Red Hood: Outlaw #48 Review

Bring Your Daughter To Work War

Written By: Scott Lobdell

Art By: Brett Booth, Danny Miki, Arif Prianto, Troy Peteri

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: August 25, 2020

We're putting that Chamber of All business behind us for the moment because bigger and more important things are happening in the world of DC Comics...... That's right the Joker War has invaded Red Hood: Outlaw and it's time for Jason Todd to go back to Gotham to confront his past and join up with his family to make a better future. Let's jump into this issue and see how the Joker War treats our favorite outlaw. Let's check it out.

With the Joker taking over Gotham City, it was only a matter of time until our favorite dysfunctional Robin showed up to take a little frustration out on the man that made him who he currently is, but with everything that the Joker has at his disposal at the moment....... and I'm talking about more than just money and gadgets, I mean Punchline, Dick Grayson, (Dicki Boy) an endless horde of clowns and for this issue, to really get at Jason Todd, the Joker has brought The Joker's Daughter into the mix so that our villain can have his associates kill her the way that the Joker previously took out Red Hood. If you're wondering about the relationship between Jason and Joker's Daughter, she was briefly a member of the Outlaws....... or whatever Jason was calling his group back when Scott Lobdell was writing Red Hood/Arsenal and even though she screwed those heroes over by the end, Duela Dent was definitely someone that Jason Todd wanted to help.

This is a big moment for people who have been following Red Hood for a while and is a great callback........ especially for the four Joker's Daughter fans out there and for the most part, this issue works really well in delivering the action, the emotion and the badass Red Hood that you love. I'm not saying that I didn't want to see what was going on with the Chamber of All previously, but because of how well this issue works, I'm kind of okay if we never go back to that story just as long as we get more of this. Does it all work out well? Not exactly, Jason fights Dick Grayson who is simply wearing a clown mask and doesn't know who he is, but when we have Dick Grayson meeting up with Jason Todd at the end of his own book from last week and Jason doesn't seem to recognize anything about him...... it just doesn't really play off that well.

All in all, I love the art in this issue and am happy as hell to see Brett Booth on this book because I'm a big fan of his style and it seems that with this art change, we have a change in writing style as well because where Scott Lobdell was really losing me with his previous arc, this feels like he pulled out the big guns and made me feel for Jason Todd again and brought something interesting to the Joker War through Red Hood's perspective. Yeah, it doesn't totally work for me for what we saw at the end of the last issue of Nightwing but it's still a vast improvement over what we were previously getting and I hope that we continue on this path for as long as possible.

Bits and Pieces:

Both Scott Lobdell and Brett Booth are bringing their "A" games to this Joker War tie-in that really combines a lot of things from Jason Todd's past to screw with him in the present and I couldn't be happier. Yeah, it does get old when we always bring up Jason's death, but here it works well and makes me excited for what's to come from a lot of characters in a book that looks amazing the whole way through.

8/10