It’s Batman versus the crooked coal miners and guess who wins?
Not Batman.
Okay, maybe I’m abridging a little, but not by much. Conway makes Batman a little too human here, way too fallible (he gets hit in the head with a shovel–isn’t he supposed to know when people are sneaking up on him?).
It’s an odd complaint and one I wouldn’t have without that development, because the humanity’s otherwise nice. Most of the issue–after the sort of prologue with Blockbuster finding some nice people to take him in–is all about Batman worrying about Blockbuster (this Blockbuster is the innocent one, not the evil one).
The Batgirl backup story–with Barbara Gordon getting framed for murder–is a little better than the previous issue’s entry. There’s still a lot of talking and way too much story is conveyed in it, but the frame-up is interesting enough.
As odd as it soinds, I seem to remember Batman getting sneaked up on and being hit a heck of a lot of times with various bludgeons as a kid. Not that they’d ever get away with that now, of course. Ah, the good old days…