It's Not That I'm Bad At My Job, It's That You're Wrong
They made a new Batman comic and I'm still here being mad about the X-Men for some reason
It’s been a big week in comics, and I could talk about Alliance Entertainment getting the winning bid in the Diamond bankruptcy auction, but, as with all mergers and acquisitions, it’s early days and there is nothing much to talk about, beyond the fact that Alliance seems to want to get in the toy business, and comics are just along for the ride. There is, however, a much bigger story playing out at your very own local comic book shop. It is possibly the biggest comic of this year in the American Direct Market sphere, and besides that oversized edition, it might also be the best-selling single issue of 2025.
Obviously, I am talking about Hush Two (pause for obvious joke). It is, allegedly, the sequel to Hush, reuniting the team of Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee in the pages of the actual real deal Batman ongoing, as is tradition, and I do not have a shred of context for it. I vaguely know about Hush the character from the video games, and I’ve heard of Shush, you know, from the Williamson Batman And Robin run? That Shush? The hit character Shush? Shush, the character we all know and love from that comic that released in 2023? Yeah! Shush! We remember Shush! Anyway, the point is, I have never read Hush; never made the time for it. By the time I got hooked on Batman Incorporated I was on the runaway horse with a destination of the here and now.
And that gives me a unique qualification to talk to you about Batman #158, which I thought was a remarkably smart in the ways in which it’s being remarkably dumb kind of comic. It is a comic obsessed with the idea that it’s doing the same thing again, and it will repeat that idea over and over until you get it. It starts with The Laughing Fish; it goes to The Killing Joke; right at the end it spills the big secret: it’s doing Hush. You might have figured out from this sentence that there isn’t much worth chewing on in the writing department. It’s competent, but not novel or provocative in any way.
And none of that matters, not really, because you’re here to see Jim Lee summon up some of the old magic, and boy oh boy was he on one for this one. The designs are iconic, the physicality is picture-perfect while the action is fantastically dynamic, it’s the complete package. Yes, Talia al Ghul appears in the skinniest tightest skintight outfit known to man, leaving most of her outlines very visible; yes I would still call it cool as all hell, because what is superhero art but bodies rendered aspirational through dramatics. Maybe there’s more to it than that, but I got really dazzled by that whole sequence in the hall of mirrors, and that has to count for something.
Look: maybe there’s more to it; maybe I should read Hush — I won’t but maybe I should — and maybe spending all this time just to say the pictures as night was a poor use of time on both of our parts; but if using your newsletter about comics to brag about how bad you are at your job didn’t feel good, why would Tom Brevoort do it all the time?
You’re reading HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS, a newsletter about comics that did reverse-engineer this whole H2SH thing from the punchline; for more dedication to this kind of one-sided grudges delivered directly in your inbox, subscribe! After this, reviews I had notes for from last week, and a comic from this week too, you probably know which one it is.
Like the comic book industry did one afternoon in 1939, we’re not going to stop the Batman hype there. Once the first act of the second second sequel to Hush (yes, despite everything, I am, in fact, aware of Heart of Hush) is done, there will be a new Batman #1, and that one will be written by all-time favorite to cool people everywhere Matt Fraction. That takes me to this little bit of advice for all the aspiring hipsters out there: there is a way for you to get in on what will no doubt be spectacular hype early. It’s called Adventureman: Family Tree #1, it came out last week so your store might still have copies of it on the shelves, and it is, quite simply, pure fucking comic book joy.
Let’s put it another way: this comic has all the romance, super-science and fighting action that you should want in your superhero adventure diet, and Terry Dodson draws it all like it’s the most exciting stuff in the universe, which, if we’re being honest, it kind of is. I’ve been on this boat, which is also a train, since the team’s heartbreakingly short-lived Defenders run, and you can join me there! Join me now, while the mass of incurious Batman readers is still asleep. Join me now! If there’s enough of us we can make it so it’s financially advisable to make new Casanova comics, and I have to admit now that this is my real endgame, I need new Casanova comics like I need to breathe, come on, do me a solid, the comics are fucking great, please do me a solid on that one.
