Robin as Batman and Damien as Robin. Grant Morrison hasn’t exactly been winning lots of praise from Batman readers. But then again who has? DC brought in supposed comic book visionaries like Kurt Busiek, Grant Morrison and Jeph Loeb to shake up the DC universe and instead got a bunch of messy, barely comprehensible series that never actually made any kind of sense. It’s almost enough to make you switch to Frank Miller’s All Star Batman for a dose of common storytelling. But wait, now Grant Morrison is back with Batman and Robin, which looks a lot like classic Batman, aside from starring only Robin and Talia’s evil Bruce lookalike spawn, Damien, who doesn’t actually sport any numbers on his forehead, but does give off that evil literalist vibe. The good news is that unlike RIP Batman, Batman and Robin brings back some of the fun, with a consciously classic look and coloring that begins at the cover, a new deranged villain, Pyg, who seems to be the Joker in a pig mask, but he is horrifyingly evil and ruthless, which makes for a colorful read. Of course none of this substitutes for the real Batman, but it will do until DC gets its house in order, or someone gets its house in order for them.

So last we checked Batman is still dead, except he obviously isn’t. Instead his numerous second bananas and assorted villains and loons are battling for it instead. And most of it is underwhelming. The new Azrael is exactly what you would expect from DC, and that’s a bad thing. Barbara Gordon or Oracle going to Hong Kong to stop the Calculator is almost as exciting as watching paint dry. Then there are the fun adventures of Jason Todd. Sure Neil Gaiman’s Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader was elegiac and somberly beautiful. The Secret Six issue wasn’t even that bad, though the only really good thing about it was Bane’s dignified tribute to Batman and Ragman’s occasional antics “Holy capital punishment!” The problem with having a battle for Batman’s cape is that hardly anyone is fighting and Gotham has a shortage of good guys anyone cares about.

Let’s examine the evidence. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 started promisingly enough with Buffy leading her own slayer army based out of a Scottish castle, a gathering mysterious evil led by a mysterious Big Bad, returning guests and dialogue that seemed pretty pitch perfect. That was then, this is now. Case in point in Buffy Season issue 25 Living Doll, we learn somewhat belatedly that Dawn has vanished and there’s an army of vampires headed for the castle. The battle with the vampires happens off the page.

Instead it turns out that Dawn has been turned into a wooden doll or something, and is being watched over by an evil or not so evil toymaker. Now throughout Buffy Season 8, Dawn had been turning into all sorts of wacky creatures. We had Dawn as a giant and then Dawn as a centaur. Now it’s Dawn as a living doll. As it turns out the underwhelming explanation is that the whole thing was a spell put on her by her boyfriend, a Thricewise, whose roommate she slept with. Aside from the stupidity of the whole thing and the way the story reminds you of the worst of Season 5, the whole thing just has no point whatsoever.

But Buffy Season 8 hasn’t had any point to anything in a long time. Tokyo giant robot dawn, cyber corporate vampires, Buffy’s lesbian fling, Giles and Faith visiting an evil Swiss town of renegade vampires feeding Slayers to a regret demon. What started out promisingly enough is now a mess, and it seems like Joss Whedon bringing in the same writers who killed Buffy, I mean the series not the character, managed to kill Buffy Season 8 too. Sure the sales are probably good, till someone notices that the whole thing is going nowhere, makes no sense and is hanging by a thread. Hey remember the time Jonathan and Buffy went alone to hunt some rogue slayers with a robot and then there was a standoff and nothing happened. Yeah that’s the whole season now.

Once upon a time the WB had a pilot for Bruce Wayne, a show that would be to Batman what Smallville was to Superman. The script was highly spoken of, yet the show went nowhere. Instead the WB ordered a Tarzan series that everyone has tried to forget, a Batman themed Birds of Prey series that no one really remembers except for the horrible acting by everyone involved, an Aquaman spinoff that’s mainly fodder for internet comedy and now apparently a Robin prequel.

Yes, a Robin prequel to be titled Grayson or something like that is in the works. Now Smallville, despite the cheesiness and the teen soap opera stories and the refusal of the CW to just let it die, has worked out pretty decently. But a Robin prequel is inherently pointless. Not only is Robin not exactly the most exciting superhero around, he’s a sidekick, and such a sequel would be Robin without the Robin part, so I think we can safely assume that it would open with Robin in a hoodie skateboarding down a bunch of stairs while listening to the latest new song Time Warner looking to promote, then having an argument with his parents and a crush on a girl who doesn’t even know he exists. Have I got it covered?

Smallville’s concept worked because Clark was Superman before he put on a cape and tights and moved to Metropolis. Robin was just a kid in a circus before Batman adopted him. All the previews and small touches suggesting Superman have no real meaning in a Robin centered series, because while Superman is an iconic hero, Robin isn’t. He has no idea that he has a destiny nor does he really have one. There have been more than one Robin because he is disposable. I could see the CW ordering a Nightwing series but a Robin prequel series?

