Batman #70: In The Dark of the Night

In the 1997 musical Anastasia (which kid-Bethany watched on endless repeat) there’s a scene when the reanimated corpse of the evil magician and renegade monk Grigori Rasputin sings a happy little song about clawing his way out of limbo, covering the scent of his own decay with a squirt of cologne, and taking revenge on the last of the Romanovs. The zombie monk chants, ‘then I opened my eyes and the nightmare was me!’ That lyric basically provides The Dark Knight’s thesis statement for this issue.

The art was highly effective, here. The ventriloquist grin gleamed with a genuine sense of malice. The panels were effectively laid out and the lettering contributed to the atmosphere without disrupting the effectiveness of the lines. The coloring, as is always the case in this book, was absolutely perfect.

Despite this, I cannot help but feel that half of this issue served as padding, unnecessarily prolonging the story. The story would have been twice as effective in half the space, but that is the difficulty of this form of narrative. Perhaps the next issue will have better pacing.