There’s another comic you should know about before we get into the big big stuff: it’s Dexter Soy and Dan Watters’ Nightwing #124. I love that comic, I think it does two cool things that absolutely needed to be done, especially following a run that might have been fun, but never really felt all that challenging or engrossing.
First and most obvious, going back to the very start of this: it is dead set on breaking Dick Grayson’s heart over and over again. Over the course of the past five issues, he has been betrayed, manipulated and framed by people he thought were closest to him, and forced to witness the cruelty of criminals of all sorts, from the gangs and their child soldiers to the petty thugs in blue and the people in boardrooms that protect them (I mean the cops, by the way; this is a run of Nightwing that hates the fucking cops). And all of this is given its full emotional weight and a hard, unforgiving edge in Soy’s pencils.
The second thing this run does, and this isn’t particularly surprising if you’ve read Watters’ other contributions to recent Batman history, but especially Arkham City: The Order of the World or Sword of Azrael, is it pushes the crime drama to the edge of something more fantastical and allegorical. Yes, there is a gang war, and yes, there are fascist rent-a-cops with killer robots. But it’s all framed through ghosts and circus metaphors. It all comes together in this issue, where the narrative gambit fully blooms into the hallucinatory and the lyrical, breaking the fourth wall in the process to jolt you into its bad trip.
Put simply: there’s no other comic doing it like Nightwing at the moment. Check it out, you will enjoy it.
I know the next few paragraphs will make it sound like I had a bad time reading Absolute Flash #1, or that it’s the Absolute line’s first major dud. And I want to tell you right now that it’s not the case: I think this works, I think the things that it’s doing are worth doing, at least to the point where I want to read more of them. It’s a good comic, not just because Nick Robles draws the hell out of it, and brings a welcome touch of softness and sweetness to a lineup that is very comfortable in being hardcore, but because Jeff Lemire has added enough touches of gentle humanity in there to keep things earnest and interesting.
And yet: this is a comic with a fundamental problem. Unlike its siblings from the world that Darkseid made, it doesn’t have a killer hook that could grab you from its very first page. The swings it takes are nowhere near as game-changing as those we are used to. Here is a comic about Wally West, an everyteen like so many others, with a strained relationship to his father; here is Barry Allen, a positive adult role model with a secret to keep. The circumstances change a bit, with the big city switched for a military base in the middle of nowhere, but at the end of the day, Wally starts running real real fast. The Rogues make an appearance, and despite being 10% more serious, they’re still a goofy-looking well-oiled machine of para-military criminal violence.
When you remove the thrill of defamiliarization, of seeing characters twisted into their opposites, and the repurposing of their symbols, what you’re left with is just a pretty good comic. Nothing transcendent; nothing as immediately essential as the other Absolute comics have been. There’s an audience for it; I don’t know that you’re part of it. But it has charm, no matter how I look at it.
And then there was Absolute Martian Manhunter #1. Let’s get this over with: yeah, it’s as good as you thought it would be and then some. Javier Rodriguez is superlative all the way through it, combining his Steve Ditko id, all in simple expressive shapes and assured linework and the occasional touch of madness, with the methodical superego of a Dave Gibbons, full to the brim of complex formalism, repeating panel layouts and symbols echoed through the issue turning up in the most unexpected places. Eventually, it goes to a places all its own, where everything melts and combines into thought, idea and feeling, a climax of smoke and people and hand-lettering floating into the near-abstract for a moment until it becomes shockingly figurative, and pulls off a trick that only a physical comic can pull.
Oh, and Deniz Camp writes it, in a mode that will obviously recall Peter Milligan’s Shade the Changing Man in the way it blends poetry and surrealism, but which feels anchored to this moment in time in a way that is uniquely him. You can feel the shared DNA between it and Assorted Crisis Events, but I think this one is better, not just because of the riskier, looser stylistic proposition, but because I think there is something truer to its experience of now as the reverberations of terrible events in the past we struggle to understand but that affect us so deeply as to make us alien from ourselves.
To remain on my annoyingly cryptic dumb referential tip: this comic is human, and it is dancer. It’s the most unique and beautiful thing in a lineup that already had plenty of unique, beautiful things. I treasure it a bunch. I’m happy beyond happy to see people responding to it so well it’s already gotten doubled in length. There’s hope for us yet.
Catch you on the flip;
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS