BATMAN LOBO

Batman Lobo: Deadly Serious is the first of two by Sam Kieth. Kieth is good on a certain kind of picture at a certain scale, but his work reveals its essential grotesque cartoonishness when he draws his characters at a distance from the camera. And his visual invention flags when it comes time to portray outlandish monsters, which Kieth presents here as sort of large-mouth blobs, intricately cross-hatched and shaded. Kieth does the story here, too, and it, alas, isn’t much better. Lots of atmosphere but no articulation. Batman is summoned psychically to discover what is possessing the women in a certain area — a disease? a plague? — where he runs into Lobo and they have a confrontation that comes to naught. While they struggle meaninglessly, a schoolgirl is possessed and wanders off. Kieth follows her, probably so he can try a variety of ways of getting her wardrobe reduced to undies, ending, finally, in a two-page spread where she covers herself with nothing but a sheet.

Not much makes sense in this, the opening issue of a two-issue run. Not even the characters understand much of what happens. That’s part of the plot, I understand, but when Lobo says, “Where’d that ship come from? Oh, who cares!” he infects us with his disinterest. I liked Lobo when he first loomed up on the DC landscape: his raw brutality turned funnybook violence into over-the-top comedy. A match-up with Batman may have seemed like a pairing of equals to someone, but it’s not coming off here, and the contrast between Batman’s restraint in murderous matters and Lobo’s eager inclination to chop his foes into mince has the effect of unmanning Lobo and robbing him of his only redeeming feature — his complete and absolute single-minded ruthlessness. Too bad. What will happen in the concluding issue? Don’t know. And don’t want to find out.