This series started out amazingly for me. In fact, over at Comic Vine I gave the first issue a rating of 5/5 stars. The next two both got 4/5 and 4.5/5 respectively. But it was around issue number four that the mini-series just started to drag for me. It had the feeling of a mini-series that was forced to be a little too long in order to match up with some deadline. And, now that we know that this mini-series leads directly into World’s Finest in May, perhaps we now know why this story went about two issues too long.
I first got into this mini-series because I somehow came across the information that Huntress is Batman and Catwoman’s kid from Earth 2. I’ve never been a huge DC fan, so I didn’t know anything about the different DC Crises and that before The New 52, that the Huntress that was a Wayne had been eliminated. While the series didn’t answer which Huntress this was in the early issues, the story ended up being really fun to read. It concerned a sex smuggling ring running out of Italy and it featured a female comic book character kicking some serious butt. It also had some lite Batman-style detective work. As Huntress has worked to dismantle the smuggling ring and making life difficult for the smugglers she’s had both moments of action-movie character awesomeness and vulnerability. While the story has never made you feel that she’s truly in danger (as Snyder has done with the titular character in Batman), it’s been pretty well balanced. At the same time there have been some weird scenes and dialogue choices that make us feel like a lot has happened in the background and we weren’t able to see it. And that’s absurd considering how the series already feels too long. For example, the newspaper that Helena is working with seems to go from not knowing who she is to knowing who she is without any explanation. I know I’m not to only one who feels this way - I’ve seen similar complaints on other sites.
This issue revealed that, unlike her father (assuming her nDCU origins are the same as the Earth-2 Hutnress we know) she killed the main villain, a middle eastern politician, who was trafficking the women. As readers of the mini-series know, the villain had a son who was involved (or at least privy to the knowledge of the crime) and Helena is after him. She deals with him and then meets up with someone in a teaser for World’s Finest.
I was very disappointed in the ending to this mini-series. It’s really hard to discuss what was so disappointing about this issue without getting into details, but I felt that the resolution to Helena’s plot was handled so badly - after what was happening to these girls the ending is just so unsatisfying. And the person she meets functions as an almost literal deus ex machina. My recommendation would be to skip this issue unless you’re committed to learning the ending of the mini-series.
