I had some time to kill before a shift on Saturday, so I went to the library to read a little. I picked up
Batman: Cacophany. I figured it couldn't be that bad. Kevin Smith's good at snappy dialogue. Maybe he just got lazy when he wrote
The Widening Gyre.nope.aviThis book has to be The Laziest Batman Story Ever Written. It reads like, and I'm just guessing here, Kevin Smith looked through the Batman mythos and cherry-picked elements to include in the story. Also, for some reason, the Joker is obsessed with feces. For those of you that haven't read the story, I'll include those stories in parentheses.
It starts off with Deadshot breaking into Arkham to kill the Joker. He is foiled by a mysterious new villain, who shoots Deadshot and breaks the Joker out, giving him a case of money to cause havoc (similar to what Bane did in
Knightfall). This new guy, Onomatopoeia, speaks only in sound effects. He wears a long coat, a mask that obscures his entire face, and carries a pair of pistols (as Hush does in
Hush) I suppose Smith was feeling clever by making a villainous embodiment of those zany fight captions from the 60's show.
So the Joker is mad at Maxie Zeus, a former villain who has taken Smilex and engineered a designer drug out of it. The Joker blows up an orphanage with Zeus's nephew in it, forcing the reformed Greek villain back into madness (reminiscent of Two-Face in
The Dark Knight Returns). Batman learns about this and confronts The Joker and Onomatopoeia. There's a fight scene and stuff, and Onomatopoeia stabs Joker so he can get away himself. Commissioner Gordon pleads Batman to let Joker die, but Batman decides to save him. At the end, Batman and Joker have a conversation in the hospital about how their struggle will end (just like in
The Killing Joke).
This isn't just a poor Batman story, it's a poor story in general. Yes, Kevin Smith can write snappy dialogue. So can Brian Michael Bendis. But being able to write real-sounding casual conversation doesn't make one an expert in detective fiction or heroic prose. Every character talks and talk and talks... The real insult is the final scene. Alan Moore did this scene so much better, and he did it
thirty-five minutes twenty-two years ago. Further, the villain comes across as... well, I hesitate to use the term, but he is a textbook Mary Sue*. He's the author's pet villain, and he defeats Batman, stabs the Joker, and
gets away without either of them knowing who he is. The art is... serviceable. Not good, not bad. The Joker's face looks pretty weird sometimes though, and I can't shake the feeling that Walt Flanagan got this job because he's Kevin Smith's friend. All in all, it's a story that could be better told, and
has been, several times.
I give it one phat blunt out of five.
*or 'Villain Sue' if you're anal-retentive about TVTropes