Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.

PART 2: KNIGHTQUEST

In the last two chapters we focused on Sir Hemingford Gray, who is totally not Bruce Wayne except for the fact that he is, getting closer to finding Shondra and Benedict as well as learning their depressing history because this is a novelization of a 1990s comic so of course it is. Can our hero stop them from killing again?

Like I said, this is a 1990s story, the “dark age” of comics. This is when they started taking the kids’ toys away from them. Even in the Bronze Age (or is it the “Copper Age” since someone stuck that period title in on my at some point?) stories could be more serious but not necessarily chase kids off. As longtime readers may be sick of hearing, my first Batman comic involved a homeless person being murdered and Batman looking to avenge her. The murder weapon was a poison-laced gold coin, the poison absorbed through the skin. Back then you just fall over dead. Had that story come out in the 1990s she would probably be bleeding out the eyes or something. It’s like writers got sick of being accused of writing kids stories because they worked in comics, didn’t bother to educate them, and decide to prove comics didn’t have to be for kids by making comics as kid unfriendly as they could get away with. By then the Comics Code Authority was a total joke and when that finally got a mercy killing it only got worse. It makes me sad as someone who got into superheroes as a kid to not see many superheroes for kids, and even less in comics. Dogman is all you have, and really he’s just a dog in an anthropomorphic world from what I can tell.

The deaths in this sub-arc are from “overhealing”, however that works, and so probably weren’t that bad…though we aren’t done and the 90s only got worse from here. Regardless, let’s return to the book and see what is about to happen.

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