Red Hood Loves Arsenal #11

This cover perfectly captures the essence of the story within: confusing garbage.

The Review!
Scott Lobdell will always have a job working for editors who hate trying to wrangle writers into being team players (being a team player, to an editor, is doing exactly what the editor wants) because Scott Lobdell has no vision of his own. I suppose you can say that his vision is writing characters that he thinks young people can identify with by making them rebellious and full of angst and angry at adults and authority but that's about the extent of it. It's not like he can build consistency in his characters over time because he just needs them to act in a way that will further whatever direction editorial wants the characters to be headed. So if editorial thinks Jason Todd as a murderous anti-hero sells, that's who the readers get. But when attitudes seem to change and people think he shouldn't be going around shooting everybody in the face, suddenly he's against killing! That might be okay if the stories backed up the change in character. But Red Hood changes his attitude by seeming whim alone. At least Roy Harper has been consistent. You always know he's the same old Rockabilly Genius that the introduction assures the reader he is, no matter the evidence to the contrary. What I'm trying to say is that this book is terrible with a capital shitfuck.

The Commentary!
Scott Lobdell has fallen into a rhythm with his Red Hood Loves Arsenal stories. He's found a theme that he's determined to stick with no matter how tired anybody gets of it. That theme is redemption. You see, Jason Todd and Roy Harper have both been given second chances. So now Jason Todd is only ever going to run into other characters who might be seen as villains or, at best, anti-heroes and he's going to cradle them in his arms and say, "Shh. Shh. Daddy's here now. You deserve to be loved. And I'm the one to do it because it'll show I'm better than Batman. And Roy will help because he wants to be better than Green Arrow. Because adults are poopy." Then all the shallow misfits of the world who can somehow, blindly, look past Scott Lobdell's awful writing feel good and embrace the comic book and call Jason Todd their little lost puppy dog. I don't know how many of those people exist because all the misfits I've ever known are anything but shallow and would sooner shit on a copy of Red Hood Loves Arsenal than read it. I don't currently have to shit so I guess I'm going to read it.

This issue begins with a flashback to when Roy Harper was working with the Wrecking Crew or whatever the fuck the bad guys are called in this issue. They're basically the negative version of Roy and Jason's Heroes for Hire business. Roy Harper's narration helps me remember that this crew call themselves Iron Rule. I'm not sure why. I've never heard of the Iron Rule before. Is that the one where you treat other people how you'd like to be treated if you liked to be treated like shit?

Once again, thanks to Roy Harper's incessant narration, I discover the meaning of the name!

It doesn't sound cool at all. It sounds fascist.

While Roy has nightmares about his old team and I have nightmares about the amount of Roy Harper Narration Boxing I have to read, Red Hood and Duela Dent discuss how she feels about going back to school. Duela doesn't find it weird that Jason Todd is completely made up as Red Hood for this chat. She should have though because Jason Todd is ambushing her. He found the Joker's face she kept hidden in the bathroom so now it's time to turn on her. Hey, he tried to help! She just didn't want the help and decided to keep doing what she wanted to do! So now his only choice is to abandon her even though that would mean he's not better than Bruce at all. He's exactly like Bruce!

Okay, maybe he's nothing like Bruce. He's not even the shit scraped off the bottom of Bruce's Batshoe. Jason Todd is an asshole.

This is probably why Scott Lobdell still has a job at DC Comics. You would think that the company would want to hire great writers and then keep the great writers working for them because great writing creates great word of mouth which creates great sales. But in the comic book business, what you really want is a writer who doesn't give a shit about what they're writing and will burn everything they've been working on at the drop of an editorial hat. So even though Lobdell has been working on this whole redemption theme and how Jason Todd has the compassion and empathy to try to understand and help the bad guys (after, you know, years of him just shooting people in the face. Again, Lobdell doesn't give a shit about consistency), Rebirth crops up and the status quo needs to change. So Jason Todd decides to forget all that shit about how he saw a little bit of himself in The Joker's Daughter just because she backslid once (or twice? Who cares how many times. He knows how hard it is to better oneself!), he's going to abandon her. And not just by sending her to Arkham where she can get help (okay, so nobody is actually getting help in Arkham. But she can theoretically get help there in the context of the DC You's reality). No, he has to shoot her and make a stupid fucking joke. Nice work, dick.

Meanwhile there's the Roy Harper story that I just don't fucking care about because Scott Lobdell has ruined Roy Harper forever. I'm not even being dramatic! Roy Harper is done! He'll never get the stink of Lobdell off him! No, that's not true. There's one way DC Comics can fix Roy Harper so that I'm not constantly remembering how awful he was in Lobdell's scripts. If DC can manage to get Thomas Pynchon to write a Roy Harper comic book, I might be able to forget how shitty he's been written for the last five years. Anyway, the comic ends with Roy facing off against Iron Rule. I hope they kill him.