There was a Crisis. IN MY BRAIN.

[odditycollector]

 
So, everyone was crying foul this week about Batman 644. I hadn't been following the storyline at all, but I was a little bit a masochist curious, so I read though it this evening.

And? It wasn't nearly as bad as it was made out to be.

The offending pages, for anyone without access to my brain... or at least my Photoshop:











So, yes, I'll miss Leslie too, but really? The above seems like a fair extrapolation of her character. After Steph's death, she realizes she's not helping anything in Gotham and goes somewhere where she *can*. It's not all that well written, I'll admit; the dialogue doesn't flow naturally, and it's hard to follow. However... it's not as bad as most of what Willingham's done in the Batbooks. I don't think he *gets* Leslie, but I've very, very rarely seen anyone who *does*. Bruce comes off as even more of a psycho than usual, but I can almost believe it of him at this point in time.

If you're just complaining because it seems like DC is flushing out all the female characters, yeah, I'm right with you. But it's not like it was character assassination, you know?


Honestly. To listen to the outcry, you'd think you guys all read a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT comic or something. Geez.

ETA: If you've found this post from outside of Livejournal and have an opinion on it, that's fine, but please make sure you reply to the post itself and not to the comments beneath it. Livejournal works a little bit differently than most messageboards, and if you reply to a comment you're replying directly to the person who made *that* comment, not to me.

Comments

[odditycollector.livejournal.com]

When I think of Steph's last moments, I imagine a young innocent girl being tortured to death, who got away and was fighting to survive. Who wanted to live and had that hope stolen away from her. For some reason, Leslie's monstrous decision enrages me more than any villain Batman has come across.

I think that's the feeling we as readers are supposed to be left with... and if it had been some until-then-unmet intern or maybe even *another* doctor's *honourable* attempt at triage, you know, I would be with you. And Bruce could point and go: See? See? Not my fault! And, okay, no one would believe him, but why should we believe him any more because we know Leslie's name?

So it's not that Steph died, hell, it's not even the suddenly retconned WAY she died, it's that it was Leslie who did it. In the face of *decades* of fairly stable characterization. And not only did Willingham do nothing to convince me that Leslie would ever do such a thing, but, from the exposure I've had to his internet posts today, I get that he didn't think he had to.