Gotham City Sirens: Unfit for Orbit #3 // Review
Ivy is seeing some strange things. The place she’s in isn’t a dance club. Well...it IS a dance club because people are treating it like it is. And people are treating it like a dance clib because they think it’s one. It’s not, though. Really. It’s something so much worse than that as she is about to find out in Gotham City Sirens: Unfit for Orbit #3. Writer Leah Williams continues her summer sprint with some of the more interesting characters in the DC Universe in another issue drawn by Haining with color by Ivan Plascencia and Hi-Fi.
Ivy’s in a strange space. There are massive cylindrical tanks of liquid that are glowing green. There are wide-eyes little pink fish that are walking around on the metal grating fo the floor. They’re walking along in somethig like a single file line. She asks them where they are going, but she only really has to follow to see that they’re marching off to what appears to be their deaths. one by one the climb up a short flight of stairs and into a glowing green fire. “It’s like these things are fueling it.” She says. And she’s quite horrifyingly right about that...
Williams is telling a story that doesn’t feel episodic quite so much as it is one, single multi-part story that’s been segmented out to play once per week through a portion of the summer. The events shoot aross the page in blinding speed and then hit the wall of the back cover to idle until next week when they’re allowed to shoot forward again. It’s a strange and strangely compelling rhythm that will likely feel a lot more fluid when the series gets collected into a trade. As an individual series, it feels like a lot of sop and go for one long adventure that takes place over the course of what is essentially a single evening.
Haining’s being asked to fling the action across the page in a whole bunch of different directions as everyone in the super-powered team is completely separated from everyone else in the team. Each distinct location has its own distinct feel and its own distinct hero. Plascencia and Hi-Fi establish a variety of different moods for a variety of different settings that get painted-on over a firm foundation of action and drama that has been developed for the page by Haining.
It’s kind of difficult to judge exactly how the rhythm of the series is working as it shoots by so very, very quickly. Individual scenes have such crazy, kinetic forward motion that it’s difficult to get a sense for how the overall series is going to end. There IS a sense that Williams is navigating to a climax, but is it going to be a really, really abrupt end, or is she going to bring it in for a gradual slide towards something more satisfying? The good news is that Williams is a good storyteller who will do an excellent job either way.
