By Chris Yost (writer), Marcus To (artist), Dexter Vines (inks), Guy Major (colors)
The Story: Tam is hiding from the Council of Spiders as they chop up the league of assassins. Lucius and Alfred discuss Wayne business over tea. One of the Council guys who has been slaughtering the league’s assassins gets hit by a young woman and scared off when she pulls a gun on him. Vitoria is travelling the world, picking up dissatisfied, thrill-craving assassins.
What’s Good: Once Tim showed up and started slapping down with the Council guys, it was pretty good. To and Vines draw up some good art with expressive faces, splattering blood, raging monsters, leaping ninja and frightened young business women (all that on one splash page!). The faces, in fact, were expressive throughout and the action sequences were great. If you pick up the book, you’ll know what I mean when you see Tim’s splash-page ambush on the Council guys. Check out the blurred effect on his flying disks.
What’s Not So Good: The Council of Spiders was a pretty effective source of tension and dread for the last six issues, partly because they were hidden and partly because they had the world’s premiere assassin’s league wetting their pants. Now that they’re out in the open and cutting through that same league of assassins like Thanksgiving turkeys, I’m really feeling that mood of impending doom gone. To be clear, the tense mood hasn’t been replaced by the feeling of “dread has arrived” (like what Johns is doing with Blackest Night or how I felt when Flamingo appeared in Batman and Robin). It’s been replaced by a feeling of “Wow! That league of assassins is pretty candy-ass. No wonder they found it necessary to put an obsessive teenager in charge.” This is sad, because up until now, they were great villains.
On a smaller note, for a few issues of Red Robin and Batman and Robin, the bat-writers have been laying some pretty obvious hints that the Wayne fortune is in danger. I really don’t care about the Wayne fortune, except insofar as it is an essential piece of the Batman identity (rich guy dresses up as vigilante). If you mess with it, you change something that was cool and essential to Batman. Anyway, this has been going on for about five months and I’m wondering when they’re going to drop the shoe. At this point, I’d just like them to get on with it and show the consequences to Dick, Damian and Tim instead of telegraphing something that is no longer a surprise.
Conclusion: This issue fell flat for me, because (a) I really don’t care about Tam and (b) the building of the Council of Spiders didn’t have much tension. Red Robin has dominated most pages of every previous issue, and an issue mostly without him, his angst and his obsession, is a letdown. Maybe Yost needed to bring together some threads, but the fact that I missed seeing Tim on the go means that maybe those threads weren’t that important and that maybe the less you see of the villains the better.
Grade: C+
-DS Arsenault
Filed under: DC Comics Tagged: | Batman, Chris Yost, Comic Book Reviews, comic books, comic reviews, Council of Spiders, DC, DC Comics, Dexter Vines, DS Arsenault, Guy Major, League of Assassins, Marcus To, Red Robin, Red Robin #7, Red Robin #7 review, review, Tim Drake, Tim Wayne, Weekly Comic Book Review
Hey SoldierHawk! I suppose in the big picture, we got one dud out of seven issues. Pretty good record for the writer. Yost has put so much drive into this arc that it’ll have to come back to Red Robin soon, so that Tim can get back to hunting down Bruce Wayne.
I was not an enormous fan of this either, which is sad–like you, I really, really enjoyed Red Robin to now. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t BAD, just, as you observed, rather flat. Tam does nothing for me, and her interior monologues are intrusive and irritating to me. Oh well. Here’s hoping the next one gets things back to form.