Sirens: Love Hurts #1 // Review
July 21st, Gotham City. Poison ivy and Harley Quinn are meeting-up with Carwoman. It’s in broad daylight, so they’re out of costume. Catwoman show-up at te h get-together with another woman who is out of costume. Dina didn’t expect to be meeting-up with a trio of criminals. Harley an d Ivy didn’t expect a crime-fighter to show-up either, so it’s a bit of a surprise for everyone but Catwoman. who feels quite comfortable with the situation. A friendship begins to establish itself in Sirens: Love Hurts. Writer Tini Howard opens a whole new story with artist Babs Tarr and colorist Miquel Muerto.
It's a perfectly canceled get together. However, there are more than a few bits of uncertainty about everything. No one's necessarily ready to trust anyone else. However, things do manage to get at least a little comfortable once they start talking about the possibility of helping women in Gotham City. Before Dina can blink, everyone in the group is gone. She manages to track them down a little bit later. But the situation is not good. They've got bags full of money and there's a dead woman there. The thieves leave. The crimefighter stays. Everyone's a little bit concerned about the victim, though. It's one of a couple of murders that fit a pattern. Chance and circumstance will find a crime fighter working with criminals to sell a string of murders in Gotham City.
Howard is working in a Gotham City that veers a bit from contemporary continuity, it plays a little bit with the mythology in a way that allows all of the women in question to be hanging out together while involved in romantic relationships. Given the title and some of the architecture of the plot, it seems like that's going to be a factor in the series. Romance around the edges of a story involving a series of women being murdered in Gotham City. Howard fits together with the different dynamics of each character in a way that makes them all very distinct. Each woman has her own very distinct personality with her own angle on the investigation. It makes for a really engaging story with a lot of different moving parts that all seem to be fitting together quite well by the end of the first issue.
Tarr has a manga-inspired style which ramps up the cuteness and the emotional exaggeration of a more traditional American superhero cow book style script. It never goes so far over the edge that it feels like the artwork is totally clashing with the style of Howard's script. There is a stylishness about it that really amplify the overall sense of poise, symmetry, and balance that make it feel very well designed from cover to cover.Tarr’s style makes all of the women in the ensemble look very beautiful in different ways. It also embraces emotionality in a way that allows them to all be very sympathetic and very heroic in the face of the current situation.
Howard has put together a really fun dynamic for all of the characters and are really interesting and intriguing plot that moves pretty far away from the standard tropes of all female crime fighting action adventure tropes. It feels really fun and really unique and quite promising. Howard Sharp approach seems like it's really going in a direction that could be very appealing as things progress.
