Christmas Is Ruined
Written By: Tom KingArt By: Liam Sharp, Clayton Cowles
Cover Price: $4.99
Release Date: December 21, 2021
It's time for our next chapter of this strange Bat/Cat saga that is giving us three timelines to play with where previously we saw The Joker singing some Christmas songs while Catwoman was pissed at Batman, in the present, we had revealed that the Phantasm's dead son was just some kid that she kidnapped fourteen years ago and in the future, Catwoman escaped police custody for the murder of the Joker. While at least some of that feels like it may have been something, in reality, all we got was a revelation out of nowhere and the idea that Tom King plans on ruining the introduction of The Phantasm into the comic's continuity. Let's jump into this issue and see if things work out somehow.
So that Christmas carol singing continues this issue and for our story that's set in the past all we get is the Joker singing, talking about a dream of killing Bruce Wayne, and then later Selina looking at the clown and saying "It's all a lie". So yeah, while there may be a revelation about the lie later on in this maxi-series....... which will probably just be about how the Joker loves Batman, which is nothing new, this part of our story really does do nothing. For our future bits, we have Selina and Penguin hang out for a bit so that Penguin can hopefully get Selina safe passage out of Gotham but most of this seems pretty padded out to get to the ending of this issue, where the two reminisce over what feels like Batman '66 style stories..... or at least Silver Age stuff that really doesn't matter to what we're currently doing in comics.
Yeah, there's not a lot going on with those time periods in our story this issue and I'd like to say that our present time stuff is where it's all really at because at this moment it's the stuff that feels most compelling but sadly this section too just reiterates what we saw the last issue and only goes further to ruin the introduction of Andrea Beaumont, The Phantasm into comics continuity to a point where I don't even know why she was brought in in the first place and for all three of these timelines we have the Catwoman squaring off against the Joker and I can only hope....... which I hope for each issue but never get it, that the next chapter will add something to the story that feels important.
All in all, I'm not really a fan of Liam Sharp's style on this comic, especially for how much I was loving Clay Mann's stuff previously, but this issue feels worse to me than what we got in the previous issue because everything dealing with the Joker feels almost like it's all a dream where the Joker's mouth is constantly stretching off his face to the side and it just feels weird for what this comic has done up to this point. As for the story....... Well, I'm still trying to find the story because even though we're technically dealing with three stories here, I'm desperately trying to find one, and the one that's mildly interesting just comes off as aggravating because all we're doing is destroying what the Phantasm is and making sure that no one can use her again. With three issues left I have no idea how this series can rebound.
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Bits and Pieces:
If you were looking for this series to finally pick up and go somewhere... Well, like me you'll be sorely disappointed. There's a lot of Liam Sharp fans out there but sadly I'm not a fan of what he's doing with this book and didn't really care for how anything looked this issue and as for the story..... I still feel like I'm waiting for something to happen to make this feel like more than just a vehicle to destroy The Phantasm now that she's in continuity.
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