I feel a bit like a freak for not enjoying this book.  90% of iFanboy readers think it’s the best book this week, but I can’t bring myself to care what happens in it.  I love Dick Grayson, and I enjoyed RIP and Battle for the Cowl, but reading the reviews of this book I feel like I’m at a party where everyone else’s drugs have kicked in and they’re tripping balls, but I’m standing around shuffling my feet waiting to come up.  Which is to say: I’m clearly not having the same experience that everyone else is.

It’s just dull.  I don’t care about the whining of Damien.  I don’t care about Dick’s angst (and I usually love Dick’s angst).  I don’t care if Damien goes over to the dark side.  I don’t even care enough to speculate whether or not he will.  I don’t care if Dick finds acceptance as Batman.  I don’t care if they get the bad guy.  Alfred was okay, Gordon was a prick (he doesn’t recognize Dick’s voice as the guy he worked with for years?  Really?) and the villain is drying paint.  The sad thing is that I want Dick to be Batman.  I don’t want Bruce back any time soon.  I love the idea of the mantle passing to someone who really deserves it, but the execution here bores me.

Then there’s the “art.”  Lots of people love Quietly, and that’s okay.  There are people who like it when you pee on them and I don’t judge them, either.  Quietly’s art, to me, is like that: someone peeing in my eyes.  His figues are freakish and wrong and his layouts are flat.  He’s more watchable here than in the past (perhaps he spent some time looking at actual people, people without cotton in their mouths), but it’s still awful.

If asthetic apreciation were democratic, I’d be wrong.  Luckily, I get to say that this was one of the worst comics I’ve read in weeks.  I gave it a chance.  After the real thrill that was RIP, I gave this two issues.  I will now RIP it up, or at least stop buying it.