"Slade's Demon"
Cover Price: $1.50
Bargain Price: 3/$1.00
Cover Date: 1988
So Bruce Wayne is invited to a spooky mansion for a murder mystery dinner, when, needless to say, someone actually gets murdered. This instantly seemed like the perfect setup for Clue-style secret passages, darkened rooms, and skullduggery, with Bruce Wayne forced into solving a murder in his playboy alias, without ever letting on that he is really Batman. Unfortunately, only a page or so after the murder, Bruce changes into his Batman Underoos, with no one noticing that Batman has conveniently shown up at a house in the middle of nowhere just as Bruce has skedaddled. The mystery plot itself is a little thin, which doesn’t help matters, nor does the fact that the book has entirely too many characters, some of them with three different identities to keep track of: their civilian identity, their assumed identity for the mystery dinner, and, for several, the fact that they’re secretly someone’s father or son or whatever. Still, there’s a pretty good fight scene toward the end and a couple of really nice moments with Batman actually doing some detective work and deduction, so the issue’s got that going for it. It also has a solo back-up story featuring Jason Todd, wherein Jason struggles with whether or not to turn in his friends who have been changing their report card grades Wargames style. It’s so wishy-washy and pointless that I was yearning for a 900 number to call by about page four.
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