How many bad egg puns can you handle before your brain gets completely scrambled? Jeff Parker’s Batman ’66 #9 wants to know. Featuring the villainy antics of Egghead, a creation of the zany Batman television show of the 1960s, this issue skimps out on the formalities of setting up some semblance of a plot and launches straight into the pun-riddled dialogue of its eggceptional antagonist. If you’re like me, a good pun can go a long way and a bad pun can go even further, so there’s a lot to ironically love about Egghead, but even for a one-off issue, it’s a bit of a let down that there isn’t much to this issue otherwise.
There’s a tease in a one-panel flashback of sorts where Batman and Robin are being captured while at an Orphaned Circus Folk Fund charity event–how great would it have been to see that whole scenario play out from start to finish? At the very least, we could have seen how Egghead’s plan to capture the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder was…hatched. It’s also a missed opportunity for new artist Sandy Jarrell, who is left to draw the twosome aboard Egghead’s zeppelin, which despite being cleverly designed on the outside is very plain on the inside. Batman ’66 #9 is not very eggcellent to look at.
To his credit, however, Parker has a blast with the dialogue. I imagine a notepad scribbled with a long list of egg puns that didn’t make the cut. Egghead even has a henchman named Roe. Beyond the campy jokes there are a lot of imaginative dialogue choices, including a bit where Egghead curses himself for using a “simplistic” pun rather than the clever one he had planned. Readers that are waiting for this to be collected as a print comic will likely have more fun with this issue as an added bonus to the excellent two-issue Joker arc that precedes it. Weekly digital readers will find that it doesn’t have the solid delivery of the other issues. It’s a tad bit runny.
Rating: 6/10
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Greetings true believers! John is the Comics Director of GNN and when he isn't reading books with pictures and made up words, he can be seen on twitter @thisjohnd or on Facebook. To contact him the old fashioned way, his email address is john.dubrawa@gnnaz.com.
