Shadow of the Pants collects several Alan Grant Batman comics from way back in the day, and they allllll suck! Woohoo!
The longest story here is the four-part The Last Arkham where a killer with Zsasz’s MO is murdering Gotham citizens – except Zsasz is safely locked up in Arkham. Or is he…? You know how you’d find out for sure? Put a fucking camera on him at all times and see if he sneaks out via a hidden exit! But that’d be, y’know, sensible, so instead Batman has himself admitted as an Arkham inmate, in a cell far away from Zsasz’s, where he can’t see Zsasz sneak out. Batman supposedly has a genius IQ – but not when Alan Grant’s writing him! Four issues! That garbage storyline could’ve been wrapped up in four pages!
There’s a grim story about heroin abuse where a crappy vigilante called Black Spider kills a bunch of drug dealers; a racist beefcake fights Batman in The Ugly American; crappy Z-listers team up to try and win for a change in The Misfits (they predictably don’t); a Scots gentleman hosts a dinner for his enemies at his very own Scottish castle (of course Gotham has one) in The Thane of Gotham (the phonetic Scotch accent is painful to read); and yet another disastrous character, this time going by The Human Flea, fights Kadaver, a poor man’s Joker.
It’s not just that the stories are boring – though they all are – it’s that they’re plotted so stupidly. I already mentioned the flaw in the Last Arkham storyline. But also, putting Batman against the likes of Joker, Ivy, Penguin and Scarecrow in a closed-room – who thinks fatass Penguin and noodle-armed Scarecrow stand a chance of beating Batman in a straight fist fight?? Calendar Man literally throwing number cards at Batman in a fight though did make me smile for its utter idiocy. The art is just bad early ‘90s crap – rushed looking lines, awful, basic colours, terrible character designs, and the Batmobile looks like a Tonka toy reject.
Batman: Shadow of the Bat, Volume 1 is a collection of some of the worst Batman comics you’ll ever read – don’t bother.
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