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| ARKHAM MANOR No. 3, February 2015 |
Rarely has the atmosphere been quite so
claustrophobic or the Dark Knight himself been ‘darker’ than in “Cold Comfort”,
as a heavily disguised Bruce Wayne crawls through the ‘bones of his house’
looking for the lair of a homicidal maniac.
Los Angeles-based writer Gerry
Duggan and artist Shawn Crystal have really produced the goods with this issue
to the point where it is hard for the hairs upon the back of your neck not to
raise up as you slowly follow an unarmed and undercover Batman edging his way
between the room walls of Wayne Manor panel by gripping panel. Indeed there
seems to be a perfect synergy between all of the creative team behind this
comic book, starting with the disconcertingly quirky, but very well-drawn,
Crystal and Dave McCaig cover illustration of the Caped Crusader chalking dead
men on one of his home’s walls.
Perhaps the best element to this particular
edition however has to be that Duggan throws more than a few
surprises into the mix as the story progresses. So whilst many writers would just
settle for scripting a tense nervy journey through the bowels of a psychiatric
hospital with plenty of ‘jump scares’ just around the next panel, he constantly
has the reader even more on edge as revelation after revelation is intermittently
feed into the action. Perhaps such writing is only possible once a title has
had a few issues published, and the characters been blessed with a fair bit of
pre-build as a result but the fates of Zsasz, Seth Wickham, Eric Border and ‘the
nameless man in the wheelchair’ are, in the main, serious ‘didn’t see that
coming’ moments.
Shawn Crystal is equally on top of his game with his ‘unique’ somewhat
awkward-looking style of pencilling clearly at its best when it’s used to
depict dark, unsettling moments of mild horror. Or possibly the artist has finally
settled into a drawing rhythm for this title? Whatever the reason, the composition of his pages are also
first-rate, whether it be single-panel layouts depicting Bruce Wayne’s search
for a bloodied axe using the clues at hand or a series of thin vertical panels
emphasising the confined fist-fight between ‘Jack Shaw’ and the mysterious serial-killer.
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| The variant cover art of "ARKHAM MANOR" No. 3 by Nathan Fox |
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