Absolute Catwoman #4 // Review
Seven years ago, Selena Kyle was being tried for a very serious crime. They decided to prosecute her to the fullest extent of the law. This meant a lot of time in Blackgate Prison. A seven years later, she's a completely different person. She's not just survived, but she's become someone much more powerful than she'd ever been. She's got one more job to do in.Absolute Catwoman #4. The writing team of Scott Snyder and Che Grayson continue the opening story arc of the latest incarnation of Catwoman with artist Begnal. Though there are certain elements of it that seem like they're breaking the ground, there hasn't really been a whole lot done with the character in recent years that's felt very new.
Central City. That’s were Selina and her Calicos are going to find the Yarn. They need to get to it before Cassandra Cain and the League of Shadows do. It's not going to be easy. They've got to find this thing. And in order to find it, they're going to need some really serious processing power. So naturally they're going to the world's most powerful surfer computer. And naturally something like that is going to have some crazy amount of security.
On a purely technical level, Scott Snyder is NOT a completely incompetent writer. He's just not very inspired. So much of what he's doing is just reaching the surface level of any of the characters that he's working with. There isn't any true inspiration behind it. It's just a lot of fun playing with the toys, isn't it? Grayson finds some depth beyond initial superficiality of it all. And that's perfectly fine. They just isn't a whole lot of depth of characterization. As much as he might be trying to get inside the mind of this particular incarnation of Kyle, he's not really doing anything that anyone else hasn't done already.
Bengal finds a lot of ways of punching up the script with the art to make it look much more intense than it really is. There's a lot of thought that's been put into the world of Gotham City of theAbsolute Universe. Everything seems to have a function. It's not just a big façade for the action that's going on. And it's not just Gotham city. It's everything that meets the page. There's a real immersive feel to Bengal’s art that goes well beyond competently, executed action and occasionally beautiful visuals. There's a real interest in telling a story, even around the edges of the central plot.
It's refreshing to see theAbsolute Universe continuing to find a solidly stable foundation as titles expand and begin to explore various ends of an alternate world. And it's an alternate world that isn't just like any other Elseworlds series. All too often they're simply playing around with looking at characters in a slightly different way in a slightly different setting. That's still essentially the same because all adventure fiction stems from the same basic nuts and bolts. There's been a real reimagining of things that goes much deeper than the traditional alternate reality story. As a result, even things that are inadvertently kind of shallow like the.Absolute Catwoman series ends up feeling pretty well rendered.
