Written and Illustrated by Various
Published by DC Comics
This is one of those themed books that DC tosses our way every holiday.
They usually carry a $9.99 price tag and they are filled with 10 or so stories.
Some are better than others. That is certainly the case here as this book definitely has some cool stories and and a few weaker ones, all surrounding Valentines Day.
The first story of the issue is a Batman tale by Steve Orlando and Greg Smallwood.
This one is short but quite excellent. We get to see Bruce Wayne with a woman. They get together. Then we get to see Batman fighting some hoodlums. A woman holds a gun to Batman.
The problem is it is the woman that Bruce got together with at the beginning of the story.
The art is awesome here and I would love Smallwood to do a full Batman story. It has a good ending as well that doesn’t feel forced.
This was a great story to begin the issue with. This does have a quick wrap up that works pretty well for this story.
So far, so good.
The second story here is pretty decent as well. It is a story about Wildcat and it is written by Stephanie Phillips and drawn by Riley Rossmo. I liked this story automatically as I am a big fan of Rossmo’s work. Things are looking tough for Ted Grant in the boxing ring. He eventually wins and then shortly thereafter suits up as Wildcat and takes on some thugs.
This ended up being a cool short story with a very underutilized character.
The next story is written by Sam Johns and James Tynion IV and drawn by Gleb Melnikov and it features the Pied Piper. This was a fairly straight forward story with the Pied Piper going to a collector of superhero material. He wants something from the Pied Piper.
This leads to a cool little twist of an ending. I liked this story and the art was unexpectedly good.
The next story is just okay. It is written by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and has art by Paul Fry. They basically have to fight the Crimson Bomber on a rooftop. It is a very tale. It is also very quick and doesn’t have much substance.
Moving on.
Next, we have a Plastic Man story written by Sina Grace and drawn by Mike Norton. Plastic Man meets a woman in a bar. She gets him in some trouble. Craziness ensues. It is a fun enough story and very slight but I enjoyed it enough.
Following that, we have a Batwoman story by Jordan Clark and drawn by Kieran McKeown. This is where the book start to dip in quality. This one was hard. The next story stars Slam Bradley and is by writer Mat Groom and Anthony Spay and it barely registered to me.
Then we have a story about Nightwing and Batgirl. This one is by actor Jay Baruchel with art by Andie Tong. It is very stilted and almost strange. It is extremely wordy and nothing really happens quite honestly. The last page is also a groaner to end this story.
The Catwoman story that follows is pretty okay. Writer Liz Erickson and artist Abel do a nice enough job that follows Catwoman through a robbery. Trouble follows her after that. This story is a little bit more of a bright spot than the previous stories were.
The last story is the best of the bunch though.
It is written by Ram V and illustrated by John Paul Leon. It is a story with The Question and it tells a wonderful short story. It shows the Question on an investigation and it is exactly how I like this character done. It is worth buying this book for this story alone.
And that is it! There are some decent enough stories here that make this worth a look.It is slightly better than these things normally are.
Not bad at all.
RATING: B+
