A review by unladylike
Grayson, Volume 3: Nemesis by Juan Castro, Carlos M. Magual, Steven Mooney, Tom King, Jeromy Cox, Mikel Janín, Hugo Petrus, Tim Seeley

3.0

Hrrm. This series is so hit and miss, but none of the hits hit hard. There was one pretty great issue that ended (paused?) the main story arc, then it ended on an awful issue where Dick has to say goodbye to Gotham before being forced back to work with Spyral. At this point in DC (New 52), Bruce Wayne is an amnesiac, Gordon has started to play Batman in a mech suit, Lois Lane has outed Clark Kent as Superman, and Clark is far less Super than ever (since his creation in the late '30s). For some reason he's in Gotham and does a team-up with Grayson, but now he looks like actually like a brawny ex-farmboy-turned-tryhard-badboy, sporting a scruffy face, military crew cut, t-shirt and jeans with an impractical leather belt and full-size smartphone, and he rides a motorcycle. But he can't fly or see through things. Dick Grayson, on the other hand, doesn't even need his Spyral Hypnos implants to take out enemies, as long as they're presumed-straight mega-babe ladies. This whole series tries really hard to play up the angle that Dick Grayson is really attractive - so much so that his superiors and enemies trip over themselves, stop whatever they're doing, and are incapable of referring to him in a professional manner. Come on, you guys. I know what they're trying to do here, and it's not working. He doesn't look any better than Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne on their regular days. Citing Grayson as an example of "but men are JUST as sexualized in comics as women" is NOT gonna fly (any more than Superman in this comic...zing!?).

I don't have any desire to see where this story goes after this, though I do already have a few other books with the same characters (written by Tom King) on deck from the library still, so...we'll see.