Batman and Robin return to Gotham after a year away and relieve their stand-in protector: a reformed Harvey Dent! But after a series of low-level criminals are knocked off in suspicious circumstances, has Two-Face also come back?
I think this one follows DC’s 52 series from roughly 10 years ago where the majority of superheroes disappeared for 12 months and street-level characters took over. Face the Face is a very dull, standard Batman story that’s essentially just about hitting the reset button and restoring the status quo, which it does in boring fashion.
There’s no way of figuring out who’s behind the killings as the culprit is someone very obscure we don’t see until the end so the whole mystery storyline is a bust. The rest of the book is watching Batman drearily going through the motions that I suppose fans at the time hadn’t seen for a while but today reads like the most mundane scenes.
Didn’t really understand why Harvey had been put in charge in the first place but his fall from grace once Batman returns is very convenient, extremely lame and quick – James Robinson doing what he’s been paid to do: put the toys back in their original positions. It’s as uninspired as it sounds.
I didn’t realise Jason Bard existed pre-Batman Eternal so that was an interesting surprise (he’s a private eye here) and I was glad to see those utterly shite villains, KGBeast and Magpie that I remember from the Knightfall storyline, get killed off. Leonard Kirk and Don Kramer’s art is nice, they use negative space well to focus the pages and make the images more powerful. The story might not be compelling but the comic flows well on a technical level.
Batman: Fart in the Face is just another unimpressive, rote Batman story, the usual crap that James Robinson cranks out for DC by the dozen.
Batman: Face the Face
KGBeast and Magpie existed before Nightfall. However, they've always been shite.
ReplyDeleteI know, I meant to say that I recall them from the Knightfall storyline - sorry, poor wording!
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