Hello again to another spooktacular installment of the World of Bats, the Batman Book Club! That’s right, it’s the month of October, so this month we’re going to go into some of the more chilling, horrifying parts of the Batman mythos. So what better place to start than with one of Batman’s most iconic members of the Rogues, the Scarecrow?
With that in mind, this week’s reading will be the recent six-part mini-series Batman: Kings of Fear!
Legendary artist Kelley Jones makes his triumphant return to the Dark Knight in this explosive miniseries written by former BATMAN editor Scott Peterson! Batman’s been overseeing Gotham City for years now and isn’t sure how much of a difference he’s making. Doubt, fear and insecurity are starting to take over. And as all of those negative feelings set in the Scarecrow orchestrates a riot at Arkham Asylum to give the Dark Knight one of his greatest challenges yet! This six-issue miniseries will see the Scarecrow in a horrifying new way that you’ll have to read to believe.
You can find the link to the mini-series HERE!
We’ll be reading this through 2020-10-03T05:00:00Z → 2020-10-09T05:00:00Z, but these threads will always stay open if you want to share your thoughts after the fact. 
Speaking of, please tell us what you think of this series down below!
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Holy 90s throwback, Batman!
Between this story and The Long Halloween, Batman is sure getting raked over the coals this week for inspiring the Arkham inmates, isn’t he?
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Yeah, though I think in this case, the book presents an effective counter-argument as well.
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I found this story quite enjoyable. Much like the previous Batman: Unseen miniseries, it’s essentially a “lost tale” from Kelley Jones’s tenure as the artist on Batman in the mid 1990s. I’m not sure if Jones was the right person for a regular artist on the main title, but his extreme style is always a treat in these more contained works.
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I agree – I feel like he doesn’t fit a lot of the mainline books but he works so well in stories like this!
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I noticed this as well. I particularly thought the conversations with Alfred and the psychiatrist(?) in the last issue laid out their argument that Batman is ultimately a positive influence on Gotham quite well.
The authors also brought up the idea that Batman would be more effective if he were to fund social programs and etc with his wealth instead and beating up criminals. I think think they countered this argument as effectively, but Gordon’s monologue did address it.
Was that the point of this miniseries? Or did they just have a cool Scarecrow story and work in the meta-narrative later? I think they wanted to defend the Batman against these criticisms and a Scarecrow story was a good framing device for Batman to get all introspective.
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I also haven’t quite decided what I think about the artwork. Some panels I think are gorgeous, just beautiful and others I think the faces are weird and the bat ears are too long and swooped back at an odd angle. Scarecrow looked awesome though.
From what I understand, the writer, Scott Peterson, was a former Batman editor and I guess he pitched this Scarecrow story and they thought “Sounds cool, let’s do it!” I mean, stories don’t have to continue some long-running narrative, sometimes you can have just a cool one-off story that can fit in somewhere if you want it to.
I can feel you on that one – I’ve read work with Jones’ art in the past when he was on the main title, and sometimes I felt like it was an odd fit. I think it particularly stands out when those books were doing crossover events like Contagion (an event I’ve thought about doing here but considering events going on in the world, probably not a good idea). Like, it can be weird going from more standard superhero artists like Graham Nolan, Mike Wiendigo, and Jim Balent, to Kelly freaking Jones.
But on it’s own, in a story that fits his style, I think it really works.
Thanks for your thoughts! And as a hint, you’ll get a chance to better figure out how much you like his art later this month. 
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