Weak Formidophobia
After some pretty good recent covers, this one is way too close up, super generic, and all around just confusing. Where are they falling into and what does it have to do with anything?
Finch's art just doesn't seem as ragged and harrowed as it did in recent issues. The lines are thicker and more defined, and the colors are a bight brighter and also more defined. The opening fight scene is made up of a lot of very crowded panels with a seriously confusing flow. I have no idea where Batman was stabbed, there's about 5 different spots it seems to be in. The climax of the fight is undeniably badass, but how well it sticks to Batman's character is debatable, as he fires his grappling line through Scarecrow's lower jaw.
It's just that it feels like Hurwitz wrote himself into a corner at this point, because the conflict that's encompassed most of this arc is resolved at the beginning of this issue, only for Scarecrow to suddenly seem to have a whole plan worked out. He desperately tries to save the girl who showed him a kindness and reignited the sparks of his own childhood, which is amazing for the character work being done here, but then he seems to completely forget about that as he launches a completely unrelated plot. The big finale to this arc basically comes out of nowhere at the last minute and completely forgets everything amazing the arc has been building previously.
In Conclusion: 2/5
I've been loving or at least really liking most of Hurwitz's work on this series, and this issue STILL outshines the horrendous first few issues, but this issue was still pretty bad. It dropped all the good stuff when it attempted to fix the problems and just ended up creating a bigger mess.
