All that’s missing in eye-catching details from the cover of Gotham City Sirens #1 is a stripper pole, and I’m not sure that wasn’t drawn in originally. I think my mind kept subconsciously filling it in. Women in tight-fitting, nearly nonexistent clothing that looked ready to peel off at any moment? Check. Cleavage and nearly-naked cheeks? Check. There’s even an S&M hint in Catwoman’s whip. Oh, and all three women (Poison Ivy, Harlequin, and Catwoman) are all wearing stilettos. Definitely eye-catching.
But a comic can’t just be eye candy for long in this day and age. Readers want something that engages them and has a bite to the plotting. Paul Dini provides that in the script among all of artist Guillem March’s pretty panels.
The book opens with another eye-catching visual, this one of Catwoman doing a one-handed handstand over a fall that would surely kill her. However, I don’t understand how the gargoyles remained on the building ledges, considering the heavy weight of the body of the statues, but they are some of the most macabre I’ve seen depicted in Gotham City.
Through the first-person dialogue, the reader quickly learns that Catwoman is still trying to get back to fighting form after taking a knife to the heart. (Man, there have been a lot of changes in the Batbooks since I stepped away for a while!) March delineates the combat action really well and does a lot with facial expressions. I liked how we get a hint that Poison Ivy has arrived on the scene by the growth behind the villain Boneblaster, then the splash page with her saving Catwoman. Great visuals run all through this book, and March evidently loves drawing the female form.
I enjoyed the way Poison Ivy’s “hero” turn immediately gets negated by her imprisonment of E. Nigma (the Riddler). Her keeping him hostage is a truly fiendish thing. Even more funny is what Ivy did with the money she evidently received from Catwoman on some assignment.
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