So I'm apparently in the minority: I unabashedly love this, but I've read the 'Road to Task Force Z' story in Detective comics - and I will reread those issues eventually, but I had to travel and didn't want to carry them for a small portion of the comics.
TFZ wasn't what I expected: Road to TFZ was funny in a completely different way, but I also wanted to see if Rosenberg really had a grip on Red Hood: Jason Todd is my favorite Robin and while I still probably would have read this - and yes, subscribed - if it was even fair writing of him, I wanted it to be good.
Rosenberg delivers. Jason walks a fine line: he wants to be better than he was, but also recognizes the things he's done that... are not so great. Like all the murder. So of course, Crispin, the disembodied voice that is Jason's connection to the murky higher-ups at TFZ uses that against him. Jason, he declares, is just as much of a monster as the rest of Task Force Z, but sees himself as a hero. (I disagree: Bane, for example, killed for power, while Jason was truly trying to protect innocent people. Anti heroes aren't villains, although one can argue they're not as pure as Batman, say, who doesn't resort to the violence anti heroes are prone to. Crispin conflates the two as just as bad, which I think isn't as nuanced as it should be - but here we are.)
He also doesn't want to lead a team of supervillains who are now undead, although Crispin is irked by the term 'zombies.' (They're dead, brought back, and eat people: they're zombies even if the TFZ policy is not to call them zombies.). Jason was led to believe he'd lead a team, but he hasn't been told about this. He sees TFZ as uncontrollable - and expendable - and doesn't think this will work.
Still, he has no choice: captured by the police, traded - for what, we're not sure yet - so Crispin and unnamed others can use him, Jason has no choice. He's unnerved the more he learns: a normal seeming, self-declared lady is in the containment wing, and he's sure she'll be killed. This decision taps into Jason's protectiveness, and women and children are his big 'weakness': he will protect them at any cost, unless, of course, they're what he considers evil (legitimate super villains, mobsters who order/carry out hits, etc.). He gets exposed to the Lazarus resin that revives these villains - and has to take a decontamination shower because they don't know what it will do to living people. (Or living people who were revived after death, but not zombies in this case, I guess.) There's a lot he hasn't been told, or that has been obscured: sure, he was told the resin was safe, but not 'relatively safe' in that they know what it does to dead people, and not much more. There's reasons to be suspicious, and bitterly regret being dragged into this.
I hope he finds out what's happening soon.
Anyway, great writing, some really funny lines, some serious scenes that give us a peek into the tensions between the team, between Jason and Crispin, the doctor might be cloned, I guess? The art is just beautiful.
Love, love, love. Just glancing at the reviews, I see my opinion isn't the popular one, but so far this has been five stars for me all the way: I'm truly enjoying this title.