Some thoughts about Red Hood #51

Can Red Hood return to his roots?

Jason came back to his old neighborhood only to find out that things are just getting worse, especially when a new crime lord starts causing trouble.

A brand new direction is here and speaking as someone who considered most of the current volume written by Scott Lobdell pretty solid, I would say that newcomer Shawn Martinbrough has done a nice job at continuing that trend.

The plot is centered around Jason going back home and introducing characters who supposedly have a connection to him, mind you, I don't really like the idea of creating brand new characters and acting like they knew the old ones all this time (especially without some sort of flashback to at least justify it) but the writer does a decent enough job at making them seem familiar, as a whole the new supporting cast is not that interesting but they still have some issues to develop. Much more intriguing is the new villain who is presented as a mob boss on the rise (although I'm not really into Killer Croc being portrayed as a common thug once again after all the development he had over the years).

About the writing, the biggest difference between Lobdell and Martinbrough is the narration. While in many instances Lobdell's writing was overwritten, Martinbrough's is more subtle, managing to convey the sentiment of the scenes much better with just a few lines. There's also a bigger effort to make the cast more diverse (which doesn't mean much right now because they don't have a lot of development, not to mention that Jason barely has a role in the story but okay).

Tony Akins manages to follow the script as clearly as possible with great storytelling and a clean style, I would say that he's one of the best pencillers the book had.

Decent beginning, let's see how things go on.