“Till Human Voices Wake Us and We Drown”
Artists: Anthony Marques, J. Bone
Color Artist: Dave Stewart
Letterer: Ferran Delgado
Review by Eric Lee
Batman: The Audio Adventures #7 ends the series with a finale so over-stuffed that it may leave readers confused and frustrated.
As I’ve previously said, Audio Adventures suffers from too many subplots, and it’s very difficult to track them all. In this issue, most of the plot threads tie together but it’s still an ultimately disappointing endeavor. The problem is that the disparate plots are all jammed pack into one issue that it is difficult to give sufficient storytelling space to them all.
Threads like the Penguin- Robin- Scarecrow feud gets resolved so quickly that it could easily be missed. With such an underwhelming conclusion, one wonders why writer Dennis McNicholas dedicated so much time to the subplot.
Batman is Useless
Even the main plot with Batman and the Demon’s Brood suffers a shockingly abrupt ending. Batman unfortunately doesn’t do a lot in the issue to stop the villain’s bloody rampage. In the end, he feels very ineffectual and inconsequential.
I don’t want to make everything about the issue all doom and gloom, though. The art has always had a wonderful cartoony, quality to it. Anthony Marques and J. Bone have great storytelling skills and make visually jumbled scenes easy to follow. However, the dark tone of the Demon’s Brood plot seems to clash with the fun art style. It’s hard to say this comic is lighthearted when it depicts bloody mass murder. The cartoony style makes me suspect the series will be accidentally categorized in the kid-safe section of a comic shop only for a horrified parent to discover people getting eviscerated in it.
Conclusion
The entire series feels like a strange mish-mash of plots that barely connect, wrapped in a beautiful, but also inappropriately cartoony art. It should be no surprise that Batman: The Audio Adventures #7 would’ve been any different.
Images courtesy of DC Entertainment