All-Star Batman #8 - DC Comics

ALL-STAR BATMAN No. 8, May 2017

It must have undoubtedly been clear to those loyal 71,809 readers that bought Issue Eight of “All-Star Batman” that Scott Snyder clearly had some far-reaching and broad-canvassed narrative in his mind when he was composing this third instalment to “Ends Of The Earth”. For whilst the twenty-two page periodical almost exclusively focuses upon the Dark Knight’s infiltration of the Mad Hatter’s mansion, located near the “Mississippi Delta... Twenty miles deep in the Batchaloo Swamp”, it continues to pursue the New York-born writer’s plot of Victor Fries releasing a “necrotic patch” spore into the atmosphere and Doctor Pamela Isley subsequently helping the Caped Crusader develop a cure with which to halt the murderous fungi.

Sadly however, in order to do this, the American author relies upon a series of explanatory panels that not only provide a bit of necessary backstory to the titular character’s motivations, but disconcertingly, also start to summarise events within the story-arc which this publication has never actually ever depicted. These ‘narrative leaps’, such as Duke's dutiful deployment to watch the “death patch” and subsequent sudden silence “one hour ago, or the stealthy assailants which have been supposedly “hounding” Batman “every step of the way”, being revealed as the Blackhawks, “a long-vanished strike force known to take down apocalyptic threats”, awkwardly jar with the general flow of the adventure, and resultantly come across as simply lazy penmanship on behalf of the Stan Lee Award-winner.

Fortunately, not everything is amiss with Snyder’s suggestion that Bruce Wayne has been living a chemically-influence hallucination ever since he first encountered Jarvis Tetch back when the mind-controlling scientist tried to sell the billionaire “a hat that would interact with the wearer’s neurology”. The appearance of (fake) Batwoman, Nightwing and Red Hood, and their beating at the hands of their cloaked mentor is arguably worth the cover price of the comic alone, especially seeing as it concludes with a bizarre Giuseppi Camuncoli-pencilled illustration depicting the cowled crime-fighter about to battle a flock of robotic bright pink flamingos…

Yet even witnessing the Dark Knight dispatch an assailant by thwacking him around the head with a squawking feathered fowl, isn’t enough to save a script which dwells far too long upon the protagonist pondering as to whether to press a detonator switch or not, rather than telling a well-paced thoughtful tale. Indeed, Snyder would arguably have been far more successful if he had simply curtailed Batman’s disconcerting visions of his Rogue Gallery clawing at his exposed brain, and not then had to rely upon the book’s Italian artist to rather clumsily compile this comic's cataclysmic conclusion within the space of ten tiny panels.

The regular cover art of "ALL-STAR BATMAN" No. 8 by Giuseppi Camuncoli & Dean White