Batman #8

Script: Steve Orlando
Art: Riley Rossmo
Colors: Ivan Plascencia
Letters: Deron Bennett
Publisher: DC

My general mood is “this crossover I'm reading: it's not great!”, so you'd think I would stay away from them but it's also really easy to get me to pick up a comic book so I end up giving a lot of events a shot. I've stuck with Monster Men for longer than I thought I would (for longer than I should have, to be honest) with the aim of reviewing it and the thing about this crossover is, it's not great! SO, I'm sorry if this and my review for Nightwing make no sense whatsoever. My brain's melted trying to read this stuff.

Sure, Rossmo's art is still good, and Plascencia's coloring is really solid. I guess I already talked about how much I like Rossmo's Batwoman and he goes out of his way to make scenes which the plot discards panels later (more on that in a second) memorable. I do like that DC completely forwent any attempt at trying to make the crossover have a unified art style, allowing them to feature interesting artists like MacDonald and Rossmo, but aside from that I can't find many redeeming qualities in this.

But this crossover has been completely driftless. There's no depth to anything that's happening, there's just a string of strong character moments, and I mean… that's fine but I really don't know if that's worth it just in and of itself. There's a lot of places where you can see the seams of this arc, like in how this issue quickly resolves the sub-plot of Cass and Spoiler vs. The Mysterious Goo That Is Turning People Violent, and I guess the Goo turns into a large Goo Monster Man after which neither this issue nor Nightwing #6 do much with the Goo Monster Man. Which makes one wonder, what's the point of showing us the corpses of the 4 Monster Men several times, if such a thing as a Goo! Monster! Man! can just show up out of nowhere.

It just feels like there's no consequence to anything that happens, Batman gets a Clayface suit, but Monster... Gotham Girl punches it away 2 pages later. Batwoman mean mugs and exclaims “Time for a lesson.” before facing off against Monster… Nightwing and Monster… Gotham Girl and then proceeds to get beat up for a couple of pages. Both of those panels could work really well but there's no attempt whatsoever to make them function within the context of a story. It's the polar opposite of Detective Comics, which was similarly written expressly to service its cast of characters with big, impressive moments but it at least gave the impression of building towards a bigger plot.

There's no attempt to enlighten the readers as to the what the point of this is, there's a handful of character moments which are interesting but this arc has been completely vapid. This issue in particular felt like filler.