Sunday, October 3, 2010

COMIC: Top of the Stack - Gotham City Sirens #16 (Review)


Written by Peter Calloway
Pencils by Andres Guinaldo
Cover by Guillem March

Publisher: DC Comics
Price: $2.99

Gotham City Sirens has been a title I have tried to make into a guilty pleasure but my lack of satisfaction with the stories have kept it from attaining my status. That said, I have continued to check out the series every few issues or so hoping that I would get a story that excelled with the Sirens characters.

So it was a pleasant surprise when in a week with solid issues of Star Wars: Blood Ties and Justice Society of America, Gotham City Sirens stepped up to the plate and hit a home run with it's newest issue making it easy to select it as the comic at the top of the stack.

Writer Peter Calloway has written for a few TV series - including an episode for the new CW Hellcats series - as well as some comic books, including Joker's Asylum II: The Riddler #1 which he was previously teamed up with Andres Guinaldo, the artist on this issue of Sirens.

In this issue readers are treated to a hazy reunion between Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne and it takes the length of the issue to understand the context behind the meeting. Once again, Selina's knowledge of Bruce's identity as Batman is the crux of the story and it's up to the other Sirens to save her from whoever is after that secret. What made the story so appealing to me is that Calloway made use of the book's place in the DC Universe and brought in other females from the Bat Family, like Zatanna and Talia al Ghul.

The original series artist Guillem March drew the cover and while I was not a fan of his interiors I think covers are the perfect place for his style. The interiors were done by Andres Guinaldo who has been on the book for several issues now but is only now beginning to express the art of the book in his own style and it is a change for the better.

With Dini off the book, and Calloway starting off his run on Sirens with a pretty solid first effort, I am looking forward to seeing this book gain some stability and start a streak of solid stories readers will enjoy seeing these characters in. Let us hope that Calloway gets a chance to move this book in the right direction and that readers will be willing to give Gotham City Sirens a second glance with this creative team behind it now.

Check out Geek Plate's Tumblr for today's Sirens themed picspam.

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