Review: Batman and Robin #1

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely? Doing Batman and Robin? I was sold right there. I loved their All-Star Superman. In fact, this would be All-Star Batman & Robin if Frank Miller and Jim Lee hadn't already started that one. Morrison and Quitely are all-star material. Heh, I bet Morrison and Quitely get 2 or 3 more issues out before the next All-Star Batman & Robin comes out ;-) But I digress... this is about this issue and not the dreadfully late Miller/Lee Batman & Robin.

All day yesterday I was looking forward to reading this issue. I finally sat down and read it after the kids went to bed. There was one distraction that kept me from enjoying it the first time through, but more about that a little later. I re-read the issue trying as best I could to ignore this distraction and I really enjoyed it. I thought it was very well written, exciting, and drawn very well. This is everything you could hope for in a Batman comic. Better Batman than I've read in quite a while. Can't wait for issue #2!

It was a little more stylized and cartoony that I expected, but it worked really well that way. If you like Frank Quitely's art in other things he has done, you'll like this. I absolutely LOVED how he draws the sound effect words into the action frames. The very first panel of the issue has "BOOM BOOM" written into an explosion behind a car. Very effective, very cool.

So, the distraction... and I never thought I'd be talking about this in a review, but I can't ignore it. The coloring. In Morrison and Quitely's All-Star Superman and their book WE3, they had Jamie Grant as their colorist. He complimented Quitely's art beautifully. I love everything about the pencils/inks/coloring in both of those books. For this series, Alex Sinclair is doing the coloring. I know him from his coloring work in All-Star Batman & Robin, Batman: Hush, Top 10, Tom Strong, and Identity Crisis. His work in Batman: Hush is probably the most impressive. Jim Lee drawing Batman is amazing and then what Sinclair did with it when he colored it was very impressive. I have the Absolute hardcover edition of Batman: Hush and it is stunning.

So, one would think that this would be a good move - to get Sinclair coloring Quitely's art for this new Batman and Robin series. Well, it wasn't. It was a complete disaster. I honestly thought that maybe the book had been misprinted or something and I had a defective copy. But I looked at scans and samples online and no, I had the same thing everyone else has. Almost all the backgrounds and a lot of the other filling colors look like they were taken into Photoshop and then reduced to 8 or 16 colors. The result is something that looks like a mistake or something that would come out of MS Paint. Here are a few samples of what I'm talking about:

There is no smooth color transitions, they are all very blunt and sharp... That's what happens when you don't have enough colors in your pallet to make the transition from one color to another. I can't get over it. I'm sitting here on my couch with 8 trades spread out on my coffee table of other things Alex Sinclair has done and I just don't get it. I'm shaking my head in frustration, because I can't let this go. It just looks THAT BAD.

Now, if anyone knows about a misprinting or something, please let me know! I want to think this is just a mistake that somehow slipped by and that there will be another printing or at least the next issue won't look like this. I guess I'll cross my fingers and pray for the best. I've also noticed that nobody else is complaining about or noting the terrible coloring in reviews online. Could I really just be that picky that it doesn't matter to most people? *sigh*

*update*: Douglas Wolk over at The Savage Critic(s) noticed and commented on the coloring too, "I don't know about the weird pixelated colors Alex Sinclair is using for a lot of the backgrounds..."