So, DC announced a couple weeks ago that the real New 52 Lobo was not the guy we’d seen trucking around in other books, the guy who looked and sounded like The Main Man we’d come to know and snicker at since he was created as a parody of grim and gritty ultraviolent antiheroes decades ago. Instead, the new-look Lobo was a sleek, shiny, dare-we-say-Twilighty high-society type who was going to come looking for the Lobo impostor who was using his name. Now that Justice League #23.2: Lobo #1 is here, we can see that the actual tonal shift from writer Marguerite Bennett isn’t as drastic as we were led to believe, but it’s still a bit puzzling.
Sure, the look is a drastic change. He’s still pasty white, but he’s got a vague sort of Clifton Collins Jr./Lou Diamond Phillips (Los Lobos?) sort of look about him, with mangy, pubescent facial hair and awkwardly-placed glowing blue facial tattoos instead of the dark black KISS look. However, as the book wears on, artists Ben Oliver and Cliff Richards seem to make it more apparent that the pale-skinned, sparkly-faced, pompodoured guy with fangs is very much in the modern-vampire vein.
Despite the push towards pretty, though, the actual character we see in this issue isn’t that far removed from Mr. Feetal’s Gizz. In fact, the first words of the issue are “You think you know me,” which immediately puts us in the mind of a particular pro wrestling entrance, thus putting this song in our head the whole time we’re reading the issue.
Of course, you might not have the same mental associations… but if you watched that, maybe now you do.
Anyway, the first shot of Lobo is the one you see above, with the wine glass looking all snooty, but his internal monologue isn’t particularly classy, aside from complaining about rudeness and some weird ‘sorry-not sorry’ verbal tic. There’s a lot of g-dropping from -ing words (including a “fraggin'”) and lines like “surprise, surprise, suckers,” “I’ll heal faster than you can piss,” and “never loved me a woman, way I love my choppers,’ although the choppers in this case are his machetes rather than his hog, his bike. There is no bike. There is no biker. There’s a lot of murder, though, and a show of how callous he is when, upon realizing the cargo he’s delivering is actually terrified people who are being taken to a place where they will be murdered for their body parts, he herds them back in the cage and completes the job. The payment for which is the location of “the impostor,” who is apparently the one Czarnian this Lobo didn’t kill, and who is currently hiding out on Earth. The story isn’t bad and the artwork is fine, but this revamp is overshadowing any of that.
So, what exactly do we get out of this reinvention of Lobo? To be honest, it doesn’t seem like much. How many cunning, ruthless, too-cool-for-school assassin types are floating around the supervillain pantheon? Too many to count. How many wild-and-crazy, over-the-top, heavy-metal, crank-that-sumbitch-up-to-11, foul-mouthed stinkbag maniac biker bad guys are there? Aside from the ones that are usually invented as random fodder for heroes to beat up easily, not many. Sure, this new Lobo is a character that could more easily be plugged into the DCU at any point without automatically destroying the tone of whatever book he’s in, but it sacrifices anything unique and interesting about him, which makes any appearance he does make that much less impactful. Increased utility at the expense of originality.
There’s nothing about this guy that screams “The Main Man” anymore. Maybe that’s DC’s point – Lobo was always screaming too much. He may be quieter now, but that just makes him another generic voice in the choir. Another face in the crowd. A pretty, sparkly face, but one that’s much more easily ignored.
Then again, it could turn out this new Lobo is full of crap, and the “impostor” is going to hand him his ass. Time will tell.
