Batman: Black and White, DC’s award-winning Batman anthology title, returns for a new run since its last seven years ago. And this first issue is… meh, kinda crap!
A League of Shadows ninja tries to punch Batman; the coronavirus hits Gotham; some Manbat ninjas invade the Batcave; an experience from a Lazarus Pit; and Killer Croc takes a young woman hostage - or does he?
The stories aren’t any good, despite the pedigree of some of the writers like Paul Dini and G.Willow Wilson - they’re all forgettable, boring, unimaginative, and pointless. The coronavirus story is simply about Batman wearing a mask (over his regular mask)! The ones written by artists - JH Williams III and Emma Rios - read like bad poetry. Williams: “The only fight I have now is wrestling with ghosts of madness haunting me like a fever dream.” Rios: “I’ll walk these bones so others don’t meet themselves rotting.” Uh… huh.
The art is mostly great though. Despite their bad writing both Williams and Rios draw the best-looking pages in this comic. I especially liked how, in Williams’ story, Martha Wayne’s pearls were used as speech bubbles on the splash pages before morphing into COVID-19 particles. Greg Smallwood’s pages on the Killer Croc story are brilliant too - I’d love to see him draw a regular Batman comic. The Greg Capullo cover and Dexter Soy pinup were both awesome too.
I normally love Tradd Moore’s art, and it’s not terrible here, but he draws Batman as if he’s made out of jelly, which is a bizarre choice. Maybe it’s to show how fluid his movements are or the warped perspective of the ninja narrator but it just looked silly - like Zoidberg without his shell!
Also the full page bios of all the creators is unnecessary filler - like they’re there so DC doesn’t have to pay for an additional story to make up those pages.
Batman: Black and White #1 is an underwhelming start to this new run - this one really is as black and white as “art good, writing bad”!
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