Crush & Lobo is a 2021 eight-issue DC Comics mini-series written by Mariko Tamaki, with art by Amancay Nahuelpan and Tamra Bonvillain. It stars Crush and her dad, Lobo.
Crush recently quit the Teen Titans Academy and has gone solo. She's also dating Katie and is determined to be the best girlfriend ever. However, Katie likes, well, pink and other normal stuff, while Crush likes breaking people's faces. When Crush accidentally ruins Katie's birthday party, their relationship is put on pause.
However, that isn't even the biggest event in Crush's life: her biological father, the Czarnian bounty hunter Lobo, has contacted her. Turns out that he's been captured and is in prison, going through some robotic therapy, and has invited Crush to the prison so he can talk about their issues. The last thing she wants to do is talk, but perhaps this will be good for her and Lobo.
Or perhaps Lobo has his own agenda and everything will go to hell in a handbasket.
Tropes in Crush & Lobo:
- Accidental Misnaming: When Crush arrives at Katie's birthday party, Katie's friends call her "Trish," while Katie's parents call her "Tasha". She corrects both of them.
- The Alcatraz: Considering that it can hold Lobo and he hasn't been able to escape yet, the prison Lobo is in counts as this.
- Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Katie's parents are like this, calling Crush and Katie "adorable." Crush does not know how to handle it.
- Ballistic Discount: Lobo is shown walking into an alien gun shop in one panel holding grenades in each hand and telling the clerk to give him everything in the store or he'll set them off.
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: Crush is no more hindered by hard vacuum than her father is. Getting ejected from her spaceship is merely an inconvenience and she later goes planet-hopping in a convertible.
- Big Beautiful Woman: Katie carries quite a bit of weight, but it does absolutely nothing to detract from her looks.
- Hellhole Prison: The prison Lobo is locked up in initially looks like this, but it's subverted when it's revealed that the prison actually focuses on therapy and rehabilitation for prisoners. Then it's double-subverted when the head warden robot reveals that she doesn't actually care about rehabilitation at all and locks up Crush for the crime of being related to Lobo.
- In Medias Res: The first page is Crush beating someone up a week from now and then it goes back to a week ago. She even lampshades this. "This is a flash-forward. Bit of a mess. I don't actually know if we're even going to come back to this scene but it's a really nice punch".
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Crush's narration. She talks about how the book starts in medias res and then comments about how she doesn't even know if they are going to return back to that moment. And then she starts summing up who she is, but then quits and tells the reader to just check the internet.
- Masculine–Feminine Gay Couple: Crush is a Butch Lesbian, but Katie is pretty feminine, with Crush commenting that she likes "pink".
- Must Have Caffeine: Crush owns 31 travel mugs. She insists on regular coffee fill-ups even while traveling through space. Fortunately for her, there are space coffee stands.
- Shout-Out: The alien Crush kicks into space in the beginning of the first issue looks like Krang without his robotic exoskeleton.
