With the fifth (and final) issue of Man-Bat, the story finally becomes worthwhile. It’s a long haul too--from the first issue, Jones’s handle on the story is loose at best. Man-Bat is an unspecified “event” comic. It exists to solve a problem--probably to move the sitcom-ready character into position for an appropriate guest spot in Grant Morrison’s Batman comic. What should have been a horror comic--Mike Huddleston being known for it and Bruce Jones having been known for it (in the 1980s)--is instead a Batman: Gotham Knights limited series. There are a few villain guest-stars, with two of them having more page-time than the title character. Since there’s a contrived plot to bring these characters together and part of that plot includes a well-telegraphed twist ending.
Some of the first issue actually resembles Bruce Jones plotting, with attention paid to throw-away characters instead of the leads. Problematically, by the time Jones actually does get interested in his story, it’s the fourth issue, when the twist has begun to unravel enough to allow him to actually spend time with the Man-Bat character and not worry about revealing too much too soon. Batman eventually shows up as well and--after an issue or two of wasted pages--Jones makes him interesting in the fourth and fifth issues. The series is so seeped in the current Batman continuity (instead of the historical Batman mythology), Jones doesn’t have any leeway to treat these characters as anything but pieces on a Monopoly board. He gets a bit of a chance in those last issues and the series improves visibly.
Man-Bat never got bad enough to bother me--though the first couple issues are such downers it’s hard to imagine why anyone would think anyone else would want to read them--and at the end, after the fifth issue, I had actually warmed quite a bit to it. Until, writing this post, I realized Jones had only sketched out some significance in that last issue. I get the significance and it’s still affecting, but he could have gone further, instead of wasting time on Batman and the bad guys.