Gotham City Sirens #1

This morning, I read a couple reviews of GCS which mainly had the same things to say.

1) The setup is contrived.
2) The art is too "cheesecake."
3) The characters are flat.
4) Nothing really happened and the bad guy was lame.

This is my take on these issues.

1) Considering the state Catwoman is in, I'm not sure who else she'd have to turn to right now. The Batman she knew is out of the picture and neither heroes nor villains trust or like her entirely. Unless she were to be kept out of the current storyline completely (not an option, as far as I'm concerned), who better to team her up with? Besides, I love all of these characters, and even if there weren't a good reason to put them together, I'd like it anyway.

2) Yeah, well, what the hell did you expect? It's called Gotham City Sirens for fucks sake. I'm not really into fan service myself, and I admit to rolling my eyes at the Zatanna scene a little, but I kind of knew what I was getting into here. Again, I love the characters so much, I just accepted the whole cheesecake thing from the start. Besides, I read Bomb Queen recently, and I guess it kind of desensitized me. (Ask shadow how amused I was at the nip slip therein.)

3) Since this is the first issue, I'm going to cut Dini some slack regarding how well-rounded the characters seem. A lot of first issues fall victim to obvious or hyperbolic character "development" in the interest of having the reader know about the characters as quickly as possible. This is presumably so we can just get to the action already. Hopefully he'll round them out a bit more as time goes on, especially considering he had a hand in creating one of them.

4) Again, this is a first issue. It's mainly going to be about setup. And yeah, the bad guy sucked out loud. But a) this is a female-centric comic book, which means the bad guys are often going to suck (see: Oracle v. Calculator or Wonder Woman v. Ninja Turtle Genocide Cheetah) and b) his presence is indicative of what's going on in Gotham City right now. The death of Batman has brought all kinds of weirdos out of the woodwork, and they all want to make names for themselves, like the doofus in question. As Sirens seems to be one of the more lighthearted titles in what has been a bummer of a recent storyline, I guess this is as good a place as any to portray that side of the new Gotham.

Overall, I liked GCS and will probably be adding it to my pull list. I guess if it's month after month of nothing but flat characters and cheesecake with nothing to show for it, I'll drop it. But it's worth giving it a shot, IMO.