"The Hungry Grass" is an excellent issue, and I love Milligan's brief run on 'Tec. His weird, creepy stories were a winning combination with the classic Aparo art. I do agree, though, that his stories are told "in the void", and that partly explains why he's never been much of a mainstream superhero comic writer. He's always played fast and loose with continuity, and it's notable that most of his successful longer runs (I'm thinking Shade the Changing Man, X-Force/X-Statix and to a lesser extent Human Target) diverted wildly from previous versions of those properties and were basically Milligan's own, personal take on the characters.

I really like the interactions between Bruce and Alfred in these issues.

It's such an odd thing. He clearly took pains to read and emulate major aspects of what other writers were doing with Batman at the time, but the continuity itself didn't seem to interest him at all.

One could argue he ran in the complete opposite direction with X-Force. There his style was a complete break from what had occurred before, and yet there was continuity tying it all to the runs that had come before, though ever so loosely.



Didn't get much of that in this issue. I'm looking forward to it.

The last time I read these issues, I was a snot nosed eleven year old who wasn't paying much attention to what I was reading if there wasn't a major story arc in play or lots of talk about the issue in the middle school cafeteria.

True enough. You could argue the two stories of his I did thus far had a greater long term effect on Batman continuity than anything Barr or Wolfman ever did in their significantly longer runs. We've already got the basis for so much of what Morrison will do in exploring the ancient black mysticism surrounding Gotham City ten years down the road, as well as the first appearance of Blackgate prison, which will go on to become a mainstay in Batman continuity.

Clearly, people paid attention to these stories.

Legends of the Dark Knight #18



"Venom: Part Three"
writer: Denny O'Neil
Layouts: Trevor Von Eeden
pencils: Russell Braun
inks: Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez
letters: Willie Shubert
colors: Steve Oliff
editors: Kevin Dooley & Andrew Helfer

grade: D

(Part 1 and Part 2 of this story)

Ugh.

This story has devolved into melodrama, with everyone operating at the total extremes of human emotion and behavior to the point that none of it rings authentic nor genuine at all. Any potential to warn young impressionable readers about the dangers of drugs is lost when we witness transformations that are just completely and utterly unbelievable.

Before:




After:




Sure. I believe that.


Or when O'Neil needs to show Batman at his breaking point. Okay, you want to put him in a cliche phone booth on some lonely street corner for no apparent reason? Fine. You want him to beg forgiveness to Alfred? Fine. You want him to cry through his mask...?



I suppose O'Neil has forgotten, too, that Breyfogle established Batman has glass lenses over the eye holes giving them that pupil-less effect.


We do get one almost moving moment towards the end of this story, though it's hard to take seriously considering the unbelievable speed and extremity of young Timothy's drug-induced transformation:



Damn. That kid's opinions on the works of Joyce Kilmer changed fast.



And, of course, back to characters being depicted in extreme melodrama, what about the villains of this story, who are just so thoroughly irredeemable?



We need someone to experiment on? Hey, why not my son? And, by the way, all chicks who don't want to put out deserve to be murdered brutally. Just sayin'.




So yeah. This story is getting pretty terrible, and whether O'Neil was going for it consciously or not, the middle section bears an uncanny resemblance to the montage sequence in Rocky IV, Bruce fighting desperately to come back from his defeat while Timothy pulls his best steroid-induced impersonations of Ivan Drago.





Minor Details:

O'Neil takes the opportunity to bring back two minor but important things to him in this story:

1) Batman's mentors:

Back in 1988, O'Neil was pushing hard for his writers to determine a definite list of mentors Batman studied under in order to become the Caped Crusader, and he forced these details into the stories with the subtlety of a hundred pound mallet. Here he brings some of that back, just as a completely apropos-of-nothing reminder to us all.




2. Santa Prisca:

Ah, O'Neil's favorite fictional island harbor for drug cartels. Of course he works that one into this story.







Plot synopsis in one sentence: Batman agrees to kill Gordon in order to get more Venom but immediately feels guilty about it and stops himself from killing Gordon at the last second, informing him of who is trying to have him killed instead; He goes back to take them down himself but is distracted by an opportunity for more Venom and lets them escape to Santa Prisca, so, wracked with guilt, he begs Alfred to come back and spends a month locked in the Batcave, detoxing, while the General and the Doctor perform weird experiments on the General's son Timothy, turning him into a powerhouse monster who even murders his girlfriend at their command, all while Bruce returns from a month in detox and is ready to hunt the General and the scientist down.

You know what would have helped Venom? A first-class second- or third-rate villain!

Like the Spook! Or the Black Spider! Or Captain Stingaree!

Or Johnny Witts!

The Getaway Genius?

I know! Two Tone!

I love the Nocturna storyline in Detective from about #530 to what was it? The weird way it ended, where she floated away in a balloon?

I know who Black Spider is, but just from seeing him in bat-villain crowd scenes. But I put him on the list because I ordered Detective #463 and #464 and should get them in a few days. Should I be super-excited or merely excited?

Go with merely excited for now. That will leave you somewhere to go.

Black Spider was a little odd, because writers seemed to forget what his original motivation was. He started as a vigilante who killed drug dealers (he called himself Black Spider because he preyed on the 'super-fly' drug dealers), but he later turned into a sort of generic assassin. I think the best Black Spider story is Shadow of the Bat #5 (1992) where a personal tragedy reminded him what his original mission was.