I can sort of see why.
I just finished the first trade, collecting a somewhat paltry five issues, and I can't really decide if I like it or not.
So, the summary: Kate Spencer is a U.S. prosecutor who gets sick of crime, specifically supercrime I guess although that's not 100% clear, and decides to steal a costume and some weapons from the Department of Justice's rather overly convenient on-site supercrime evidence storage warehouse, and become a no-rules type Vigilante. You know, with a chain of custody like this, maybe it's no wonder no one in the DCU spends more than five minutes in jail.
Oh, wait, did I capitalize vigilante back there? Maybe that's because, at the conceptual level, this is just a new version of Vigilante in a red jumpsuit instead of black. And considering that Vigilante himself was just a Daredevil/Punisher transporter accident, it's not exactly the most original premise ever developed. But this isn't bad; Vigilante was kinda cool, and Daredevil was very cool, and the Punisher... well, the Punisher could be cool. Anyway, it's at least been a while since we've had a crazy prosecutor take the law into her own hands, at least to the best of my knowledge. Maybe there's a Law & Order where Jack McCoy beats a perp to death with a cosmic rod. Or Lenny Briscoe becomes the Spectre!... and I just made myself a little sad.
Speaking of unoriginal concepts, her first villain/victim is Copperhead, apparently some Z-list cannibalistic snake-themed supercriminal who probably originated in a fill-in issue in 1967. Basically he's a yellow version of the Lizard, but with no tragic backstory, at least no so as anyone would notice. She fails to secure a conviction on Copperhead after the defense blows her out of the water with the shortest closing argument in the history of time, amounting to "My client isn't guilty, so there." She gets pissed, steals the Manhunter arsenal from the government, and in about two pages' worth of build-up, is already fighting Kobra. I mean Bushmaster. I mean Copperhead.
And she kills him.
Good on her. My problem with this comic isn't that she kills--firstly, there are persuasive legal arguments that I won't get into that it's not murder, even if she went into the situation expecting to use deadly force, and I understand that she winds up having to deal with the sweetness-and-light-and-mind-rape-and-acceptable-losses superhero establishment at some point, and there's actually an excellent dream sequence curb-stomp-fight with Batman that gets this point across. So that's all good.
What I don't like is that, in this age of decompression, this transformation from daylight lawyer to nighttime avenger is handled in about a page. It plays as if Bruce Wayne became Batman ten minutes after his parents were murdered--and, not only that, he was successful at it. There's literally like four hours between her decision to become Adrian Chase and her first kill. Zero physical training. Almost zero equipment testing. Zero soul-searching. Just, "Hey, I think I'll gank this Manhunter suit and kill the superpowered monstrosity."
Beyond that major but tactical pacing quibble, what bugs me the most about Manhunter is that, well, Kate Spencer is a really horrible person. Not just ambiguous, straight-up fucking horrible. Take the case of her son--leaving aside that she's a bit of a bad mother already, since she tends to forget that she has custody of him and just generally sucks at parenting, she leaves her Manhunter gear out where he can play with it. I'll give Andreyko this: he doesn't shy away from the consequences, and writes the curious little moron into a coma.
And, you know, I actually sort of thought that was pretty realistic for a rookie superhero, and interesting. If it ended there, I'd still be cool with Kate. But Kate doesn't stop at profound negligence, no sir.
Kate dives headfirst into intentionally destroying innocent people's lives, too. She acquires her sidekick, her Microchip, if you will, the man who will help her understand her stolen technology, by berating, blackbailing, physically threatening, and finally physically battering an ex-henchman she happens to have once prosecuted, who is now in the Witness Protection Program. This is really kind of beyond the pale morally and legally, and I'm having a real hard time identifying at all with this woman. It's also the sort of thing that only a rather stupid person would do, because any loyalty it engenders probably won't outlast the "accidental" total equipment failure during a fight that this savvy reader sees coming. It's also a little weird, because once this guy comes in, he instantly becomes the most likable character in the series. His henchman history montage is actually probably the best scene in these five issues.
So, given all this, I can see why this title might have turned off some readers! On the other hand, I like my protagonists to be shitheads, and I like my texts to acknowledge that they're shitheads, which Andreyko tacitly does. Hence, after a little soul-searching, I have decided to fully embrace Kate Spencer's human wasteland.
However, if anyone else has read Manhunter, two questions:
1)Does Kate Spencer ever become less of a extreme nitro-burning bitch?
2)If not, does Kate Spencer's utter sociopathy go to interesting places?
Finally, I guess Jae Lee forgot this was supposed to be a somewhat feminist title when he was drawing the cover with Manhunter presenting to the reader. Stay classy, DC.
(On the other hand, he also did one of the most interesting, disturbing, and Freudian images I've seen in a while:
Heh. Neat.)