Buffy has always had a problem with turning minor side characters into the main attraction. The series did it with Spike, they did it to some degree with Anya, but Buffy the comic book manages to do it with Harmony. Harmony was always a one shot joke, and the series knew that keeping her mostly in the background. David Fury did a good job sketching her into an Angel episode, but with a turnaround demonstrating that she was evil. Then the disastrous 5th season of Angel felt the need to drag Harmony back as a non-evil Vampire secretary and built one episode around her being framed for drinking someone.

This time around Jane Espenson pens Harmonic Divergence, the 21st issue of the rapidly sinking Buffy Season 8, and probably the worst and ugliest issue of the season to date. Which is pretty much what you can expect from Jane Espenson, since Marti Noxon apparently wasn’t available to do something even worse. Like Harmony it’s a shallow, annoying and completely empty issue with an ugly touch that sees the pointless death of a Slayer, and pushes the whole storyline way outside reality.

We begin with Harmony, back to being evil again, and getting her own Reality TV show after getting caught drinking Andy Dick’s blood outside a nightclub. This turns into an MTV reality show, and when a Slayer who struck out on her own tries to kill her, Harmony kills her instead, leading to CNN reporting on the evil army of Slayers. There’s lots of glib satire in there, but mostly it’s hard to believe that the world is suddenly ready to accept the existence of vampires, after Buffy was dedicated to the premise that the world wasn’t. And would that same world which saw Harmony drinking blood on TV really believe the vampires are the good guys? Satire may be satire but this is pushing against the boundaries of plausibility. Sure if you substitute terrorists for vampires, the metaphor can sort of work, but then again if terrorists turned into demons and drank blood on TV, they’d still be the ones with the PR problem, except maybe in Berkeley and the UK.

Buffy Season 8 was chock full of problems before, and another Far East issue which seems to be coming up next, is certainly not the solution. Still Issue 21 is a clear low point. It’s not just the return of George Jeanty, whose Harmony is virtually indistinguishable from Buffy, because neither of them look recognizable at all. It’s a storyline that discards all the continuity of two series’, in order to make a few jokes about a one joke character, that never connect.

FOX’s Tom Rothman is talking about Daredevil needing a reboot though I’m not sure if it’s because he genuinely feels that Daredevil needs a reboot or because nobody will put Ben Affleck in a movie unless it involves him repeating his role in Mallrats. Either way Daredevil can be rebooted but Daredevil doesn’t really need a reboot. Mark Steven Johnson’s movie was no meteoric cinematic achievement in comic book film making but it wasn’t a completely disaster either.

Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil suffered primarily from casting problems, whether it was Ben Affleck as a ridiculously smug Matt Murdock or Michael Clarke Duncan as the friendliest Kingpin ever or Jennifer Garner working hard to exercise her one acting muscle while saddled with a terrible fake accent. Considering how awful Ghost Rider was I wouldn’t bring back Mark Steven Johnson to direct a sequel, but the original Daredevil holds up pretty decently as an evocation of just who Daredevil is. It may need a rebooting as far as a new director and new cast goes, but it’s not like the 2003 Daredevil is the equivalent of Batman and Robin that it needs a franchise reboot.

If anything Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil points the way to getting the next Daredevil movie right, from the visual concept of Matt Murdock’s sensing to Hell Kitchen’s itself. It may need to be a little darker but Daredevil isn’t Dark Knight and trying to turn every single comic book movie into Dark Knight is the surest way to an explosive and laughable train wreck.

Hey what if you took Buffy Season 8 and made it just as bad as the later seasons of Buffy. A good way to do that would be to bring back all those great late season Buffy writers like Jane Espenson and Steven S. DeKnight, not to mention Drew Goddard, so they can turn out lightweight episodes with threats that make no sense, and amp up the soap opera drama. Well there you go, and Issue 22 from Steven S. DeKnight is a great example of what that gets you. I’m not exactly sure what Issue 22 is about. The regular Scooby gang barely make an appearance in it, so it’s mostly Satsu and Kennedy who uncover a plot to send vampire kitties, stuffed Hello Kitty like cats with fangs, that can apparently possess people. Not to worry though since they blow up the entire shipment of them with a submarine. Yes, a submarine. Where did they find the submarine? Don’t ask stupid questions, apparently a bunch of vampires had a submarine and the rest is history. Also the events of Harmonic Divergence weren’t some kind of hallucination, but the setting for the rest of the season in which Harmony is a celebrity and people like vampires. Great. Thanks Joss for reminding us of why Buffy was better off dead from Season 5 on. P.S. is there any way you can bring back Marti Noxon too? Because this just isn’t sucking enough.

