Comic Book Review

Mania Grade: C+

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Issue: 835
Authors: John Rozum, Tom Mandrake
Publisher: DC
Price: $2.99

DETECTIVE COMICS #835

The All-New, More-Evil Scarecrow

By Kurt Amacker August 13, 2007

DETECTIVE COMICS #835
© DC Comics

Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow, escapes – God help me for saying this – from Arkham Asylum in the most implausible manner imaginable. Without his fear gas and mixed with the general population, he mind-f-cks both the inmates that torment him and the guards that keep him. Rather than gas them, he uses his skills as a psychologist to hypnotize and mentally torment his way through the prison, causing several inmates to commit suicide in the most unusual fashions. Once he escapes, he starts brutally murdering random people. With no pattern to speak of, Batman becomes increasingly perplexed and hostile. At the same time, he tries to maintain a romantic relationship between Bruce Wayne and Kay Scott, who finds herself uncomfortably close to one of the Scarecrow’s attacks.

This issue continues the ongoing revamp of Batman’s rogues’ gallery, during which we’ve seen drastic changes for the Riddler, Harley Quinn, the Joker, Scarface, and a few other lesser-known personalities. And yet, Rozum’s stilted, fragmentary narrative ill serves the material. I wish comic writers wouldn’t feel so free as to write in ridiculous sentence fragments. Imagine if my reviews read like that. Like this. Just imagine. What if they did? Horrifying. Unreadable. Isn’t it?

Rather than coming across as a disturbing transition for Jonathan Crane, this feels like another fill-in issue between runs by Paul Dini. Some of the deaths Crane causes look and sound rather gruesome, but they feel more pedestrian than shocking. We’ve seen Batman take on the worst of the worst, so a guy killing himself by eating the rope he would’ve hanged himself with fails to register the way it could with another character.

Tom Mandrake provides some nice art that reminds me of Neal Adams’s work on Batman, but that’s about all I can recommend with this issue. If you’re considering adding Detective Comics to your pull list, wait until October when Paul Dini comes back.

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