Batman: Urban Legends #18 [Part One] - DC Comics

BATMAN: URBAN LEGENDS No. 18, October 2022

For those readers of Brandon Thomas’ “Signal And The Outsiders” who weren’t familiar with “the events of The Caretaker and The Fearful”, this opening tale to Issue Eighteen of “Batman: Urban Legends” probably wouldn’t have made too much sense until the twenty-two page plot is at least half-way finished. Sure, the narrative eventually suggests that Duke and his team-mates are primarily fighting for the planet’s future in some sort of three-battle competition against Vogel the Lord and his Subterranean Forces. But these scraps of context are only fed to the audience in a piecemeal fashion as the main narrative focuses upon the teenage vigilante’s obsession in finding his dead mother and difficulty in getting enough sleep.

Happily however, despite this uncertainty as to what is actually going on, Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque’s artwork more than manages to hold the attention until the adventure is played out, courtesy of some particularly well-pencilled set-pieces and wonderfully dynamic splash pages. Indeed, quite possibly this yarn’s best moment comes when the Spanish illustrator draws an adrenalin-charged chase through the streets of Gotham City as Batman tackles the evidently ‘mad as a March hare’ Wonderland Gang.

Far more straightforward, though a tale which simply doesn’t stop in its relentless drive to reach a somewhat succinct conclusion after only ten pages, is “Blood In And Blood Out” by Henry Barajas. Crammed full of depictions of the Caped Crusader battering away at a great mystical eye whilst the demon Etrigan confronts his adopted brother Lord Scapegoat, the pulse-pounding pace of the ensuing carnage begins just as soon as the “Latinx author from Tucson” quickly establishes that Bruce Wayne has bought the haunted Huitzilopochtli Statue so as to return it “back to Mexico’s Museum of Anthropology.”

Sketching all this chaos and insanely fast shenanigans is Serg Acuna, who does an excellent job of drawing both the Dark Knight in his prime, always one step ahead of his foe no matter how bizarre they may be, and the joy had by Jason Blood’s yellow-hued alter ego as he repeatedly batters his goat-headed sibling at the foot of a truly unholy-looking altar. Furthermore, the graphic designer impressively shows that there is much more to the character of Randhir Singh than just being a psychic-skilled ally of Etrigan; “This makes him your half-brother!”

The regular cover art of "BATMAN: URBAN LEGENDS" #18 by Liam Sharp