Wow, where do I start.
I've heard how notoriously bad this was but I wasn't expecting THIS bad. First of all I'll start off with the positive: the art is good, the panels are laid out well and action generally flows well, the artist does successfully manage to pull off a lot of the absurdities in Denny O'Neil's script without making the scenes laughable (no such luck with the dialogue) and the colouring is nice especially considering how much mediocre colouring was going on in this early nineties period.
Where the comics suffers is from one of the worst scripts I've read outside of the 1960's period which writer O'Neil seems to have set this Batman story; complete with shark attack and shark repellent, OK maybe that part was written as a sly nod towards the Adam West Batman series but that does not explain for the rest of the script nor why they thought the shark attack was worth depicting on the cover of Issue #19.
The main meat of the storyline deals with an [out of character] Batman being unable to save a drowning girl as he is unable to lift a heavy rock to get to her, he has an [again uncharacteristic] rant at Alfred and goes to inform the father of his daughter's death, the father is beyond unsympathetic to as not blink an eyelid when informed of her death (which the normal Batman, the world's greatest detective, would immediately see as suspect) but instead explains, conveniently, about his new super drugs which gives the user superhuman strength, [in character] Batman throws the drugs back in the man’s face and leaves. To cut a [very] long story short Batman has more rants at Alfred until he quits and chooses to start taking the drug, he drops use of the Bat suit, starts taking out criminals and is given stereotypical ‘roid rage traits and is constantly shown as a foaming user scrambling for his next fix. Now the whole addict storyline is a noble thing, and O’Neil explains in the preface is a personal story, but it was told much better by Stan Lee in Amazing Spider-Man 20 years earlier through Harry Osborn’s drug use, here it just doesn’t work as the story relies on the Batman that we know and love to act completely out of character to facilitate the cycle of addiction. If Denny wanted to tell this story then he should have told it via a DC character that works, editorial should have rejected these scripts outright.
The dialogue is laughably dumb, and character interactions are constantly out of character. This whole thing would have been forgivable as a “story of its time” if this had popped up in a Batman Showcase book of 1960’s stories but this was originally published in 1991! Both comic book writing and the Batman character had come a long way in that time.
DC should keep this out of print so people forget about this faux Batman tale.
