Red Hood and the Outlaws #19 Review and *SPOILERS*

Date Night

Written By: Scott Lobdell

Art By: Marcio Takara, Rob Schwager, Felix Serrano, Taylor Esposito

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: February 14, 2018

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Smarty Pants Bizarro continues with this issue, where hopefully we start finding out what our former lovable big cloned lug has on his mind now that he's a super genius.  Previously, we saw Bizarro do a whole lot of things in order to obtain synthetic Kryptonite to keep his IQ up, but this synth K, which our hero has been bathing in isn't quite right and it's making Bizarro quite paranoid and causing hallucinations.  Let's jump into this issue to see if we gleam anything new out of this story or if it's going to spin its wheels a little bit more.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with Jason and Artemis going out to paint the town red as they have their first date.  They wine and dine and do all that, but really, this bit is all filler until Artemis gets Jason to take her to the Batcave, which we find out, not even Bizarro's equipment can penetrate.  While all of this is going on, Bizarro continues to slide into madness due to the synthetic Kryptonite and as it turns out, Lex Luthor may have been on to the secret that Bizarro's been keeping from his teammates this whole time because we get to see that Luthor's been watching everything the Outlaws have been doing since they left him.  

In the end, after Artemis and Jason get inside the Batcave, they start talking about Bizarro and what he may be up to and if he's getting worse........ and even if he wasn't, they're going to want to keep a closer eye on him anyway because while the two were away, Bizarro was alerted into a downtown bar in Gotham, where he met a man named Solitary, who apparently knows all about Bizarro and may have actually been the one who orchestrated everything to get the Outlaws together in the first place.  He's no slouch either because when Bizarro threatened him, we saw Jason and Artemis show up to pick him up off the floor, where he apparently passed out.  So yeah, who knows where we're going from here and just because I didn't spell it out earlier, the date was just a ruse so that Jason and Artemis could discuss Bizarro without him hearing.

That's it for this issue of Red Hood and the Outlaws and while the art continues to be fantastic in this issue as you've come to expect and we did get a glimpse of some puppet master playing our heroes from the background, this issue felt like almost complete filler, where Jason and Artemis just discuss whether or not something is up with Bizarro, while driving the readers crazy in thinking that they're actually going out on a date.  The story felt like it moved about a single page in worth of story and while it was an interesting page, it wasn't enough to get me excited about this issue........ Even with the amazing art.  

Bits and Pieces:

We're given a lot of filler in this issue as the majority of our heroes try to catch up to what we already know and while the story does move forward in an interested way........ it's about an inch forward and that wasn't enough to keep me excited here.  The art was fantastic, I just wish this story would pick up the pace a bit and give us more each month.  

6/10