Oh, I know I didn't pay full price for this one: Batman: Day of Judgment. Written by Scott Beatty, pencils by Dean Zachary, inks by Robert Campanella and Sal Buscema. This is one of those little crossover spinoffs that DC or Marvel can get away with sometimes: Batman sells x amount of copies a month. In crossover event y, DC can either have a Batman crossover issue, hopefully increasing sales by some factor of y; or they can do an entirely separate crossover issue, still get their x sales from the regular monthly book plus whatever they can get for this. Which hopefully wasn't a ton, but was probably more than you'd think.
For those of you who don't recall, Day of Judgment had something to do with Neron, the Demon Etrigan, and Asmodel; but is generally only remembered as, the one where they made Hal Jordan the Spectre. I have it somewhere, but...meh.
Batman, however, does his damnedest to sell this as a big deal...for the like three pages that he's in this comic. (Did I say three? It's only two.)
Seriously. Batman broods about how this could be the end, then packs up to join the Justice League, already in progress. And I wasn't going to scan that whole page, but is there any reason for Batman to go all Renfield and pose when Barb turns the desk lamp on him? Did he hiss, too?
Gotham's left in the hands of Nightwing, Robin, and Oracle; who treat this end of the world event like picking up another shift at the Gap to make a little extra beer money. Maybe a little less seriously than that, I don't know, I've never worked at the Gap...
Even though terrible things are (allegedly) happening--the fires of hell going out, the Spectre bonded with a fallen angel, insert Ghostbusters joke here--all Gotham gets is a handful of walking dead gangsters. I believe this is right after the Bat-Quake and the Bat-Plague and maybe the Bat-Locusts for all I know, so maybe anything more would've just been kicking Gotham City while it was down. And the gangsters? Well, hell, if they were that damn tough, they'd still be alive, right?
Nightwing and Robin do get a fun moment at the beginning, where Dick tells young Tim a fun story about Batgirl and Killer Moth; but nothing else here is that fun. They do have a particularly stupid moment where they doubt the existence or possibility of zombies: of course zombies are ludicrous, compared to magic wishing rings, water-breathing kings, Amazon princesses made of clay, 87 different alien races including Dick's old girlfriend...
Still, a nit: Robin and Nightwing, using the night-vision lenses in their masks, charge in and nearly get ventilated by the zombies, who, being cold and lifeless, don't show up on infrared. But the guns they were carrying did, floating in the air. (That maybe almost would make sense if they had been fired, but no.
All told, the zombie gangsters are less trouble than regular gangsters, since regular gangsters don't explode into dust when you punch them.
2 comments:
Oh Batman is SUCH a drama queen, why else would he wear that cape? I swear, the number of times that Alfred has walked in on him posing in front of a mirror would surprise you.
But I have to admit that the shot of the dead gangsters clomping out of the water in their cement shoes, was oddly cool.
I WANT MORE ZOMBIE GANGSTERS!
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