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| BATMAN No. 12, October 2012 |
It is hard to
imagine that many of the 125,249 people who purchased this comic in August 2012
were terribly impressed with Mike Marts’ decision to use not only two different
writers but two separate artists as well when creating “Ghost In The Machine”;
especially when the transition from one creative team to the next is so
bone-jarringly obvious in quality. Admittedly there is some logic as to why the
title’s editor invited guest artist Becky Cloonan to draw the first twenty-one
pages of this overly long periodical. Besides the former “Conan The Barbarian”
penciller being “the first woman to draw Batman in the main series.”
Scott
Snyder’s arduous, though serious and important storyline focuses upon the
exploits of Harper Row, a twenty year-old woman with a talent for fixing things
and who is as independently fierce as she is clever. As such she is clearly a
character with which the American illustrator could identify with even down to
her having “had a similar [short] haircut when I was twenty”. However Cloonan’s
somewhat imprecise, rough-looking style is infuriatingly inconsistent throughout
and at times disappointingly resembles the work of an aspiring adolescent as
opposed to someone talented enough to draw for all of the leading comic book publishers
during the past decade. Snyder may well believe “Gotham is a better place”
for the Pisa-born artist’s work and that her depiction of Harper “practically
jumps right off the page.” But for many it would perhaps be arguably more accurate to say
that the penciller’s concerns about having “some stage fright going in to this book”
were well founded.
Fortunately two thirds of the way through Issue Twelve of “Batman”,
at a stage set just after the Dark Knight has rescued "Miss Row" and her brother
Cullen from an unpalatable homophobic beating, the New York Times bestselling
writer is replaced with his frequent collaborator James Tynion IV. Such a move heralds
a much needed injection of action into the proceedings as the Caped Crusader
battles a tiger whilst onboard a speeding cruiser racing down the underground
sewers of Gotham City. Breathtakingly dynamic is an understatement, as the
superhero fends off the large hungry cat, bloodies the villainous Tiger Shark’s
mouth and knocks Harper clear of the runaway ship with a ‘wumping’ Bat-bullet
almost simultaneously.
Such an energetic sequence of events is superbly brought
to life by the finely detailed drawings of Andy Clarke, who dishearteningly for
Cloonan, really shows how a Bat-title should be illustrated. Even the more sedentary
scenes where the Dark Knight informs his ‘helper’ that she isn’t to do so again
because she’s “finished” are incredibly well done, with plenty of emotion
visible on the character’s faces.
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| The variant cover art of "BATMAN" No. 12 by Bryan Hitch |
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