The Four Color Media Monitor

USA Today wrote about Scott Lobdell's already botched run on Red Hood and the Outlaws, where he basically corrupts the Titans, and does little to improve on Jason Todd. While they do at least establish that the reason Todd was revived from the dead was because Talia al Ghul engineered his resurrection not unlike how her father Ra's would be, it's the kind of characterization that follows that spoils everything:

Lobdell teases an encounter in issue 8 between Jason and Tim Drake, another former Robin and current Red Robin, where it's awkward for a moment because Jason feels badly about how he has treated Tim in the past. Tim's response: "Look, you got murdered, you came back to life, you were mad, I get it. It happens."

"A lot of what Jason has been through has been totally understandable and you could see the choices he made, but at his heart he is not a cold-blooded killer," Lobdell explains. "Certainly he kills when he needs to, but at his heart of hearts, even if he has done some terrible things in his life since coming back, he is a good person.

"It is only through his relationships with Roy and Kori, both short term and long term, that he's going to start to look at those choices he's made and maybe make different ones."

Just like we the audience are going to have to, unfortunately, in what we choose to read at this point. Lobdell already led to a loss of respect among readers after he depicted Starfire as a brainless sex object in one the first issues, and he's not helping matters if he implies that Jason is just back from the dead so that he can be depicted as a killer, supposedly in good faith, but under a writer as bad as Lobdell, it's more likely to be gratuitous and artificial. The mistreatment of his successor Tim Drake is another problem.

Lobdell's portfolio has very little to recommend, with Marvel's Generation X being one of the few series where he ever accomplished anything significant. Outside that, most of his work has long been regarded as wretched, and his misuse of Starfire, Arsenal and Todd himself will only add to the list of embarrassments he's made.

Labels: Batman, dc comics, dreadful writers, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, Titans, violence, women of dc