Entry tags:

char: robin/red hood/jason todd, char: speedy/arsenal/roy harper, char: starfire/koriand'r, creator: kenneth rocafort, creator: scott lobdell, title: red hood and the outlaws

So, the first issue of Red Hood and The Outlaws was... surprising.

So much so that I'm not sure what I thought of it. At all. It was very much an introductory issue, and as such it focuses mainly on who the three main characters are, and how they relate to each other. What is clear is that Roy, Jason and Kory have all had extensive changes and/or additions made to their back stories. I've posted three pages that I think illustrate this below the cut.



Some of it is good - like Roy and Jason apparently having something like a friendship...








...And some is bad. Kory now cares very little for individual humans, to the extent that she finds them completely forgettable. Seriously, she doesn't remember any of the Titans, even *Dick,* although her relationship with him is still canon. She has also seems to have lost the 'y' from the end of her name and is now called Kori. The writing and art are both extremely male gaze-y when it comes to Kory. She is depicted with a great deal of sexual agency, but the book drips with the assumption that the only people reading this are the 18-35 male bracket. I found it quite insulting.








Ok, so people who were wondering/worrying whether she might 'get with' Roy or Jason?








The obvious is somewhat subverted by the fact that she's done 'em both. Ordinarily I'd have thought that makes her a lucky lady who gets what she wants, but the rest of the book is so objectifying of her that I feel weird about it. There is potentially some interesting points to be made about her attitude to sexuality, but I think they got lost in her primary portrayal as a male fantasy-style 'nymphomaniac' - people spend an awful lot of time leering at, discussing and photographing Kory, managing to make themselves look like enormous douches in the process. Still, at least she's not being held to the usual comic book heroine standard of being sexy but not actually sexual, I guess? :/

As for the main plot (or what's foreshadowed to become the main plot), it's still very mysterious. It relates to Jason's hitherto unmentioned ties to an organisation called the All Caste. A creepy former member named Essence has come to ask for Jason's help with a string of murders connected to stolen organs, and to tell him that a female mentor of his named Ducra has been murdered. No, I have no idea what any of that means yet either.