Detective Comics, Volume 2: Scare Tactics is an assortment of bad Batman short stories, mostly written by Tony S. Daniel, a guy who can draw right good but cannot write right at all!
Catwoman steals something for Scarecrow or something – Batman stops her. There’s a Night of the Owls crossover where chaos erupts inside Arkham Asylum after the Talons target Dr. Arkham – Batman stop them. This is followed by a tedious three-part story involving a mad scientist cloning himself – Batman stops him. Black Mask and Mad Hatter do something – Batman stops them. And finally there’s another Bruce Wayne origin set in the Himalayas and the book closes out with a series of short Two-Face stories about nothing.
So yeah: the writing is formulaic, tedious, unimpressive and the stories are almost instantly forgettable – so it goes with Tony Daniel’s Batman comics! Still, even though it’s obviously heavily influenced by Jim Lee, I love his sleek art style which is so damn near perfect for Batman’s look. In fact generally it’s impressive how many artists there are contributing pages in this volume and the art looks almost uniformly the same; just goes to show have pervasive Jim Lee’s art style is at DC. Except for the Two-Face backup art which was just black ink smeared on the page making it hard to discern what was going on (the answer: nothing worthwhile).
Pretty pages don’t make for a great book though and I was immensely bored reading this lengthy, pointless volume. Tony Daniel is just another artist who can’t write – I wouldn’t recommend any Batman books with this dude’s name on. The cover made me laugh though – looks like Batman’s taking an almighty shit and he’s barely hanging on!
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