Each day in November, I will read and review/discuss/whatever one comic taken from a box of some of my childhood comics. Today, it's Batman: Shadow of the Bat #63.



Batman: Shadow of the Bat by Alan Grant and Dave Taylor is the second part of "Janus," a Two-Face story where a new vigilante named Janus has popped up in Gotham, targeting Two-Face's men. Janus wears a gold mask that has two bearded faces and shoots to kill. In this issue, he makes two appearances and is a relatively unimportant.

As far as stock Batman stories go, this one is fairly mediocre. Tim suspects Alfred of being Janus despite it obviously being Two-Face... Two-Face hijacks a nuclear sub and threatens to kill half of Gotham if he's not paid two billion dollars... Also, Two-Face has apparently taken over completely and the Harvey Dent half of his personality is no more, which makes the Janus twist make a little more sense. However, it's all very by the numbers with little innovation. The only interesting part of this issue is the information on the number 2 that Two-Face reads in a book.

Dave Taylor's art has always been to my taste, although it's a little static here. It's a very clean, slick style. Clear cartooning -- the colouring really works well with it.

Oh, and it turns out that Alfred was taking ballroom dancing lessons. That's why he would disappear without explanation at times and why Tim suspected him of being Janus.

A short post today, but I imagine many of these will be very short posts.