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A review by unladylike
Batman Eternal, Volume 2 by Scott Snyder, Tim Seeley
4.0
I got into this weekly series because of Scott Snyder (the chief writer and mastermind of all the great Batman comics of the past 4+ years) and Harper Row (badass working class sister who's developing into a great hero in the Bat-family).
Kudos to the artists for keeping the quality so consistent through such a complex story arc week after week. It's the script writers who couldn't keep up the consistency of tone in this volume. Specifically one writer stands out as having ruined an otherwise great story: Tim Seeley. I don't know who this guy is, but he makes Ray Fawkes' portions look great by comparison. The story-plotting/scripting/co-advisor junior assistant team for this series is Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV at the top, Ray Fawkes and Kyle Higgins doing an admirable job of both dark and more light-hearted moments throughout what is one of the most intricate Batman stories I've ever read. There are SO many threads to this plot all happening at once that to pull it off was truly a feat - and on a WEEKLY deadline! But then there's Tim Seeley, whose issues read like the Scooby Doo interlude in Batman Begins.
Whole pages of good artist talent are wasted so Seeley can slowly set up a corny joke, everyone's voice becomes that of Jay Leno, looking at the reader and squeaking out, "Ya git it?! See? Cuz...It's funny!"
Thankfully Seeley gets pulled after a few issues and Fawkes/Higgins, with direction from Snyder/Tynion pull it together for the closing act of this dense volume.
One final quibble I forgot to mention in my review of Vol. 1, which carries over into this one: The plot arc about Gordon getting thrown in jail hinges upon one moment, wherein he fires a single bullet past a hired villain, and that bullet hits an electrical panel, causing a subway train to be unable to brake, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives. Even Batman points out early on that frying that control panel shouldn't have been enough to cause the tragedy, but nobody ever looks further at that point. So they sweep this unlikely plot point under the rug and never look back for the sake of the bigger picture. But seriously, you can't just smash a visible control panel at pedestrian level on a subway platform and make trains crash into one another like that! Gordon was framed and (at least in these 2 volumes) we never get to see the World's Greatest Detective put the pieces together of the incident itself - more just making excuses and looking at the red herrings strewn about the scene.
Kudos to the artists for keeping the quality so consistent through such a complex story arc week after week. It's the script writers who couldn't keep up the consistency of tone in this volume. Specifically one writer stands out as having ruined an otherwise great story: Tim Seeley. I don't know who this guy is, but he makes Ray Fawkes' portions look great by comparison. The story-plotting/scripting/co-advisor junior assistant team for this series is Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV at the top, Ray Fawkes and Kyle Higgins doing an admirable job of both dark and more light-hearted moments throughout what is one of the most intricate Batman stories I've ever read. There are SO many threads to this plot all happening at once that to pull it off was truly a feat - and on a WEEKLY deadline! But then there's Tim Seeley, whose issues read like the Scooby Doo interlude in Batman Begins.
Whole pages of good artist talent are wasted so Seeley can slowly set up a corny joke, everyone's voice becomes that of Jay Leno, looking at the reader and squeaking out, "Ya git it?! See? Cuz...It's funny!"
Thankfully Seeley gets pulled after a few issues and Fawkes/Higgins, with direction from Snyder/Tynion pull it together for the closing act of this dense volume.
One final quibble I forgot to mention in my review of Vol. 1, which carries over into this one: The plot arc about Gordon getting thrown in jail hinges upon one moment, wherein he fires a single bullet past a hired villain, and that bullet hits an electrical panel, causing a subway train to be unable to brake, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives. Even Batman points out early on that frying that control panel shouldn't have been enough to cause the tragedy, but nobody ever looks further at that point. So they sweep this unlikely plot point under the rug and never look back for the sake of the bigger picture. But seriously, you can't just smash a visible control panel at pedestrian level on a subway platform and make trains crash into one another like that! Gordon was framed and (at least in these 2 volumes) we never get to see the World's Greatest Detective put the pieces together of the incident itself - more just making excuses and looking at the red herrings strewn about the scene.