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Review: Batman: Night of the Monster Men

ComicBookWire

Quick Summary

Pros: The story features plenty of monster fighting and bombastic action. The monsters themselves are great and look incredible.

Cons: The story tries to deliver some sort of message about Batman, but it comes off very weak. The ending feels rushed.

Overall: This is a fun and crazy event packed with action and cool fight scenes. This is basically the Batman version of old monster movies. If you are going into this expecting a deep look at Batman’s psyche, you are out of luck. However, if you go into this looking for Godzilla-style monster mayhem with nonstop action, you’ll find exactly what you are looking for.

Story

Batman: Night of the Monster Men is exactly the type of book you would expect it to be based on its title. It is a monster book with a feeling similar to Godzilla or Jurassic Park. This means that it is full of action, fighting, and just a touch of horror. Though the narrative also tries to include a message about who Batman is as a person, it comes across too weak to leave any sort of impression on readers. The end result is a fun book that is great if you are just looking for unadulterated heroics and nothing more.

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The story starts out with a massive storm hitting Gotham at the same time that various monsters are released around the city. Batman and most of the Bat-family then have to deal with evacuating the city while also taking down these monsters.

For most of the book, this is the status quo: the team fights a monster, they defeat it, and then they fight the next one. It is not complex by any means, but it allows for some great moments and fights. In particular, there are some great scenes that highlight just how fun, and slightly ridiculous, this event is meant to be. Batman wearing Clayface like battle armor, Nightwing and Gotham Girl turning into monsters, and the whole team using the Wayne towers to shoot at the monster are so over the top that they wouldn’t fit in most stories, yet they fit perfectly in this one.

Outside of the action there are also a few good character moments sprinkled throughout. Batman learns to trust his team more, Clayface is able to prove his worth to himself, and Gotham Girl comes closer to terms with her current situation. None of these moments are mind-blowing or particularly astounding but do increase the quality of the work as a whole.

The end of the book is where the more serious problems start to creep in. Both Hugh Strange and the main monster are defeated through a simple trick, thus avoiding any sort of true confrontation. It feels anticlimactic as the fights against these two main threats are inconsequential compared to the earlier fights. This is what mainly leaves the end of the book feeling rushed.

The book’s message is also spelled out around this time. The monsters are all reflections of what Strange saw to be Batman’s weaknesses. However, Dick says that they are not weaknesses at all, they are what fuels him. In terms of a message this is alright. However I doubt it is nearly memorable enough to stay with readers after they put the book down. As we said earlier though, this is not a book to read if you are looking for a message; so as long as readers go into this with that in mind then the ending should not upset them.

(spoilers end here)

Art

The artwork in this event is done by three different artists, with each of them doing two issues. Riley Rossmo does the Batman issues, Roge Antonio does the Nightwing issues, and Andy MacDonald does the Detective Comics issues. The end result is an alright looking book with very little standing out as majorly positive or negative. The Riley Rossmo issues tend to look the best, though a large part of this is because Ivan Plascencia’s choice of colors make it look more serious and sinister than the other issues.

The one thing that stood out to me when reading this book was how great the monsters looked. They were all incredibly well done as each one looked particularly creepy in their own weird way. Since monster fighting is this book’s biggest draw, I was glad to see that visuals did not disappoint in this regard.

Continuity

This is a crossover event in the DC Comics universe with portions of the event spanning across multiple comic book series. While the event itself directly stems from events in Batman Vol. 1: I am Gotham (Review), it ends up encompassing much more. It cycles through issues of Batman, Nightwing, and Detective Comics twice, presenting a singular narrative throughout. For more information see our Batman: Night of the Monster Men reading order here.

All of this means that you should have a general knowledge of what is going on in each of the three series before reading this. However, Batman Vol. 1: I am Gotham (Review) and Detective Comics Vol. 1: Rise of the Batmen (Review) play a much larger part in this story and give the most direct prelude to the events of this collection.

This volume also references and continues the stories from other comic books, all of which are detailed below:

Collection Notes

Individual issues from this crossover can also be found in the hardcover deluxe edition of their respective series:

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