Well, it sounded like a really great premise. Hugo Strange sends his Tyger guards into Wayne Manor, a scenario that would add greater depth to the Arkham City DLC challenge maps that featured the Wayne family home as well as the Batcave.
Regretably, we spend the first half of this book wasting our time with Hugo Strange. The moment in which he launches an attack on the prison is shown from the villain’s perspective, but we don’t dig any deeper into how he organized such a maneuver nor do we get any interesting insight into the character’s mind. It’s boring. If you’ve played the video game then there is absolutely no reason for you to read the first half of this comic. None. And remember in my last review of Arkham Unhinged #14 how I pointed out that the color of Barbara’s hair was wrong and that it wasn’t the first time a colorist on this series had made a hair-color mistake? Well, it happened again and this time it was with The Riddler, who is shown as having dark black hair.
The second half of the book actually takes us where we wanted to go in the first place: The House of Wayne. We start things off in the batcave where Tim is fighting off Tyger guards with ease. It’s not a terribly exciting battle and it doesn’t even compare to a similar battle we saw in the latter half of Scott Snyder’s City of Owls. The action was easy enough to follow, but in one of the last pages in the cave, I was really lost. There was a shot of Robin popping open the shield on his staff and then the next panel had the guards shooting toward the ceiling and then there was a shot of Robin back on the ground, but the giant Joker card had fallen on top of the guards. I’m not entirely sure what was going on there. This scene also brought up a question about whether or not this means that there are now dozens of Tyger guards who know that Bruce is Batman, but that was quickly explained away in another page or so before we moved on to Wayne Manor and Nightwing.
None of these fights hold any emotional weight, there isn’t anything particularly bad-ass on display, and the guards never feel like a real threat. It’s just page after page of Dick and Tim delivering one liners as they punch and throw things at faceless assailants. Perhaps if the artwork had been better the action might have pulled me in more, but Davide Fabbri’s pencils are merely passable and the colors are often too dark and we don’t see enough of the environments that play such an important part in an episode like this.
Overall
With so many Batman comics on the market, fans of the world of Gotham need to spend their money carefully and there are frankly far too many better Bat-titles out there than this one. Thankfully, there are only a handful of issues left in this series which has overstayed its welcome by about a year.
SCORE: 3.5/10
