What a tremendous achievement! What a frustrating failure! I looked forward to the publication of "Digital Justice" for months, my appetite 
whetted by advance artwork published in the fan press. The art looked stunning. It looked to be the greatest example of sequential art done with desktop graphics technology. The story line certainly seemed quite "cyber," with the new Batman jousting against a malicious computer program, a last killing joke left behind by the Joker.
What a bitter disappointment! The art IS very good, even great at times, but the dialogue and story execution are simply awful. Halfway through the book, I was reduced to reading the "old fashioned way," the way I read comics as a kid: skip the words -- just look at the pictures...
Words should not be an afterthought in comics. They're the flesh, the muscle, the circulating blood of a story. If this tale is ever translated into a new media (like CD-Rom), a new script is essential.
(P. Sugarman)
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Story and Art: Pepe Moreno
Dialogue: Doug Murray
DC Comics
1990, $24.95
Here is the TEXT POPUP for Batman: Digital Justice:
Quotes:
(from the dustcover)
Digital Justice, which took more than a year to create, puts the latest advances in computer graphics at the service of what comic books have become at the dawn of the Twenty First Century a state-of-the-art combination of 3D modeling, Raster and Vector painting and drawing programs, page layout and story telling. It was produced on a Macintosh II System with an 8bit/32bit color board, a system palette of 16,000,000 possible colors, 8MB of RAM, a removable 45 MB hard disk drive and a 19" Trinitron monitor. Many of the software programs used in creating the book were in beta version but are now available commercially. The lettering was designed to duplicate the look and charm of traditional comic book hand-lettering.
