Thursday, April 02, 2015

You've Been Warned: Shadow of the Bat #19 and #20

I have been making my way through some of the Knightfall trades in recent weeks and this little arc is the absolute bottom of the barrel. A villain named the Tally Man is introduced - he's part Joker, part accountant. He's got a pretty strange modus operandi, and it never really made sense to me in terms of how it is executed (pun intended). His background is actually fairly intriguing but Vince Giarrano sloppy storytelling makes it very difficult to follow. Let's not even get into the action sequences. The scratchy, pseudo-abstract artwork gets in the way of the flow of things. All in all, it seems as though Alan Grant was trying to create a new villain by simply putting some grim and gritty ingredients in a blender. It did not work. The Jean-Paul Valley era Batman stories are an acquired taste at the best of times, but this one leaves a bitter aftertaste.

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