Written by Eddie Berganza
Illustrated by Carlo Barberi and Juan VlascoRobin’s been found dead! And that’s not an easy thing to face — especially when you’re Tim Drake! In this pre-RED ROBIN tale, Tim and Batman must solve the murder of an impostor Robin and follow the trail of someone putting together a new team of teenaged sidekicks made up of kids who’ve been promised that they’ll become the new Robin…IF they survive!
Eddie Berganza was recently promoted to the role of Executive Editor of the DC Universe, so I figured why not check out the new two-part series from him? Follow the cut to see what I thought of this extra-large issue.
When I finished Wolverine: The Best There Is, I thought “there is no possible way anything else coming out this month (or even this year) could be as bad as this, much less this same week.” I was wrong. So very, very wrong. I try not to exaggerate in my reviews, so I mean it wholeheartedly when I say Batman: Orphans may be the single worst comic I have ever read.
I really don’t know how to put the lack of quality of this comic into words. The story itself is a mess, everyone was terribly out of character, the dialogue was an absolute disaster, the visuals tore apart my eyes… the list goes on and on. Even the lettering was horrible! And the characters that were new were either a) not interesting or b) terribly grating. I love Samuel L. Jackson as much as everybody else, but having a character that speaks primarily in SLJ quotes isn’t quirky or funny. It’s goddamn annoying.
The worst thing about this issue, though, was that it seemed to never end. Extra pages can make a well-written comic even better, but they make a poor comic even worse. I was literally saying aloud “When is this going to end?” and nearly just stopped in the middle. Unfortunately, my task as a reviewer required me to finish the issue, leading me to feel like I was stuck in a black hole made entirely of the worst the 90s brought to Batman comics. Sure, 56 pages for $3.99 is a hell of a deal for a comic nowadays, but I wouldn’t pay a single cent for this.
This isn’t a bad comic. This is an atrocious comic. How Berganza was promoted when he creates stuff like this is beyond me. I know that editors aren’t the same in the comics world as they are in the literary realm, but anyone who would write the poorly-structured sentence “Before its famous Commissioner Jim Gordon, its police department was one of the most corrupt” should not be given a title even resembling that of “editor.” Oftentimes you will see comics that are so bad that they are hilarious; this, on the other hand, dips even lower than that and is just bad no matter how you look at it. I want the time I spent reading this back, with interest.
Final Verdict: 0.5 – Don’t even look at it.
