Today wasn't just the day that I received that first beautiful Absolute Planetary volume... it was also the day that the first issue of Batman: Odyssey came home from the comic store with me! This is the Neal Adams miniseries (two 6-part series, by the sounds of it) that was first rumoured several years ago and then confirmed earlier this year. Neal writes, pencils and does most of the inks in the first issue, and will carry on at least the first two of those duties for the duration, I assume.
My expectation was that the story would be somewhat goofy because I'm not a huge fan of Neal Adams, the writer. And sure enough, it reads like a cross between the 1960's Batman TV show, the Frank Miller/Jim Lee All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder series (that I've often referred to as a pleasing-to-the-eye, over-the-top train wreck) and a sort of bizarre fan-fic take on the Caped Crusader. I can't say as any of the main voices in the book sound like they should, nor that the plot makes much sense, but it's still mildly entertaining.
None of that matters, though, when you have interior pages by Neal Adams, the artist. This is what makes the book well worth its $3.99 price tag. We get pinup style panels, strange perspective shots, and some of the weirdest page composition you'd ever expect to find in a modern day comic... and it's all quite lovely! Several of the panels transported me back to my childhood, when we could still expect new Adams comics on a regular basis. His command of anatomy is amazing, to the point where every other comic book artist just seems to be delivering varying degrees of wrongness. I guess that skewed a viewpoint makes me an Adams fanboy... oh well, I can live with that label.
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