I just finished the first trade, collecting a somewhat paltry five issues, and I can't really decide if I like it or not.
So, the summary: Kate Spencer is a U.S. prosecutor who gets sick of crime, specifically supercrime I guess although that's not 100% clear, and decides to steal a costume and some weapons from the Department of Justice's rather overly convenient on-site supercrime evidence storage warehouse, and become a no-rules type Vigilante. You know, with a chain of custody like this, maybe it's no wonder no one in the DCU spends more than five minutes in jail.
Oh, wait, did I capitalize vigilante back there? Maybe that's because, at the conceptual level, this is just a new version of Vigilante in a red jumpsuit instead of black. And considering that Vigilante himself was just a Daredevil/Punisher transporter accident, it's not exactly the most original premise ever developed. But this isn't bad; Vigilante was kinda cool, and Daredevil was very cool, and the Punisher... well, the Punisher could be cool. Anyway, it's at least been a while since we've had a crazy prosecutor take the law into her own hands, at least to the best of my knowledge. Maybe there's a Law & Order where Jack McCoy beats a perp to death with a cosmic rod. Or Lenny Briscoe becomes the Spectre!... and I just made myself a little sad.
Speaking of unoriginal concepts, her first villain/victim is Copperhead, apparently some Z-list cannibalistic snake-themed supercriminal who probably originated in a fill-in issue in 1967. Basically he's a yellow version of the Lizard, but with no tragic backstory, at least no so as anyone would notice. She fails to secure a conviction on Copperhead after the defense blows her out of the water with the shortest closing argument in the history of time, amounting to "My client isn't guilty, so there." She gets pissed, steals the Manhunter arsenal from the government, and in about two pages' worth of build-up, is already fighting Kobra. I mean Bushmaster. I mean Copperhead.
And she kills him.
Good on her. My problem with this comic isn't that she kills--firstly, there are persuasive legal arguments that I won't get into that it's not murder, even if she went into the situation expecting to use deadly force, and I understand that she winds up having to deal with the sweetness-and-light-and-mind-rape-and-acceptable-losses superhero establishment at some point, and there's actually an excellent dream sequence curb-stomp-fight with Batman that gets this point across. So that's all good.
What I don't like is that, in this age of decompression, this transformation from daylight lawyer to nighttime avenger is handled in about a page. It plays as if Bruce Wayne became Batman ten minutes after his parents were murdered--and, not only that, he was successful at it. There's literally like four hours between her decision to become Adrian Chase and her first kill. Zero physical training. Almost zero equipment testing. Zero soul-searching. Just, "Hey, I think I'll gank this Manhunter suit and kill the superpowered monstrosity."
Beyond that major but tactical pacing quibble, what bugs me the most about Manhunter is that, well, Kate Spencer is a really horrible person. Not just ambiguous, straight-up fucking horrible. Take the case of her son--leaving aside that she's a bit of a bad mother already, since she tends to forget that she has custody of him and just generally sucks at parenting, she leaves her Manhunter gear out where he can play with it. I'll give Andreyko this: he doesn't shy away from the consequences, and writes the curious little moron into a coma.
And, you know, I actually sort of thought that was pretty realistic for a rookie superhero, and interesting. If it ended there, I'd still be cool with Kate. But Kate doesn't stop at profound negligence, no sir.
Kate dives headfirst into intentionally destroying innocent people's lives, too. She acquires her sidekick, her Microchip, if you will, the man who will help her understand her stolen technology, by berating, blackbailing, physically threatening, and finally physically battering an ex-henchman she happens to have once prosecuted, who is now in the Witness Protection Program. This is really kind of beyond the pale morally and legally, and I'm having a real hard time identifying at all with this woman. It's also the sort of thing that only a rather stupid person would do, because any loyalty it engenders probably won't outlast the "accidental" total equipment failure during a fight that this savvy reader sees coming. It's also a little weird, because once this guy comes in, he instantly becomes the most likable character in the series. His henchman history montage is actually probably the best scene in these five issues.
So, given all this, I can see why this title might have turned off some readers! On the other hand, I like my protagonists to be shitheads, and I like my texts to acknowledge that they're shitheads, which Andreyko tacitly does. Hence, after a little soul-searching, I have decided to fully embrace Kate Spencer's human wasteland.
However, if anyone else has read Manhunter, two questions:
1)Does Kate Spencer ever become less of a extreme nitro-burning bitch?
2)If not, does Kate Spencer's utter sociopathy go to interesting places?
Finally, I guess Jae Lee forgot this was supposed to be a somewhat feminist title when he was drawing the cover with Manhunter presenting to the reader. Stay classy, DC.
(On the other hand, he also did one of the most interesting, disturbing, and Freudian images I've seen in a while:
Heh. Neat.)
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