Psychedelic Batmania

Batman #678

The Club of Villains is stalking Robin and Nightwing and has attacked Alfred, and there’s nothing Batman can do, because Bruce Wayne has been shot full of crystal meth and heroin and is wandering the streets of Gotham unable to remember who he is. His guide is a homeless man who Batman helped an issue or two ago, but who now appears to have unusual abilities of his own. And by the end, there’s the biggest, weirdest change of costumes I think I’ll ever see.

Verdict: Thumbs up, I think. I really do wish it wasn’t necessary to guess at all the obscure comic references Grant Morrison is dropping on us. (All the “Zur-En-Arrh” stuff is a reference to a Batman story from 1958 where Bats traveled to another planet.) But homeless guys who may not be there, evil mimes, Bat-Mite cameos, and wildly drugged-up stream-of-consciousness Bruce Wayne actually ends up going a long way toward making this work.

1985 #2

Toby has run into the Hulk and the Juggernaut — which is a little weird, since where he’s from, both of them are just comic book characters. Of course, no one believes there are real supervillains around, but the bad guys are tired of being cooped up in that old house, so some of them go out to stir up some mayhem.

Verdict: I’m gonna have to give it a thumbs down. The primary problem here is the art — I know I liked it last issue, but that was one or two normal people and a bunch of supervillains in costume. In this issue, we have several costumed villains, but we have a lot more normals — and it’s really hard to tell one normal person from the next. There need to be some sort of clear identifiers to tell everyone apart, even if it’s just some captions here and there…