Manhunter is one of those titles you have probably heard praised, but haven’t actually read. I think that’s a safe assumption, because I read a lot of others asking “why aren’t people reading this great comic” before actually buying it myself.
Manhunter is Los Angeles District Attorney Kate Spencer. Tired of meta-villains constantly getting away with murder (literally) she dons a mask and decides to deal out some lethal justice of her own. She kills Copperhead and then does battle with his friend Shadow Thief. This ends inconclusively, with both injured. She has also enlisted the aid of Dylan Battles. A former techie for super-villains, he is now in a witness protection program and hating it. He wants to get back to his old life and its exciting ways. Spencer offers him the chance. Actually, she doesn’t offer him any choice. If he doesn’t do what she wants, she threatens to give his location away to the villains he betrayed.
With her murderous intentions and extortion, you might have guessed that Manhunter isn’t your traditional DC super hero. Andreyko doesn’t let it end there. She is a divorced mother, whose work gets in the way of any relationship with her son – in fact, her carelessness almost gets him killed. You know a character isn’t being set up for your sympathies when the fact that she’s a bad mother is underscored again and again.
And that’s just the first four issues – no decompressed story telling here – in this current issue she has her re-match with the Shadow Thief. Since their last fight Shadow Thief has killed Firestorm and the Justice League come to LA in search of him. The issue opens with her running through training exercises at an old Western film location. A master at improv, Spencer doesn’t have Wayne’s billions behind her. Battles has equipped her with two tools with which to fight Shadow Thief: he has taken a part of the shadow suit Spencer recovered to create a homing device, good for a radius of two miles, and has made a pair of gloves designed to disrupt the proper functioning of the suit.
Back at her day job, things aren’t developing so smoothly. Her ex has gotten an injunction preventing her from seeing their son and the JLA come to her office to brief her on their search for Shadow Thief. This may not seem like a problem, but if you’re hunting metas you don’t want to be on the radar of people who are still acting within the law. They might not understand. She then gets her re-match, though not quite the result she wanted.
With the Identity Crisis DC has said things are going to change. Villains will be more effective, heroes more complex. It makes sense from the comic company’s perspective to let the bad guy get away with murder again and again. After all, you don’t have to keep inventing new villains, and writers can exploit the relationships that develop both between the villain and the hero and between the villain and the reader -- but how realistic is this policy? The US has capital punishment. Why isn’t that exercised more often? For the record, I’m not a proponent of capital punishment, and I certainly don’t think the JLA is going to let Spencer continue her extra-legal activities for long, but there is a logic in her behaviour. Who knows, maybe someone in Washington will see it. I can envision a DCU where law enforcement officers are given a wide latitude in the use of lethal force when dealing with metas. Maybe Manhunter will be recruited.