If you’re still reading this, Peter David is still butchering the original, or rather rebutchering it by adding his own wacky ideas. The girl gunslinger doesn’t make another appearance, but we do get a drawn out lead in to the fifth issue. Roland is still in a haze thanks to the wacky red ball of doom. After umpteen issues, I could count how many but I kind of like my sanity where it is, Roland finally gives up the grapefruit of doom to his father, but not before seeing yet more visions of his father’s death. That’s something Marten has taken care of by using Roland’s mother as a catspaw for the murder scheme. Marten also knows about the grapefruit and has plans for it too. It’s also implied that a spy is feeding false information about Farson’s movements to the forces of Gilead, and that Farson’s men have vastly expanded their range and are moving across the border. This would seem to bring the apocalyptic battle where Alain and the gang buy it that much closer to home. Of course not a whole lot happens in Treachery 4, another weak and belabored entry from Peter David who seems to be dragging this out like a bad cough. Things do however begin to pick up in Issue 5.

It’s a new year, a new month and Issue 26 of The Boys which is a lot like Issue 25 of The Boys, except for well not very much. At this point it’s safe to say that Garth Ennis is not just the master of pointless tangent stories, but of writing issue after issue in which nothing happens. Take Issue 26, which features a standoff between two G-Wiz teams, obvious X-Men parodies, you might think that in this issue we might see something like that. Wrong. Next issue maybe, not this old issue.

But we learn something new about the G-Wiz teams from Hughie being undercover there. Right? Wrong. We get some of the same wacky antics we’ve been getting in the previous issues. There’s nothing new here. Nothing new at all, except that Hughie tries to stay on after the bugs have been planted in the hopes of teaching them right from wrong. While Butcher tells him that a Supe is a Supe, a category that for some reason doesn’t include him and Hughie.

About the only halfway worthwhile material involves Annie and Hughie’s ongoing relationship, though the visuals get a lot more graphic than anyone needs to see, but for all that it’s sweet, it’s basically recycled material from previous issues. No new ground is being broken either. Finally Butcher does find something on the hard drives he stole last issue, but we’re never told what. And the investigation into Silver’s suicide leads to a home, but again any developments on that would wind up in some future issue, which at this rate would be somewhere around 2012. Good going.

It isn’t the actual end but it feels like it might be one, as Gunn’s plan has come to fruition, Illyria is back to her old self and tormented by the contradictions of her own existence and Fred’s memories claiming part of her identity, is getting ready to wipe out the world, or the entire universe. Which apparently Gunn thinks might still be a good idea. Stopping Illyria isn’t easy what with her being the size of the old Wolfram and Hart headquarters with giant tentacles and a generally bad attitude. But the old human emotions are still there.

After a whole lot of arguing, during which Gunn kills Connor, and Angel nearly kills Gunn, timeslips to the future apocalypse in which Angelus is fighting on the side of evil against good, Angel finally has the fish fill Illyria’s mind with memories of Fred gathered from Wesley and Spike, for some reason, resulting in an implosion that takes down Illyria and the Wolfram and Hart headquarters. Connor dies after delivering the usual sort of goodbye speech, leaving hell saved and in complete chaos.

If the events of Angel After the Fall actually stay true, something I doubt, then disposing of two of the show’s more annoying characters in one issue, Illyria and Connor, alone would justify the story. But the elaborate plot made up of hinged pieces also reflects the best of Season 4. Where Buffy Season 8 seems to be crashing, Angel Season 6 is prospering, probably because it has one master, instead of multiple writers taking turns. The story isn’t over yet, but so far it has worked a lot better than all of Angel Season 5.

After a giant robot Dawn, Dawn turning into a giant and then a centaur, Buffy turning gay and then not gay, going to the future, killing an evil future version of Willow, and all the other jump the shark moments of Season 8, an issue where Buffy has a dream in which she’s in the animated series that never really aired, almost makes sense by comparison. Jeph Loeb scripts this one, and there’s not much that can be said about it. I never saw the appeal of an animated series, particularly with Dawn in it, and Buffy Season 8 Issue 20 After These Messages We’ll Be Right Back does little to change that.

The idea of Buffy flashing back mentally in time to high school when things were supposedly easier sounds like a good idea, and it might have been, but the animated version isn’t just a cartoon, it’s cartoonish and silly, and just grates on you for page after page, with ugly art and cartoonish versions of the characters without any of the complexity. The idea of it does remind you of how far Buffy has gone from the premise, but that was a problem for years even when the show was still running. It’s an even bigger problem now when Season 8 has gone all out and jumped the shark so many times the shark has a pounding headache.

