Originally Posted by
ohfellow
Yes, of course we can all fill in the blanks, they always escape - but honestly I'm not sure the writers or editors remembered. I think they could have mentioned it in the dialog and then had an editor's note directing people to Nightwing -- why NOT take the opportunity to advertise a Nightwing story from 3 months ago where Babs had been kidnapped?
I saw that with Cruz/Melnikov too - maybe a lot with the panel shapes. In that case, I like both of them, but also preferred Melnikov.
I see a discussion about this on Googe's Instagram now. He confirmed exactly what I noticed - capes and faces. That I noticed it suggests it didn't work that well for me. It was more of "Darn it, he's copying Corona" rather than simply having a comfortable feeling that the art felt consistent without being consciously aware of how he pulled it off. Googe is not looking for people to notice the craft, after all. He just wanted the book to feel consistent without anyone thinking about it too much.
A book can survive any big change in art if the new work is good. Look at that recent weekly run of Detective, with 3 sets of artists working on different installments of the story. Was not a problem.
(Besides, how much DC care about artistic continuity? Think of how many books lately have had 2, 3 and sometimes more groups of artists working on different pages of the same book?! That is an annoying thing that doesn't ever work for me.)
Renzi's work seems familiar to me because he colors Spider-Gwen in a very similar way. It's because of his coloring that people describe Marvel's Earth-65 as having a neon glow to it, unlike the grittier Earth-616.
I'd say a big difference between Renzi and Stern is that Renzi's colors actually DO "pop." Stern used colorful shades, but desaturated everything (added tons of gray), so to me, everything looks muddy. I think Batgirls is now easier to look at not only because of Googe's line work, but because Renzi actually uses very bright colors.
You have to go back to #6 to see the Sarah Stern murkiness. Whole pages of shades of browns and grays. I think her colors, more than Corona's lines, made a lot of the book difficult to see. The Saints in particular were hard to make out, just a mass of grays, but you can look through any of her stuff and just see dull shades of brown and gray.
I agree it was better. Good point, I didn't notice that was Steph at the end saying she wanted to break the code - in print, it's kind of small.