The replacements

For those unfamiliar with the Silver Age of comics (or Science Fiction), a familiar trope was the 'oh no, we've swapped bodies with someone else, now I'm too disorientated to function. Think Freaky Friday but with superheroes. 

What makes Superman/Batman 27's story unique isn't that two male heroes, Superman and Batman, have swapped bodies with two female heroes, Power Girl and Huntress, but that the female heroes are in essence, the someday replacements for Batman and Superman. We get past the whole gender swap comedy of errors (like men trying to cope with high heels, etc.) quickly when Superman declares that he actually sees and feels his (male) body rather than the body he seems to be inhabiting. Like I said, the story isn't about what would you do if you woke up a different gender, it's about being replaced.

Spies, Batman, and the free will of man?

 

Although I've watched every episode of old Adam West Batman TV show, I never really tried to watch the Man From UNCLE. I picked up the book hoping for a bit of mindless 60's mod fun and the book did deliver in that way. However, I was a bit surprised at the pokes the book took at how we view good vs evil.

no surprise, the book is filled with Batman's TV criminals, but happy surprise, most of them were very low tier. Most I hadn't even remembered (I'm thinking of you, "Cossack Queen." 

To be fair, the Penguin and Mr. Freeze do appear in the book, and both Poison Ivy and Scarecrow are on hand, even though I'm pretty sure neither of them were on the old TV show, so yeah, it's a full gallery of rouges along with the secret organization of bad guys, THRUSH. What, you didn't think we could have team-up without both parties bringing their own set of bad guys did you?

While the book is full of typical punching and shooting and ducking and kicking, it also leads us to very unusual spy base under the sea. It's not the 'under the sea' part that I find intriguing, it's the use of the space to create an atmosphere of creative effort that could ultimately save the planet and reform us of our worst behaviors. That's right...

SPOILER ALERT:

The 'big bad' of this book has altruistic plans that are flawed by the whole free will thing. If the (unnamed here) big bad can just manipulate, pay off, and brainwash everyone on the planet, he can save us from the climate crisis, mass shootings by psychopaths, maybe even the hunger and war caused by greedy corporate interests...