DC Round-Up: The BAD SEEDS event spreads across the Bat-titles

THIS WEEK: We check in on the latest Batman event, Bad Seeds!

Note: the review below may contain spoilers. If you want a quick, spoiler-free buy/pass recommendation on the comics in question, check out the bottom of the article for our final verdict.

I am, anymore, wary of crossover storylines. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good event comic, as long as it’s self-contained and doesn’t interfere with what’s going on in the regular, ongoing books. When Bad Seeds, the latest storyline encompassing all of DC’s Bat-titles, was announced earlier this year, I’ll admit I was concerned. The bat-shaped corner of the DCU has consistently been one of the publisher’s strongest areas, and the thought of a crossover interrupting the regular flow of that lineup of great books irked me.

I am pleased to report that I had nothing to worry about. It turns out Bad Seeds is less of a crossover storyline and more of a storytelling backdrop. This week’s lineup of four tie-ins showcases the strength of that concept, with one title that directly continues the main thread and three other books that utilize elements of the event to advance their own ongoing stories and play to their regular strengths.

Detective Comics #1113 is billed as ‘Week 4 Part 2’ of Bad Seeds, but it’s the book that most directly continues the main storyline of the event, picking up directly where Batman #13 left off two weeks ago. That issue ended with Batman finally face-to-face with GCPD Commissioner Vandal Savage, and Tom Taylor, Jeff Spokes, and Wes Abbott deliver a showdown that’s brief but highly satisfying. No amount of punches to the face is going to remove Savage from his position of political power in Gotham, nor is that the point of the story, but it’s still a cathartic fight between the two of them after months of mounting tension. The remainder of the issue follows Batman stopping an apparently unstoppable threat, which just happens to be what he does best, and it’s a pretty fun adventure that moves the overall storyline in an interesting direction.

This week’s other three Bad Seeds installments do less to advance the main thread of the series and more to show its effects on Gotham and the people who live there. All three titles are great introductions to their respective series, replaying the onset of the wild vegetation growth depicted in the Bad Seeds – Sunset one-shot, and following their title characters as they deal with that situation on top of what they’ve already been facing on an ongoing basis.

Greg Rucka, DaNi, Matt Hollingsworth, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s Batwoman #7 has Kate Kane back in Gotham, on a mission for Batman and facing for the first time a group of TUCOs, Vandal Savage’s anti-vigilante paramilitary squad. Past events in her own series, namely the framing of Batwoman for murder in a widely-circulated video, have the TUCOs particularly keen on stopping Kate. It’s a smart escalation of an already-fraught situation for Kate, and it sets up a confrontation that will most certainly play to what makes Batwoman such a strong character.

Catwoman #91 from Torunn Grønbekk, Danilo Beyruth, Joe Prado, Patricio Delpeche, and Steve Wands presents the event from a class angle, showing how the haves and have-nots weather times like this in Gotham differently. Selina finds herself straddling both worlds now that she’s been reunited with Carmine Falcone, living in a fortified penthouse and tasked with carrying out assignments for him while also trying to protect the people she cares about on the streets in the midst of what is, for her, a situation that’s a complete mystery. 

The week’s final tie-in, Nightwing # 142 by Dan Watters, David Lapham, Francesco Segala, and Wes Abbott, looks at how what’s happening in Gotham impacts Blüdhaven. The spores from the wild vegetation in Gotham travelling downwind to Blüdhaven is a brilliant way to draw Nightwing into the event, but it’s the smaller, personal story that this issue focuses on that illustrates the largely-unseen human toll events like this can have. All three of these issues are excellent event tie-ins, but they’re even better entries in their own ongoing tales.

Bad Seeds has been a pleasantly surprising Batman event thus far. By maintaining the direction and tone of the individual participating series, utilizing the event as a setting for stories focused on character rather than simply spectacle, the creators and editors involved have crafted an engaging, exciting storyline. If future event storylines in the Bat-office and beyond are handled this way, I will look forward to them eagerly rather than warily.

Round-Up

• If Bad Seeds has been used as a storytelling platform for the individual series involved, the currently-running Kingdom of Zod storyline has been the exact opposite: one tightly-connected megastory running across the four Superman-related titles. This week’s Superman Unlimited #17 is part seven of the nine-part storyline, and Dan Slott, Rachael Stott, Montos, Ivan Plascencia, and Dave Sharpe wrap one of the major threads of the event, as well as of Slott’s run on this series. It’s been an uneven storyline, and much less accessible to individual title readers than Bad Seeds has been, but it’s also almost over and then these books can get back to normal.

• New Titans #39 continues Static’s introduction to the team with a trip to South America to visit Wonder Girl Yara Flor’s tribe of Amazons. Tate Brombal, Sami Basri, Bruno Abdias, Adriano Lucas, and Steve Wands do a fantastic job continuing to flesh out the relationships between the new team members, particularly in establishing some underlying conflicts them. It’s really nice to have a regular Titans book I look forward to reading again.

• Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #55 begins a new Ra’s Al Ghul-centric storyline, and Mark Waid, Adrián Gutiérrez, Vicente Cifuentes, Luis Guerrero, and Steve Wands bring the heat to this one. If memory serves the only other time Waid has written Ra’s Al Ghul was in an all-time classic of a story, JLA: Tower of Babel, and if this issue is any indication Ra’s brings out the best in him. It’s smart storytelling and non-stop action from the jump, and it’s a blast.

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