Mind the Gap #9 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Dan McDaid (art), Arif Prianto (colors)

The Story: Here there be monsters under the bed—or frightened women, whichever one.

The Review: I would’ve been more intrigued by McCann’s announcement that this would be a silent issue had it not been for the fact that Batman and Robin had such an issue last month.  That not only wears down the initial novelty of the thing; now we’re going to instinctively want to hold up the two issues side by side and see how they stack up against each other, even though they’re completely different products.  That’s our competitive nature for you.

Ultimately, Batman and Robin made better use of silence in its story and also had better reason to use it.  In depicting the aftermath of Robin’s death, silence seemed to embody the wordless grief that comes after someone dies, making the lack of text naturally profound.  Here, silence is used merely to heighten suspense—that is, where suspense already exists.  In fact, for the first half of this issue, the lack of dialogue or sound feels more happenstance than purposeful.  The only way to describe the difference is that the story in Batman and Robin needed silence, whereas Mind the Gap didn’t need sound.