It doesn't help that Todd Klein's impeccable lettering clearly had to be re-traced for much of this volume, nor that some of Breyfogle's inks haven't reproduced as sharply and precisely as the originals.
There's something mildly less electric about seeing these incredible stories put together in a clean and perfect package. The stark simplicity of Breyfogle's inks were also uniquely suited to the terrible newsprint on which they were printed - the striking blacks and bold shapes jumped off those yellowed pages. There was a pulpiness, a serial-of-the-week feel to Breyfogle's work with Alan Grant on these stories - they understood how to make the monthly medium work, with single-issue tales that zinged and two or three-parters so dense with plot and character that just reading a few issues felt like a full meal. And I'll admit, my four-star review on this volume is wholly due to the intensity of my nostalgia. I tracked down the single issues in my 20s, but this is the first time I'd seen his work on high-grade paper, without ads and lettercolumns. But I'm telling you, man - the dude understood how to find a page's sheer oneness in ways I've really never seen anywhere else.Īside from a handful of issues, Breyfogle's daunting, nearly-unbroken 5-year run on DETECTIVE, BATMAN, and SHADOW OF THE BAT had never been collected before this year. It's impossible, obviously, for me to talk about Norm Breyfogle without waxing poetic. You see one and you realize just how many artists out there are missing an entire half of their illustration toolbox, in which layout and content are brought together so completely and irrevocably that the page, the line, and the panel become a single unit. There's nothing like a Breyfogle Batman page. Breyfogle didn't just draw characters and settings - he drew the idea of movement, a meshing of style and tone that ensured every single penstroke was building toward an aesthetic ideal that was more than just a rendering of objects in space. From that book forward, I was absolutely addicted to Norm Breyfogle's Batman - the harsh angles, the incredible page layouts, the mix of narrative storytelling ability and an aggressive dynamism that I just don't even know how to describe. Batman #455 (which isn't collected here, but should be in subsequent volumes) was my first-ever Batman comic, and I reread it so many times in the intervening years I'm pretty sure I have it memorized. So man, I have been waiting for this collection to exist for over 20 years.
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