Don't Say "Gentleman Ghost" Five Times Into The Mirror
Lanzing, Ed Brisson, Terry Blas, Jeremy Haun
It's the spooky season and the way we're going to start that off, at least on the DC front, is to have an anthology book with probably the greatest name ever, bringing us horror stories that feature some of our favorite heroes and villains. These things are usually hit or miss with me, which is a problem with the type of price tag that these books have but I look forward to this and want to know what kind of mad and macabre things these short stories can do with the time allowed them. Let's jump into this issue and check it out.
For this year's Halloween anthology special we're going to get what we normally get out of these kinds of books and that's a mixed bag of stories and art but really, I don't know what we're really supposed to get out of a lot this because even from the beginning of the book where we have Damian Wayne's Teen Titans, this book feels out of time or something that doesn't belong because we're well past that team, and even the way that they act and talk feels off for who we've seen these characters be in the past and how they are now. They're the ones telling our campfires tales this issue about urban legend Female Furies, Batman's ghost sightings, and Aqualad's run-in with Ogopogo, the Canadian Nessie. The thing about these stories that disappoint me though is that they're not really all that scary in what they're dealing with or barely come off as something that was supposed to be a spooky style story.
Like I said though, this is a mixed bag of writing and art because where you will get a decent story, you may have characters not feeling like themselves or vice versa and one of the stories is just narration boxes with a full-page done up as one panel and it just comes off as boring by the end. Sadly, my favorite one of these stories is ridiculous to me where Darkseid and Harley Quinn team up but it's in this story that the mood of what this book is trying to accomplish actually comes through and while there is some fun to be had at points in this long, expensive book, I don't know if it's ultimately worth the price of admission.
All in all, when you have a story where you have Batman chasing after Mad Hatter, who's on a rocket tri-cycle and then Batman also sees a ghost truck you know that the scares are going to be minimal and at the end of the day with that in mind I can only say that you will get some stories with characters you don't normally get to see very often and that's cool if you don't mind if the quality to those stories might not be up to your expectation. That being said though, I'm a spooky season fan and I'm happy that DC put something like this out, especially since it has such an excellent title, I just wish that we were able to get something more out of these stories and had a framing narrative that made sense to what we're currently dealing with in continuity. It doesn't seem like it would have been too hard to get the Titans Academy kids to tell some ghost stories around a fire...... but it is what it is.
Bits and Pieces:
While ultimately this issue is just here to have some fun with your favorite DC Comics characters during the spooky season, I'm not sure if it's really worth it in the end because the spooky stories that are told here are barely spooky stories. That being said though, even with the inconsistent feel of things going on in this book, you can still have some fun but personally, it just wasn't as much fun as I had hoped for.
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