Batman: The Audio Adventures #7 // Review
There’s a weird language being spoken. Bruce instantly recognizes it as a 9th-century Akkadian dialect intermingled with Latine vulgate and Renaissance-era German. Bruce isn’t a linguist. He’s a detective. There’s a hell of a lot of heat where he is. And there’s a hell of a lot of danger as well. Bruce finds himself in a very dangerous place at the opening of Batman: The Audio Adventures #7. Writer Dennis McNicholas concludes his story with the art team of J. Bone and Anthony Marques. The series ends in a big showdown with Killer Croc as he tears his way across Gotham City.
It’s a religious ceremony: “The Culling of the Orphans.” Those in charge of the ceremony are looking for “the Orphan of Orphans.” There isn’t much time. When the massacre starts, there won’t be any way to contain the carnage. Batman needs backup, but Robin is still off the grid...His locator is off, and they don’t know where he might be in all of the impending chaos of the moment. The Brood begin to engage in ritual suicide by combat. They will serve as the initial sacrifices all by themselves. It’s a tidy opening to what could prove to be a very tragic explosion of activity in Gotham City.
McNicholas ratchets up the tension while moving scenes around between heroes and villains and victims. Batman comes across as being very heroic, as does Robin. The two heroes swim around in the chaos quite well. It’s difficult to maintain the kind of tension that’s needed to really move a story along like this. The author does a pretty good job of it. There’s a definite feeling of stress and impending doom about the whole thing, and it’s clear that these heroes have to do something very powerful to save the day. It doesn’t quite feel as strong as it could, though.
J. Bone and Marques do an interesting job of keeping the tension high. It’s a bit strange. The rubbery cartoony mess of the heartbreak feels like it would normally be something that would compromise the overall intensity of the climax of the story. However, the dark villainy of the antagonist seems that much more powerful when given the sort of Saturday morning rubberiness that the art team is clearly managing here. It amplifies the overall sense of danger inherent in the plot.
Gotham City has been in so much peril over the many, many decades it’s been around. It’s kind of hard to do that in a way that feels fresh, original, and genuinely dangerous. The author and company manage to do something that feels more or less precisely where it needs to be in order to bring across a genuine sense of danger. However, the tension seems to be moving just a little bit too quickly for it to really come across as anything more than a very quick and breezy fugue.
