Law of averages makes it clear that DC Comics was likely to publish at least one comic starring a female character who didn’t get naked in her first issue. The Huntress, Helena Bertinelli, dresses down into a sheer nightie, but she does so for a legitimate crime-fighting reason. The lasciviousness is actually part of the story! For the rest of the adventure, she’s an ass-kicking superhero who saves some girls, beats up some bad guys and doesn’t need a man to define her character. They even upgraded her costume to get rid of the exposed midriff and thighs!

Huntress #1

But then DC had to go and ruin the whole story by making it part of Earth-2! Those bastards!

Comic rating: 5/5: Great!

I’ll get to the Earth-2 stuff later in this review. It’s complicated and I want to make sure my non-comics readers understand why it’s such a sour note. If you ignore it and don’t give a rats ass about that sort of thing, Huntress #1 is a great comic. It’s a nice introduction to the heroine, a great character study for her attitude and style of crime-fighting and it sets up a nice story. This shows promise as a nice little mini-series exploring an oft overlooked superheroine. Anyone looking for a simple story that is not bogged down in continuity or characters should give the Huntress a try. There’s a lot to like about this issue.

And writer Paul Letvitz even managed to make her sexy without resorting to the same debauchery and titillation that a lot of other DC comics have with this new revamp.

The Huntress is a character from the Batman-family of books, but you don’t need to know that to enjoy this issue. She mentioned Batman at one point, but it’s the sort of comment any hero might make about the Dark Knight. She’s a vigilante without any super-powers, relying on gadgets and weapons to fight crime from the shadows. She’s sort of like Batgirl in that way, she just decided to come up with her own costumed identity rather than tack herself onto Batman’s franchise.

Here’s looking at you, Batwoman.

Anyway, this is a nice and straight forward issue about a badass superheroine investigating a crime in Italy, then working her way up the criminal ladder to shut down a very wicked criminal enterprise. It’s the start of a mini-series, so we get hints of a larger villain and more threats to come. I picked this book up on a whim, and now I’m definitely on board for the whole series. It’s too bad Huntress didn’t warrant her own series in the New 52 initiative. Perhaps if she was a stripper she’d warrant and actual series.

But who needs nudity and titillation when the art can make a character look this beautiful fully-clothed.

For some reason, now I really want to go to italy...

Personally, I’ve never had much interest in the Huntress. She’s cool and all, but she’s just one more addition to the Bat-family that it doesn’t need. Batman and Robin lose their importance if Gotham City is crawling with tons of costumed vigilantes. Fortunately, Helena’s traveled her own path, mostly as a member of the Birds of Prey. Writers like Gail Simone have done a lot with her, and she has her fans. I know my pal Mike is a huge Huntress fan. So I was more than willing to give this issue a try, and I’m happy I did.

The art by Marcus To is, as you can see, utterly fantastic. Just look at how the sun makes that page glow. Helena is beautifully drawn, with a body that isn’t anorexic or constantly on display. She looks badass as the Huntress, and the action scenes are top notch. Really, art has been great for the whole revamp. Kudos to DC for nailing the art. The story is great too. It’s solid and straight forward, with a superhero discovering a crime and then using inventive ways to investigate and stop the bad guys. Huntress isn’t fighting any super-villains, but that’s fine. Vigilantes like her and Batman should go after normal crooks and criminals.

That’s not boring, at least not in the same way that Green Arrow’s pretend super-villains are boring. There’s a difference between a normal human crook who receives superhero attention and a wannabe super-villain who dresses like a street thug but has powers and a name like a super-villain. One is interesting, the other is boring.

So as the page said, Huntress lands in Italy to investigate a shipment bound for Gotham City. She’s an Italian immigrant, so it’s not too weird that she’d visit there just to investigate a crime. Perhaps she wanted to go home again. After that brief introductory scene of Helena arriving, she puts on the Huntress costume and goes hunting. She finds the shipment, opens it up and discovers the plot.

