BATMAN AND ROBIN #17

Review by: TheNextChampion

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Avg Rating: 3.5
 
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Written by PAUL CORNELL
Art by SCOTT MCDANIEL & ROB HUNTER
Cover by GUILLEM MARCH

Size: pages
Price: 2.99

While a new era of Batman starts, once again, the end of another era seems to have closed. With Grant Morrison out of the picture for ‘Batman and Robin’, some readers like myself were wondering how this title can sustain life without him at the helm. Well great news fell on us when Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason were linked to keep this title floating. Sadly a short time later, DC had to announce that team wasn’t going to start until next year. So with a gap to fill, we quickly got Paul Cornell and Scott McDaniel in to do a three issue arc. You know what? Maybe a short hiatus would have been better.

Now Paul Cornell is a great writer and he has consistantly shown that with him various work. I mean right around the corner you have a great run on Action Comics in the work. I was hoping to get more of that Cornell greatness within these pages regardless of how ‘rushed’ he might have been to do this. After reading this however….well there’s no other way to put this: This is a mess of a comic. Cornell doesn’t have much of a voice for the dynamic duo other then ‘sparknotes’ on how Morrison was able to do it. It feels like we’re back to square one with Damian’s attitudes and their constant banter gets annoying quickly. Then you have the overall plot which doesn’t seem much going for it for a three issue arc. The villain is laughably bad and her powers (and lack of living) make no sense at the moment. It doesn’t help that Dick and Damian easily solve the various mystery’s around the reveal without more momentum. There just isn’t any magic to these pages that Cornell usually brings to the table with his work. I know that sounds cliche, but if you read this and Action Comics together (like it happened this week) it doesn’t feel like the same person is writing them.

Then you have Scott McDaniel doing the art. While he might have been a good choice for a Batman comic in 1999, here his pencils look so out of date for me. Everything is fast and loose with no sense of anatomy or even a good sense of layout within each page. Certain actions have no fluidity and it actually makes the script that much harder to focus on. There are some flashes of brilliance here or there. But for the most part, this is one ugly comic to look at.

So yeah….I’m not too keen on picking up the rest of this arc. I mean it’s a short one to be sure, but with the obvious rush in story and art here it’s gonna be hard to stomach through this to get to Tomasi/Gleason. Heck I’m not even sure if McDaniels had more time to do these pages it would look any better. I was so hoping that a taste of Cornell on Batman would be a good thing. But now? I’m not so sure…

Story: 2 - Average
Art: 1 - Poor

Comments

  1. Agree with the review. About McDaniel, though, I’m not sure if you saw his work in the 90s, but it wasn’t much like the bland mess we got here. It had more style and edge in the ’90s, and not in a cliche "edgy ’90s" kinda way. I really recommend the stuff he did on Nightwing with Chuck Dixon, and they’re currently doing a "DC Comics Presents Batman" series reprinting stories he did with Brubaker on Batman. That’s much better art than we got here.

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