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3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
When the person nexts to you brings this to class and all you do on it it's reading
vibess up there with killing joke and black mirror as my top Batman’s rn
I was a much younger woman when I first read this. My experience with comic books extended to Archie, the X-Men, and Lum. This book blew my mind. And today when I reread it, despite being much older and better-read, it did it all over again.
Wow, talk about symbolism and metaphors! A very intense story--both the artwork and the story itself bring the madness to light. Plenty of mythological symbolism throughout. The Joker acts more as the trickster guide rather than the antagonist in this one. It's Batman's own mind that creates the real conflict here.
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
56. I recently had to buy my nephew a Batman comic/graphic novel for Christmas and while browsing the local comic book store, I picked up and paged through a number of comics. I sometimes forget how much I enjoy graphic novels, so I made note of a handful of them and reserved them at the library. This was the first to arrive and frankly I just didn't like anything about it. The art was awful, the story was dull and wasn't engaging, and it was a slog to get to the end of it. I thought that I was missing something, but after reading a few others (reviews to come), it's just this one in particular that I didn't care for. The basic premise here is that the inmates have taken over the Asylum and will only let the workers go if Batman enters. Of course the inmates are all the typical villains that were put in there by Batman in the first place. This could have been far more interesting, but it just doesn't go anywhere and I was happy to be done with it. 2/5
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
There is a lot to like in the book. The script is great and the artwork is very original and interesting. Unfortunately, it is less than the sum of its parts. I feel McKean is the wrong artist for this tale. The art distances the story from the reader, so that he never really understands (this reader, at least) what is going on in the story. I enjoyed the script at the end much more than the comic proper, and I would love to see a version that welcomes the reader into the story.
What a fucking mess. The painted artwork was appalling, the story-line was incoherent, the dialogue was barely legible, and, most importantly, the portrayal of Batman was all wrong. This felt like a second-rate haunted-house horror that Batman was wedged into, and poorly at that. Batman's encounters with various villains felt thrown-in, in a cheap name-dropping way, his decision-making was baffling to non-existent, and the story's resolution -- hanging on a coin-flip -- was absurd.
The back-story to Gotham's Arkham Asylum was done much better in the Batman: Arkham Asylum video-game. If I'd read this first, I may never have played that game due to fear it was this bad.
I only did decide to read this after seeing it on multiple best graphic-novel lists. How can so many lists be so wrong? And how is the Goodreads rating so high? What am I missing?
The back-story to Gotham's Arkham Asylum was done much better in the Batman: Arkham Asylum video-game. If I'd read this first, I may never have played that game due to fear it was this bad.
I only did decide to read this after seeing it on multiple best graphic-novel lists. How can so many lists be so wrong? And how is the Goodreads rating so high? What am I missing?