Pages

Tuesday 21 March 2017

Batman: Officer Down Review (Greg Rucka, Chuck Dixon)


Jim Gordon gets shot three times in the back on his birthday – Gothamites party hardcore! Catwoman’s at the scene of the crime. Whodunit - and whydunit?! 

Batman: Officer Down is another in a seemingly endless line of godawful Batman comics I’ve been reading lately. I sure can pick them, eh? 

For no reason, when Gordon’s shot, Batman stands by his bed like a lemon for almost the entire book while the Bat-family and the GCPD look for Catwoman who obviously didn’t shoot him! But they still waste a ton of time stupidly chasing Catwoman - why’s she running at all?! Just tell Nightwing or whoever what’s what! FFS!! - only for her to tell you what you already know. It’s the thinnest of plotlines. 

The shooter’s reveal is underwhelming to say the least. It’s an unknown character who did it for boring reasons and the book ends unsatisfyingly, almost anticlimactically, especially as the change didn’t stick and was just done for this dumb “New Gotham” nonsense from this era of Batman. 

This book also has some of the worst art I’ve ever seen in a Batman book - a different artist draws each issue unremarkably but the one drawn by The Pander Brothers looked like they did it in MS Paint with a shaky mouse! No wonder I’ve never seen these guys’ work in anything else. 

Officer Down is a shitty cop show episode with added capes. Like other terrible Batman crossovers, it has the kind of storyline that could’ve been wrapped up within two issues rather than seven but got padded out to sell more comics. Officer Down is a completely awful, forgettable Batman comic that fully deserves to be out of print!

No comments:

Post a Comment