Much needed history...

Just superb in every way. Truly the other history of the DC universe, one that needed to be told and should continue to be told in the future. ( )

I love the mission statement -- a look at the history of the DC universe from the perspective of heroes from marginalized groups -- but I am wholly underwhelmed with the execution.

First, this is a graphic novel that is told entirely in typeset text: no word balloons or sound effects, just long, long columns and big blocks of words. And the words are so dull, droning on like high school book reports, with the books in question being mostly the various iterations of the Outsiders franchise, with and without "Batman and . . . " in front of it. We are put into the heads of six different characters, but instead of an emotional journey, we mostly get their summaries of events, more like a daily planner than a diary even. Ridley does some subversion and upending of the original comics, but most are so old and obscure that even a DC nerd like me hasn't read them all. And without any context, my eyes frequently glazed over at the endless recaps and abrupt and-then-this-happened, and-then-this-happened, and-then-this-happened level segues. It took me an hour each to read the five chapters collected, and I found myself avoiding the book entirely for a day or two in the middle of the weeklong marathon of reading it.

It doesn't help that Ridley has a warts-and-all, downbeat take on most of his narrators. Black Lightning gets ripped up the most, coming off as an angry, arrogant asshole. Mal Duncan comes off little better, but at least has Bumblebee there to offset his dreary and perhaps delusional voice. The chapters with Katana and Renee Montoya are super depressing. Anissa "Thunder" Pierce does some heavy lifting in her chapter to save the book, but it is too little too late by then.

The art is equally dull, by the way, as it's an illustrated book, not sequential storytelling. Each page has one image or three to four panels of art trying to stay out of the way of the text. It's all character studies or isolated representational moments or direct homages. An Italian artist roughly mimics the DC house style for the decades from the 1960 to 2010s, and I'm sorry, but you're in trouble when you are most comfortable aping Jim Aparo.

Yet another DC Black Label disappointment. They really need to reassess this imprint. ( )