A Snack Instead of a Meal
The Good: Dustin Nguyen's cover is AWESOME. His covers have been some of the very best on this story arc.
His interior art is also still excellent.
Badbug is still an interesting new villain.
It's good to see at least one Bruce Batman story with his return that ISN'T Batman Inc. At least one adventure in Gotham that isn't an analysis of his allies or a step in Batman Inc. And Hush is essentially the perfect villain to drive that kind of story.
Hush is finally back in costume, and looking awesome, and taking charge.
It's really exciting considering what Hush doesn't know yet, that Bruce is back. The suspense is killing me.
The Ragman co-feature is still pretty awesome. There's a lot of nice character development in the day-to-day life of Rory, and some nice fighting at night. The big scene with Firefly is pretty intense, and so are the consequences.
The Bad: This is 'House of Hush.' This is the big sequel to Heart of Hush I've been waiting for. So why so much focus on this side story about Bedbug, as interesting as he is, save him for the next arc, because here he just feels like a distraction and a derailment from the main arc.
The main feature is once again very short this issue while the co-feature is long. It was a bit of a let down.
The pacing is a bit slower, and now I'm wondering if it was too slow. Since Hush is only just now putting his plan into motion, I'm worried it might not hold for only 3 more issues, considering the type of plans Hush makes are generally defined by their intricacies and clear time involved and patience.
The Ragman co-feature is back to Szymon's usual style of being hard to follow.
In Conclusion: 3.5/5
It depresses me greatly to give this a less than stellar score because what it had was great, it just wasn't very substantial. There was hardly any of the main story for me to sink my teeth into, just the distraction of Bedbug and Hush back on top. This issue was dominated by the co-feature, which was fine when they did it back at the start of House of Hush because it was a prelude, and had a surprising amount of detail in the limited pages. But halfway though, it just doesn't do the same thing for me. I love this story arc as a whole, but there wasn't enough of it here. And the Co-Feature, which fairly awesome, just isn't quite enough to fill in where this issue is lacking. If you're not following House of Hush but want to, at this point I say wait for the trade, because you won't get all the Co-Feature distractions.
