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DC Pride is an anthology comic, which collects 9 superhero stories that are, in one way or another, related to the lgbtq community. Some of the stories are written by very well known writers, like James Tynion IV and Mariko Tamaki, but the majority of the stories are by writers I've never heard before and are honestly not great. Unfortunately, most of the stories are very forgettable. I'm writing this review a day after I read the comic and if I didn't have it next to me right now I would've forgot the existence of half of these stories. My favorite story is the first one and it's written by James Tynion IV. This story features Batwoman and it's about discovering your sexuality, accepting it and learning to love yourself. It's a very nice and sweet little story, with an interesting plot and a good message. This story also has very good artwork. Both the art and the coloring are done by Trung Le Nguyen. His style has an innocent that fits perfectly with the story and thanks to his use of purple for the majority of the comic, everything has a very sad and melancholic vibe which I love and works perfectly. Unfortunately, after this story, the comic goes downhill. The second story was nice and although the allegory in its plot was absolutely obvious, it was fun and enjoyable. It was about a vilain who's trying to straight-wash history and two homosexual superheroes stop him and beat him up. It was very fun, with nice action and artwork, but it wasn't as powerful as someone would expect. After this story I'd say that there are zero stories worth reading. Fortunately, some of these stories, like "Try the Girl" and "Date Night" have very nice artwork, but the writing is forgettable at best.
The most disappointing stories were "Another Word for a Truck to Move Your Furniture" (what kind of title is this?) and "He's the Light of My Life". The first one is written by Mariko Tamaki and it features the iconic couple of Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. Admittedly, other than a short story in another anthology comic, I haven't read anything else superhero related by Mariko, but having read two of her great graphic novels, I expected much more from her. This story is very mediocre at best and it's trying as hard as it can to be funny, but it fails horribly. Harley Quinn is written very realistically and it makes sense for her to be afraid of relationships, but other than that there's nothing else good in this story. Even the artwork isn't good. It's fun and bright, but it has many problems, like the very badly drawn faces of the characters. The other disappointing story is written by Sam Johns and has artwork by Klaus Janson. I'm not going to focus on the story, because that's not what disappoined me. I've never heard of this writer before, so I didn't have any high expectations from her, but it's worth to note that the idea behind the story is very good and powerful, its execution though is weak and it falls flat. But as I said, I didn't know the writer, so I had no reason to expect something better. What disappointed me was Klaus Janson's artwork. Knowing him from his work with the legendary Frank Miller, I expected much more from Klaus, probably something close to the level of artwork we got to see in the Daredevil issues he drew. Unfortunately, his artwork in this feels very awkward and rushed and it reminds me a lot of some of Frank Miller's worst artwork, in DKIII.
Although this comic has many flaws, I'm still glad it exists. It's very nice to see a title like this released by a huge company like DC. I just wish that it'd be better and if you think about it, it really could, but DC made some stupid mistakes while making this. First of all, I think it was a very bad idea trying to fit 9 stories in a 84 pages long comic. Every story is extremely short, which leads to all the threats being extremely weak, every problem being resolved in a couple pages and almost all the stories staying at the surface of their subject, because they have no time to dive a bit deeper into anything. If there were only 4 or 5 stories in this comic, I think that it would have worked much better and that everything would have been paced in a more correct way. Another thing that I consider a mistake of the book is that most of the writers aren't top tier. DC currently works with some of the biggest comic writers in the industry, if they had assigned some of them in this comic, I'm sure it would have been at least a bit better. It's not a coincidence that the best story in this comic is the one by James Tynion IV and that in every anthology title they've released in the last few years, the best stories are ones by writers like Grant Morrison, Scott Snyder, Tom Taylor etc.
6/10
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