I doubt this series is going to be as brutal as when the Punisher found a similar sex-trafficking ring

Before they can get away, Huntress is attacked by some local thugs. She makes sound work of them, kicking butt and taking various names. It’s a well-drawn fight scene, fully of fluid motion, dangerous weapons and a lot of superheroics. There are also no narration boxes to clog things up. Then there’s this…

LEGS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!

And that’s only the first of two crazy kicks. The art gets a little bendy, but the fight is nevertheless a good one. Then Huntress discovers that along with the girls, the bad guys were shipping guns to Gotham City as well. Huntress promptly blows up the ship and brings the girls to safety. Job well done.

We then cut to a couple different scenes, the first involving the crook who apparently runs the girls/guns shipment (maybe?) The art gets a little confusing because all these crooks are drawn similarly. Or at least this main crook, drawn in a gray suit with black hair and a white undershirt, looks a lot like another common thug later in this issue. There’s no indication that the later thug isn’t the big crook, but then he’s pretty clearly just a thug. Can you tell these two apart?

This guy is a totally different person from...

...this guy. I can't tell the difference.

Either way, the thug’s name is Moretti. He’s got the typical mansion, filled with beautiful women to pour his wine and whatnot. Typical crook. Nothing fancy about him. Would have been nice to get a little depth in the villainy, but whatever. The scene basically just establishes him as a person. Then he shoots the messenger who failed, since Huntress destroyed the guns. Moretti isn’t particularly concerned about the girls. He also talks on the phone to someone else in the organization named Guiseppe. Basically just setting the stage.

Then we cut to Helena visiting some newspaper reporter in his office. Helena brought the girls to him (maybe?), or at least he took care of them for her. But the reporter is upset because he’s unable to make a difference. He’s sick of writing all of these stories about sex trafficking to a country that just doesn’t care. Nobody cares about the poor, homeless refugee women who get kidnapped and sold into the sex trade.

But Huntress cares!

Print journalism is dead...because Huntress killed it with a knife!

Then we arrive at the lingerie scene. It’s a shame that DC put one in the book, but it wasn’t as bad as the others. Helena checks into a hotel room, and then uses code with the bellboy to set up a ‘date’ with one of these poor girls being sold as prostitutes. Helena dresses the part of someone about to receive a prostitute in her hotel room – see, it fits the story – but then she immediately kicks the thug that brought the girl.

The perfect lingerie line for the active superheroine karate master

Booyah! What’d I tell you about the kicks? Pretty nice lingerie too.

Helena tries to calm the very scared prostitute, but it isn’t enough. The scared girl uses her phone to alert the people holding her, so Helena has to knock the girl out. She puts the girl on the bed for safe-keeping. Then she suits up in preparation for the thugs who are responding to the girl’s distress call. Huntress kicks their asses, just like before, including the thug in the similar looking gray suit. More fluidly awesome action scenes. The art is fantastic.

Huntress ties up the thugs and gets back to her investigation.

In the epilogue, the tied-up thugs are found by Guiseppe. They try to beg forgiveness, blaming Huntress the ‘demon’, but Guiseppe isn’t listening. He shoots them and leaves. To be continued.

Let me just say that I hate villains and mob bosses who indiscriminately kill their employees and henchmen. That’s got to be bad for business and bad for morale.

So yeah, great issue, great art and a great start to this Huntress mini-series. I’m looking forward to reading the rest.

So much for 'leaving corpses'...

Except that DC added a final page discussing how all of this took place on Earth-2, an alternate reality. That’s crazy and stupid! Earth-2 hasn’t been used since the early 80s, and for good reason! DC shut the door on alternate realities because they’d gotta too complicating. But now with their revamp, they again want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to claim that Superman was the first superhero…but they don’t want to get rid of the heroes who are older in story than Superman. So they’re rebooting Earth-2 and telling us readers that some of the comics take place on Earth-1, and some take place on Earth-2.

Clearly Earth-2 is the lamer of the two by the sheer fact of being second.

So this whole awesome issue just took place in an alternate reality that just doesn’t really matter. Great. Lovely. Fantastic.