Review: Punchline: The Gotham Game hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Though clearly too relevant to the rest of the DC Universe to skip, I begin to wonder if Punchline stories are not for me.

I believe Punchline’s major writers to this point see greater societal truths in the character, but so far that hasn’t been enough to raise Punchline to the level of a compelling anti-protagonist. Punchline seems at first glance the most typical kind of 1990s male-gaze comics creation, and while I don’t think that’s what James Tynion and Sam Johns or Tini and Blake Howard intend to write, neither do they seem to be able to escape it — hackneyed dialogue, juvenile sexual innuendos that read as all the more immature for their failure to be titillating.

At the end of Punchline: The Gotham Game, the Howards do get a little bit of somewhere with Punchline, but not much; the character ends the book in about the same place she started it. I have liked Tini Howard’s writing on Catwoman just as I’ve liked main series artist Gleb Melnikov on Robin, but Gotham Game seems like a misfit for all involved.

[Review contains spoilers]

Gotham Game crosses over just in its first two issues with Tini Howard’s Catwoman Vol. 2: Cat International, and again, I adore a miniseries that’s not just off doing its own thing but that’s rather immediately connected to the DCU’s day-to-day. The ties dissipate after those first two issues (and I’m glad, since the beginning of Gotham Game ties to the end of Cat International and the next Catwoman volume’s not out yet!), but it certainly seems the Punchline characters are headed back to Catwoman with this volume’s end.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

I give credit to the Howards for picking up from the end of Tynion and Johns' Punchline: The Trial of Alexis Kaye in that we still see Royal Flush Gang scion Bluff (the Gang having been reimagined as a crime family) and even Harper “Bluebird” Row and her brother Cullen. At the same time, while Bluff is acknowledged as Royal Flush Gang royalty, his parents from Trial are absent, and a wholly different couple are shown as King and Queen, a discrepancy I never quite understood.

Since her conception, the point of Punchline has been this: She’s a villain custom-made for the digital generation, and no matter what bad she does, her viral fame — even greater than Batman’s — makes her a perpetual threat. This was true at the end of Joker War and true when she was acquitted of her crimes in Trial. To that extent, the Howards' Punchline story follows in the series; Punchline is saved here by a gathering of her social followers, who turn on Batman in Punchline’s defense. There is no new ground broken, though Punchline retains her place as a signifier of the tensions of our time.

I thought the Howards did well articulating this toward the beginning of the book, when Batman remarks that Alexis Kaye is “the direct result of the Joker’s effect on Gotham … she’s the punchline to his setup.” I’m not sure if that speaks to Tynion’s origin of Punchline’s name, but it works. I equally liked that the relevance of the “Gotham game” is that “there is no winning the Gotham game” — that Punchline’s goal isn’t money or power, but solely the destruction of Gotham. I’m not sure this doesn’t get lost by the end, nor that it’s particularly different than what someone like the Joker wants, but it was a good contrast between Punchline and the mobsters with dollar signs in their eyes all around her.

But from the start, when Punchline arrives for what the Royal Flush Gang’s former king and queen believe is a swinging date but turns out to be a recruiting visit, Gotham Game seemed on the wrong track. The scene is cheekily written by the Howards in the manner of a mainstream DC title trying to act grown-up but unable to actually do so. I appreciated Melnikov’s animated style on Robin precisely because that book leaned young; here, the small waists, outsized breasts, and over-muscled chests just contribute to the sense of a juvenile attempt at maturity. And more than once, Melnikov’s art is too chaotic; in the second issue, I struggled to tell what happened when it seems Batman is blasted through a wall by an opponent he just knocked unconscious.

As with Cat International, I felt at times the Howards needed to reduce the dialogue and let the art do the work; in a page where Punchline nearly runs over Bluebird with a car, they’ve got Bluebird shouting rhetorical questions at Punchline in every single panel. And what passes for Punchline’s fight banter is the likes of “Are you willing to eat #%$^ and die?!” or when Bluff calls another Gang member a “simp” — there’s an attempt here to be hip or mature that reads like trying too hard.

I’ll mention that another bright spot is when artist Max Raynor fills in; a climactic face-off between Punchline and Black Mask is rendered very well (though even Raynor seems to forget and then remember where the tears in Punchline’s clothing are). And I momentarily rolled my eyes when the Howards reveal Bluebird has deus ex machina “anti-nanobot technology” until they smartly reference that she used the same way back in Batman & Robin Eternal. Can’t argue with that!

I firmly believe every character has a chance under the right writer; I don’t think Punchline has found that writer yet, at least not for her solo outings. In Punchline: The Gotham Game, it’s a treat to see Batman and Bluebird teaming up again, but in all this doesn’t rise above generic superhero comics. The main draws for me to Gotham Game are the Catwoman ties.

[Includes original and variant covers, black and white page gallery]

Rating 2.0