 |
| BATMAN No. 27, March 2014 |
Part of “Scott Snyder’s… eleven-part comics event exploring
Bruce Wayne’s beginnings as the Caped Crusader”, this rather laborious “homage”
to Frank Miller’s “Batman: Year One” still somehow manages to contain enough
“elements from the Bat mythos and stories that we really love” to make it a
fairly enjoyable read. Indeed with the comic’s nod to Jim Gordon being “practically
blind” without his prescription glasses and re-imagining of Loeb’s “trigger
happy SWAT team” dismally failing to ‘nail’ an outmanoeuvred vigilante, it’s
easy to see why this particular instalment of “Zero Year: Dark City” sold
115,492 copies in January 2014.
Disappointingly however, despite all its pulse-pounding
action the New Yorker’s script is still a far cry from the 1987 four-issue
story-arc which its author seems so desperate to emulate, and sadly suggestions
that the Goodreads Choice Awards-nominee’s narrative is rather overly “ambitious”
as a result. For whereas his ‘muse’ tells a simple straight-forward tale of the
crime-fighter getting trapped by the authorities within the basement of a
demolished building, Snyder’s encircled Dark Knight instead gets shot in the
head, has his Bat-boat blown up with a grenade, goes ‘deep sea-diving’ courtesy
of an air tank, and then finally gets fished out of Gotham River by the future
Commissioner; “It’s a mile from shore. They’ll find you before you make it a
quarter of that distance… Your call.”
Sadly the American writer also provides a similarly convoluted
backstory for Bill Finger’s detective, by spending an incredibly wordy
five-pages explaining that Gordon wears his familiar trenchcoat in order to “prove
a point” to his corrupt colleagues, after they forced him to participate in a
dog-fight when he was a beat bobby. Such a dialogue-heavy drawn-out sequence
really slows down any momentum Batman’s somewhat contrived flight from Loeb’s
gunmen created. But also seems rather out of character for a Special Forces
veteran who is both a disciplined “man of integrity” and not one to tolerate
intimidation…
Perhaps this comic’s biggest conundrum though is the fretful
pacing of Greg Capullo’s usually stellar artwork, as each page appears to have
been crammed with as many letterbox panels as the Schenectady-born penciller
can manage. Such a drawing technique inevitably provides the storyline with some
much-needed impetus. Yet coupled with FCO Plascencia’s ghastly green and purple
hues, makes this book rather tiring on the eyes.
 |
| The "Scribblenauts" variant cover art of "BATMAN" No. 27 by John Katz |
No comments:
Post a Comment