I rarely buy comic books for the artist, even more rarely do I buy them solely for the artist. Cliff Chiang is a wonderful artist and these two issues of Detective Comics, 815 and 816, do have beautiful art. It’s too bad Shane McCarthy is the worst writer I’ve sat and read in a long time.
It’s not just the awful dialogue... It’s McCarthy’s incompetence in creating believable characters. McCarthy kills about thirty innocent people in these issues and features a police force who is absolutely unconcerned with it. It all falls into the DC editorial mandates on Batman comics, I’m sure, but just because those mandates are idiotic, doesn’t mean good comic books can’t be produced. (For example, Andersen Gabrych’s Detective Comics run, under the same editor, is wonderful).
McCarthy doesn’t even necessarily have bad ideas about Batman, he just doesn’t have any writing skills. I liked the focus on the relationship between Alfred and Batman, it was cute. But the pacing in these issues is ludicrous--the scenes have no weight, except maybe for the reader, who can’t wait for them to be over. I bought these two issues on a lark--for the Chiang art--but it’s $5 I could have either done something good with or just torn up. This story was offensively worthless. Maybe I can get $0.50 for it on eBay.
I wouldn’t have even written it up, except there needs to be some digital record of this story’s unbearable writing.