I don’t have a problem with her giving up. I have a problem with her putting her friends in danger to supposedly stop them from protecting others.
This one’s been stirring in me for awhile, if only because I see Tim reading her the riot act she deserves once he comes back and sees the lengths Steph went through to force her friends out of the superhero game. I know she was also being manipulated by a group doing the tired old “if it weren’t for the heroes we would be safe from their now totally unopposed villains” cliche or “if not of the hero stopping us we wouldn’t be doing the evil acts” lie cliche, but that just makes it worse. She should be smarter than that, no matter what grief she’s feeling believing Tim is dead. She attacks her friends, threaten to expose Batman, and I just wanted to smack her one, which isn’t the reaction I want to have! Between Roy Harper’s reaction to Lian’s death and Stephanie’s reaction to Tim’s faked death I don’t think DC knows how to handle grieving heroes.
One thing I liked about this strip was using the different settings and colors (because I can’t do non-superhero or non-uniform outfits in a more detailed style…they aren’t going to be designed well here) to denote the passage of time between each comic Jake is reading rather than making it look like he’s reading from a trade or something. I think it works well.
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