Red Hood: Outlaw #37 Review

School of Hard Knocks

Written By: Scott Lobdell

Art By: Kenneth Rocafort, Steve Firchow, Troy Peteri

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: August 28, 2019

Now that Jason Todd has gotten an offer from Lex to become a teacher to the next generation of meta-humans, I think that this book is going to go in a weird, new and hopefully interesting place, which really, it's needed because while I do enjoy this title, it does come off as stale every now and again and a this feels like something that will keep it pretty fresh for at least the Year of the Villain.  Let's head off to the classroom now and see Jason's first round of students and what they're about.  Let's jump into this issue and check it out.

Now I want to start off by saying that while I do love something new and interesting to keep me reading a book and while I do think that this idea of Jason training meta-human teenagers is pretty awesome...... I don't know if this first issue of this new status quo really sold me on the idea.  The characters are weird and while that's something you could suspect from teenagers that want to bring doom into the world, the idea of them being weird is really the most character development that we get out of them besides for their just out there designs and powers that we don't get a full explanation about......... not to mention that Jason Todd really doesn't have a lot to do in this.

As for these kids though, we get DNA, Babe In Arms, Cloud 9 and Devour and while all of these kids are weird like I previously said, nothing was as weird as the Babe In Arms, which is a toddler-esque person, who's a genius and is protected and held by a zombie mother figure........ Yeah..... and I don't know what's more disturbing, everything I just said, or the fact that she finds Red Hood dreamy...... I have no idea how old this character is and find her strange beyond belief, but thankfully the rest of the team just come off as odd, but their powers seem pretty normal...... well, except for maybe devour..... he eats and pukes things up........ I don't know about him either.  It's funny too because for the most part this whole issue is about getting to know these new characters, but by the end of it, I really don't know much about any of them and the most excited I got here was by the character at the cliffhanger who's going to possibly join the group because it's somebody I've personally thought about a lot since their series kind of had a failure to launch.  I don't know how excited anyone else will be, but it does get me interested for the next issue so that's something. 

All in all, I'm not really a fan of Kenneth Rocafort's art so that really didn't add any positives to the book for me, but I do know there's a lot of fans out there that will probably dig the hell out of this and the weirdness that these characters can bring to the art.  As for the story, I'm all about getting introduced to new characters and new status quos, but this issue didn't really let me in on anything more than I already knew going into it beyond character names and the idea that their training in The Block and that was disappointing.  Hopefully things will pick up next issue with the new inclusion of a Lobdell character because right now I just need more than what we got here.

Bits and Pieces:

While I love the idea of this new status quo for Jason Todd, the execution for this introduction issue left a lot to be desired in my mind.  Beyond the new characters being weird, angsty teenagers, who don't get along with each other, I don't know much about what's happening here and sadly, I wasn't really a fan of the art either.  That's just me though, I know there's a lot of K. Roc fans out there who will probably eat this up.  Just not enough of anything to get me really invested in these new characters, but I was excited by the cliffhanger........ and I'm probably the only one.

6.3/10