When the New 52 launched last year, we did an extensive, and sometimes scathing, look at them, and came up with four books we could not freaking stand. At the time, a few people pointed out that you can’t judge a comic by its first issue, and that’s fair. So instead we’ll judge it by its first arc. Here are the four we hated, from worst to best.
Catwoman
Yeah, those issues are money we’ll never get back. This book is a train wreck.
The problem is that Winick seems intent on delivering absolutely everything fans have ever hated about his work. He gets on his soapbox on a regular basis, over things a five year old knows are not good. He’s constantly introducing new characters and refuses to flesh them out or even give them any dimension. The nicest thing we can say is that it doesn’t suck any worse from issue one onwards.
Red Hood and the Outlaws
Our big problem with this book was that it flung a whole lot of backstory with little explanation, and rebooted Starfire in about the dumbest way possible. It does at least have an advantage as a DC team book in that the team is small enough that Scott Lobdell can better define the characters, but we still have no idea why Jason Todd is so ticked off and we honestly don’t care, either.
Green Arrow
This has gone from being a stupid book to being a “meh” book. It’s not nearly as bad as the first issue led us to believe, and it does actually work hard to justify having a dude running around with a bow in the DCU as a genuine superhero. That said, you’re still not missing anything.
Voodoo
Voodoo turns out to have been a lot better than we thought. They dump the entire stripper premise completely in issue three, and the arc, centering around cloning, may have uncomfortable overtones of the Clone Saga, but Ron Marz and Josh Williamson really do deliver some solid comics here. Not rushing into a Wildstorm crossover was a nice touch as well; this book has room to breathe.
In short, currently, we’d actually recommend giving Voodoo a read. And that’s not something we’d be willing to say, based on issue one.