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| BATMAN No. 7, May 2012 |
Whilst writer Scott Snyder’s stance of trying to “give
the artist room to flex his muscles, because you want him to shine on the book
too” is very laudable. It is hard to imagine illustrator Greg Capullo being
especially pleased with the substantial space afforded him within Issue Seven
of “Batman”. For very little actually occurs within its twenty page narrative despite
events having ‘moved forward’ a significant period of time since the previous
edition ended. Instead all a slowly declining readership of 127,402 had to
essentially enjoy was a lengthy dialogue-heavy sequence housed within the
Batcave, where a somewhat unstable-looking Dark Knight provides Nightwing with
a plethora of explanatory speeches as to just who the Talon is and that by
taking an adolescent Dick Grayson under his wing, Bruce Wayne actually ‘saved’ the
former acrobat from being recruited as an assassin of the Court of Owls.
Unfortunately this convoluted conversational piece lasts for eight pages, and disconcertingly only ends when the billionaire back-hands the former Robin hard enough to dislodge one of Grayson’s teeth. Admittedly the
motivation behind such a bloody assault upon his ex-partner is to remove a tiny
owl-shaped molar ‘’poisoning’ him with electrum, and the violent manner with
which it’s done highlights how poor Batman’s thinking currently is. But the youth's reaction, to simply walk away whilst telling Bruce “I don’t care…”
seems a rather restrained response bearing in mind just moments before he was
struck in the face, Dick was angrily and passionately yelling at his
mentor.
Disagreeably this rather uninspiring confrontation is not
the only disappointment to befall Snyder’s usually enthralling storyline, as the American bewilderingly never actually explains just how
the Caped Crusader managed to escape the watery grave he was last seen falling
into either. Mentally and physically exhausted by his torturous eight days surviving
the ‘Court of Owls Maze’ the crime-fighter apparently didn’t have the strength
to break the thick surface ice preventing his getaway from Gotham Harbour… And
yet “The Talons Strike!” starts with the Dark Knight being resuscitated by a
mysterious young girl and Alfred informing him that the butler had seen “the
hole in the ice.” So just how did the heavy muscular vigilante get from the
bottom of the seabed into the van of Harper’s boss? Such explanations should
not have to sought or clarified by visiting the “DC Comics Database”.
Sadly
having been given such a lack-lustre tale to illustrate, Greg Capullo’s
pencilling appears uninspired at best. Snyder’s faith in the American artist
being able to draw an entire issue simply concentrating of characters
conversing with one another “because I know that he can add some subtleties to
their expressions really, really well” is naively optimistic. For there are
only so many different ways of drawing the same pair of ice-blue eyes,
staring moodily from within a scowling visage.
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| The variant cover art of "BATMAN" No. 7 by Dustin Nguyen |
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