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A review by pantsyreads
Batman: Death by Design by Chip Kidd
2.0
This seemed like a fun Elseworlds-esque experiment (what if Batman/Bruce Wayne existed in the 1930s?), but this was ultimately a flop for me.
Gotham is undergoing an architectural boom and Bruce Wayne is spearheading the renovations of an old train station his old man had built decades earlier. However, accidents begin happening - faulty machinery, collapses, etc - that are too frequent to be accidents.
Sadly, the underlying mystery I've described above is just *boring*. The Joker makes several appearances in this story that felt our of place and like he was thrown in simply because he's a popular villain, and it was easy to guess how everything would wrap up.
Another problem I had is with how Kidd wrote Bruce Wayne. For some reason, he's written as wry and self-deprecating which didn't feel right at all. The Bruce I know is a broody pile of angst. I can appreciate Kidd trying to go for a different interpretation, but this felt like a completely different person to me.
Lastly, I honestly didn't find the art to be that great. The soft pencils certainly fit the period and atmosphere, and Taylor is obviously good at drawing architectural elements, but the way he draws people looked.. off. I also found that Bruce's face was drawn very inconsistently - he would have a hard, chiseled jaw one moment, then a rounder and softer face in the next panel. He often didn't even look the same page-to-page. Mileage may vary on this point, but I was personally disappointed on this front.
(Also, this is kind of a stupid complaint, but that whole scene on the giant glass floor that's like a million stories up? that was the dumbest looking club I've ever seen in my life, even for something that is complete fiction. There were no walls!! Perhaps could easily fall hundreds of feet to their death if they weren't careful and it was supposed to be a CLUB. Just, why???)
Gotham is undergoing an architectural boom and Bruce Wayne is spearheading the renovations of an old train station his old man had built decades earlier. However, accidents begin happening - faulty machinery, collapses, etc - that are too frequent to be accidents.
Sadly, the underlying mystery I've described above is just *boring*. The Joker makes several appearances in this story that felt our of place and like he was thrown in simply because he's a popular villain, and it was easy to guess how everything would wrap up.
Another problem I had is with how Kidd wrote Bruce Wayne. For some reason, he's written as wry and self-deprecating which didn't feel right at all. The Bruce I know is a broody pile of angst. I can appreciate Kidd trying to go for a different interpretation, but this felt like a completely different person to me.
Lastly, I honestly didn't find the art to be that great. The soft pencils certainly fit the period and atmosphere, and Taylor is obviously good at drawing architectural elements, but the way he draws people looked.. off. I also found that Bruce's face was drawn very inconsistently - he would have a hard, chiseled jaw one moment, then a rounder and softer face in the next panel. He often didn't even look the same page-to-page. Mileage may vary on this point, but I was personally disappointed on this front.
(Also, this is kind of a stupid complaint, but that whole scene on the giant glass floor that's like a million stories up? that was the dumbest looking club I've ever seen in my life, even for something that is complete fiction. There were no walls!! Perhaps could easily fall hundreds of feet to their death if they weren't careful and it was supposed to be a CLUB. Just, why???)