#although spluttering angrily is an appropriate responde to all-star

[tasteless-lemonade]

Stressful Comic Reading: The Human Target

My pilot chapter of Stressful Comic Reading, All-Star Batman & Robin, was pretty much just angry splutter about the infamous "Batman: Year One" sequel. To this one, I'd like to make a more structured text. At the core, I'm still complaining endless about shiny spandex people comic book, but now with more coherence.

Synopsis: Christopher Chance, The Human Target, disguises himself as Lex Luthor to see who is trying to murder him. Due to that, Chance ends up taking a poison that was meant for Luthor, and now has 12 days to live. He spends his last days looking for the killer, who is someone among the Justice League International.

If you never read a JLI book, maybe you will like The Human Target. If you are a JLI fan like me, it probably won't be the most enjoyable experience

Tora is written as a femme fatale, "good girl actually bad girl" style. Not only that, she openly despises being a nice sweet girl. She clearly hates it and her actions throughout the book are motivated because she doesn't want to be nice anymore. She gets angry to be referred to as kind and sweet.

Now, a storyline that deals with how Tora feels with the common view of her being shallow "sweet" would be nice. But this whole story seems to hate the idea that Tora might be a sweet girl. Tora doesn't has to be a femme fatale bad girl in order to be interesting and Tom King obviously hates this version of Tora, as he is always trying to show his Tora is better, his Tora is way better than boring, nice Tora.

Because oooh, my stories deal with MURDER and SEX so they are Deep™ and much better than your kind-hearted heroism.

The same way he is trying to say his Tora is better, he is trying to say his Tora relationship is better. Yes, now we talk about Guy Gardner.

This whole characterization of Guy is based of him at his absolute worst moments. Calling Tora a bitch, stalking her, beating up Chance for dating her. People can argue that Guy was indeed an asshole during his first JLI moments, but The Human Target canonically takes place after Tora came back from the dead. It makes no sense for him to be acting the way he is acting, unless years of character development have been magically erased.

Actually, it makes. In an effort to make Chance/Tora look better and to make the author's self insert Chance look cool, Guy is written as a abusive, jealous ex who has an unhealthy obsession with Tora and a hatred towards Chance for "stealing his girl"

Then the book falls into the typical of "Man beating up girlfriend's ex to prove how he is such a Better Man For Her". Sigh.

There's a scene where Tora and Chance kill Guy and go fuck while the corpse is melting downstairs, for fuck's sake.

It would later be confirmed Guy faked his death here with Tora's help, but it still clearly a scene to show how Chance is awesome and this cool action hero and the man Tora needs that I feel like someone kicked me in the balls again. This trope never sounds good.

"What about the rest of the JLI?" you may ask. Well, they are certainly here.

They just show-up in the story, do what is needed for the plot to move and then disappear, not being given actual characterization or development. For a book supposedly about the JLI, I was waiting for them to be more than plot devices. AND STILL.

Bea??? Had an affair with J'onn???? Cause he liked being burnt??? But felt guilty for it??? Why???

Other than that, Bea doesn't do much other than be Tora's friend (still queercoded) and a suspect for Chance's poisoning. Almost all of J'onn moments is just "J'onn you did something bad you slept with Bea" and basically no depth other than that.

Ted has a nice moment of team-up with Ice and talks to Chance to give him information for the plot to move forward. Booster shows up and eats some bagels and that's it. There's also this take on Booster and Beetle relationship which is... questionable. At best.

Rocket Red is the only one who seems to care about Guy (because despite referring to the team as family, no one, not even Tora seems to at least like Guy throughout the whole book). He asks Chance where Guy is, because he wants to at least bury his brother. I gotta say, it was a good scene.

G'nort is also there to... uh... be a plot device for... take them to Oa and... that's it.

That's it. During 12 issues, we got beautiful art and some wonderful mischaracterization of these guys, well done!

To quote the words of @shoesofthefishermanswife