Review: Batman Odyssey #1

Neal Adams has returned to Batman with Batman: Odyssey, the first of two mini-series touching on the high-points of his career. While the art is certainly very nice, the story itself is lacking.

Batman starts the story, relating to Robin (Dick Grayson, though he’s drawn wearing Tim Drake’s costume) one of the earliest adventures of his career, back when he packed guns as part of his repertoire. The hook of the story is to explain to Robin why they don’t carry guns, though the phrase “Batman doesn’t kill” would seem to be good enough explanation for me. From there, Man-Bat wanders into the Batcave with some important information. Bats yells at him for using the Man-Bat serum instead of simply coming as his human self, stopping him from relaying some information that he thinks Batman needs to know. From there, Batman shows off his new Batmobile to Robin while driving/flying/boating to stop the Riddler who is, apparently, committing two simultaneous crimes.

This book is a mess, the Batman featured here seems to hew closest to Frank Miller’s “G--damn Batman” from his All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder’, berating Robin, while lamenting in his internal monologue that he should be more supportive of the boy. While I realize that historically that Batman did sport guns back in the day, I had long thought that had been retconned out, so it was just jarring to see them show up here as a plot point, the same for Dick wearing Tim’s costume. I realize that this was the first issue of a 12 issue story-arc, so it’s natural for it to throw out a lot of plot threads that will be followed up on over the coming issues, but there was a haphazardness to this that felt like it was throwing a ton of stuff at the wall, just to see what will stick. It felt like Adams drew a bunch of pages and then waited a year before worrying about grafting a plot onto it.

As for the art itself, it’s certainly very nice. Though not as smooth as his 70’s work, Adams can still draw the heck out of a Batman comic. The scenes with Batman driving his “new” Batmobile (actually a retooled model of Adams classic coup model from the 70’s) are just gorgeous, if only the dialogue written over them was not so clunky.

I had high hopes for this book, and I still do, but I can’t say that I’m not more than a little disappointed at the opening issue to this series. Hopefully, though Adams stumbled out of the gate, he’ll get back up and charge to the finish.

Batman: Odyssey Part 1
Neal Adams - Story & Art
Michael Golden - Inking (pp. 19 & 20)
Continuity Studios - Color
Rob Leigh - Letters
Mike Marts - Editor

Thinking About Batman

[Note: This was written on Wednesday, so, if the zombie horde has since taken over, please disregard what I have to say.]

I just finished reading Batman #683 and I feel that, it and #682 are easily the best issues of Grant Morrison's run since the three-issue Club of Heroes storyline last year. [SPOILERS AHEAD] In these two issues, we're shown what has happened to Batman since he was strapped into the machine in Final Crisis #2 (or was it 3), essentially, Desaad and Simyan have been beating all of the pain and rage out of his psyche and feeding it into their artificial soldiers to essentially give them an army of Angry Batmen. Fortunately, the pain he has endured over his life is so extreme that not only is it too much for creations of Apokolips to bear, but he can also wield it as a weapon against psychic attackers. This is one of those cool, clever ideas that Morrison has become known for, and really haven't been seen a lot in this series.

Along with all that, we're given some closure as to what happened to Batman after he plunged into the Gotham River with Dr. Hurt at the end of #681. The only real problem here is that, with Batman breaking free at the end, we get a big "TO BE CONTINUED IN FINAL CRISIS #6!" Now, I'm sure this is going to piss a lot of people off (and it already has on the internets), but it doesn't really bug me. Mostly because I'm already reading that series and it seems appropriate that if Bats is going to do something big in FC, it should happen in the main series. The big problem a lot of people are going to have is that the "end" of Batman R.I.P. isn't happening in Batman. I can kind of see their point, but let's face it, this is the nature of big event comics, if there's going to b a major change to a character, it's going to happen in the big event book d'jour. The only place that this hasn't happened is when Marvel showed an uncharacteristic amount of restraint in letting Captain America getting shot in his own book. But anyway, it is what it is, and I, for one am excited to read it when it happens.