6. The Awful Character Designs
Tim Sale is a good artist and his work is definitely the best part of this book, but his character designs for Batmans rogues gallery? Among the worst ever committed to paper. Joker looks ridiculous. His face is one elongated thin and angular visage shaped around his grotesquely exaggerated mouth which takes up fully half (sometimes more) of his face containing what look like several hundred individual teeth. Poison Ivys appearance is just baffling it looks like shes farting confetti the whole time. There are tons and tons of bits of confetti/pixels surrounding her I guess theyre supposed to be leaves or something?
The worst of the bunch by far is Catwoman whose outfit in this book is the worst outfit she has ever had. She literally has a tail. Her outfit has a tail attached. Why does a thief need to have a tail that does nothing? And thats not the end of it - she has whiskers too! Whiskers!! What possible benefit could whiskers and a tail have for a thief? If anything, a tail would be a hindrance! And the cat ears?
Fans of this book call it serious and dark Catwomans outfit totally undermines any semblance of either by being laughably stupid. Shes a great character and has had a variety of outfits over the years, some of which are better than the others (Darwyn Cookes is probably the best), but the tail/whiskers/ears look is definitely the worst of the bunch.