For anyone who really needed a tribute to a show which never aired, an exclusive club that is probably limited to Joss Whedon, Jane Espenson, and that creepy guy who has a restraining order out against him, After These Messages We’ll Be Right Back is it. But the best thing about it is the cover, and it never gets any better than that. Season 8 has regularly run these stand alone stories to interrupt the general arc, and it’s a nice idea, and Joss Whedon has done them pretty well. The Chain for example took a risk but worked. After These Messages We’ll Be Right Back though is all but pointless.

For a while DC vs Marvel at the movies looked bad for DC. DC had allowed its Batman and Superman franchises to malinger. A new Superman movie had been in development at Warner Brothers for nearly forever and despite spending oodles of cash before a single frame was ever shot, by the time the box office released rolled around, churned out a mediocre movie that underperformed and was helmed by Bryan Singer, a Marvel retread kicked off the X-Men. Batman meanwhile had gotten its own reboot, but Batman Begins while critically praised wasn’t blowing minds.

Marvel by contrast seemed to be developing everything they had and with Spider Man a solid franchise and X-Men close behind, Fantastic Four doing well and numerous others on the way. And then Dark Knight came along and changed the picture. Of course it wasn’t Dark Knight all along, but The Dark Knight achieved not only box office superstardom that made all the Marvel films look puny in its wake, but it achieved massive critical acclaim of the kind that had eluded Marvel’s movie adaptations. People were actually taking The Dark Knight seriously, and when was the last time they’d done that with any Marvel movie.

But what The Dark Knight really did was shine a light on Marvel as a sausage factory, spinning out movie after movie, low in quality. Sure the early Spiderman and X-Men movies had been good, but by their third outings, they were being widely disparaged. (The same thing went for Blade.) Both franchises already looked tired, while Batman and Superman looked fresh and well rested by comparison. The Fantastic Four had earned money and genuine hatred from critics and fans. And one shot adaptations like Ghost Rider and The Punisher were even more marked failures. And so the picture changed and now Marvel is rushing to copy The Dark Knight.

With George Miller gone off the JLA movie, the question isn’t all that urgent anymore. The George Miller JLA had a somewhat weak cast, skewed toward the Smallville generation, except those actors are probably in their thirties, which would have disqualified them for the JLA movie. Still despite all that and my reservations about the big twist in the script, George Miller is an original thinker and while terms like visionary get thrown around so often in Hollywood that they no longer have any meaning, the man does bring something original to the table when he gets to work.

But back to the title question, does a JLA movie need to overlap casts at all? Brandon Routh isn’t exactly bowled over by so much work, that he can’t fit in a JLA movie appearance, and while Christian Bale, for whatever reasons of bad taste is, he also seems like the sort of guy who might make himself available for such a project as a JLA movie. Of course that means bigger and badder paychecks and a higher budget, but putting that aside for a minute, is that really a good idea?

A simple test is whether you can imagine the Green Lantern or the Martian Manhunter showing up in The Dark Knight’s Gotham? I think we all know that wouldn’t work so well. Christian Bale’s Batman is part of a painfully realistic vision of Batman, devoid of even the costumed capering and stylish set design of the Tim Burton Batman movies. Even the supervillains are in the end only human and all too human. The Superman and Batman have embraced a superhero exclusive world, centered around one hero and their sidekicks. That world has no real room for the JLA. To make a real JLA movie, the George Miller approach was always right, start from scratch.

The Boys 25 We Gotta Go Now Part Three is about as disjointed as any of the issues have gotten so far, so disjointed that you would have to be Garth Ennis to have a clue what’s going on in it, if even he does. For starters we have a bunch of characters with unclear functions and agendas dumped out there, aside from the main story which involves Hughie moving around the G-Men mansion, where some of the Supes seem to be self-destructing, such as one Nubia who keeps repeating “Kill Me” or the Wolverine stand in with hammers for hands who just keeps shouting “Gonna, Gonna”.

So naturally when in doubt Garth Ennis pulls out the old circle jerk, but that doesn’t help Dynamite much or this issue, which is more aimless and tangled than usual. Just to make things worse, The Boys 25 We Gotta Go Now Part Three boasts a cover featuring the Female killing a bunch of people, including possibly Butcher, only to deliver an issue completely without the Female in it, let alone her killing a bunch of people in a bloody bathroom. The bloody part being literal, rather than Brit slang. Now I’ll grant you comic book covers will often have a limited relationship to what’s inside, but this is a little like sticking a loaf of bread in an iPod box and asking to split the difference.

By the end we have Butcher stealing hard drives from some nerd by distracting him with a hooker in a wheelchair. I might have missed the memo, but I didn’t miss any issues, but I still have no idea why Butcher stole his drives or why he bothered to distract him with a hooker, instead of just killing him or beating the hell out of him or just waiting till he was out of the house. But then it wouldn’t be much of a Garth Ennis story, would it.