The artwork was amazing! ( )

After finishing this I realized it’s the first of a series which makes a lot of my criticism kind of no longer applicable but oh well. I don’t really have the energy to pursue a whole series so I’ll still say that there were way too many characters to keep track of and I was hoping for some payoff where they all meet up at the end and never got that. I’m sure that’s the direction the story goes in eventually though so I guess I’ll cut them some slack!

This definitely had a unique perspective, which is putting recognizable superheroes into a 40s aesthetic, but it honestly started feeling hamfisted. Like, again there were way too many characters, I groaned when “Alexander” Luthor was introduced for example. I think the concept would have worked better had they focused in on just a few characters instead of cramming the book with cameos. It’s weird because it’s both a work of historical fiction and also an aesthetic callback to actual Golden Age comics that were just talking about contemporary events. The only way this is weird is that everyone talks really funny, it’s like playing an aesthetic game of telephone.

All in all my main takeaway is I appreciate the lesbianism but I wished there was more. ( )

I'm intrigued. This is an re-imagining of the DC universe, female-centric and taking place during World War Two. Many familiar faces and names are present, including Amanda Waller, head of the "Bombshells", the Allied Powers' all-women superpowered taskforce. This felt very much like an introduction, with mini-stories of each of the characters and how they came to be a Bombshell. And there's another story about Zatanna and Constantine, and how they are stuck in the grasp of the Joker's Daughter.

This shows a lot of promise, and I look forward to seeing where this goes. ( )

I had reservations about a comic book series based on a statue line, but okay, sure, I used to read comics based on toys all the time (Rom, Micronauts, Transformers, etc.) so I guess that's not a big deal. And I enjoyed flipping through The Art of DC Comics Bombshells a couple years back.

The statues and the art book are just basically cheesecake, so I was surprised that beyond Marguerite Sauvage and cover artist Ant Lucia, the other ten artists who illustrate the stories in this book aren't very strong when it comes to that style of art, churning out fairly generic superhero pages. (And some of them really need to dig out some WWII photo reference once in a while, because their uniforms and equipment are shamefully shoddy.)

To offset the cheesecake, there's an attempt to give the story a feminist slant. And I like that the writer wanted to give the heroines strong, independent personalities and storylines, but too many characters are juggled in too many settings doing too many things to give any individual much chance to actually develop as a person. And of course whatever they are doing still has to generously focus on T&A.

Not well drawn, not well written, not much more than a time-wasting muddle. ( )

I LOVED THIS SO MUCH. If you haven't read these yet, pls do. Wish they'd do a Netflix series or something. ( )