Liars and thieves, that’s what they are! A vicious cesspool of villainous thugs who twist our minds and spin falsehoods! A fan of DC Comics, are you? Enjoy the Court of Owls storyline in Batman do you? Fool! You are their prey, and they are the vipers that would slither into your bed at night and bite you with sharp, treacherous fangs filled with snake oil! A pox upon DC Comics, I say! A pox!

But where does this sudden anger come from, you ask? Why do I lay a curse upon their children and their children’s children? Behold the cover of Batman: The Dark Knight #9, purchased by this very blogger only yesterday!

Falsehoods! Libel! Slander!

Look and see! What does that cover entail? Why it’s the heroic Red Robin doing battle with a deadly Talon assassin! It looks as if one of my all-time favorite DC comic book characters, Tim Drake, is finally being plucked from the mediocre Teen Titans series in order to make a cameo back with his proper Bat-family! For months now, the greatest Robin of all time has been cut off from the world of Batman, forced into the world of tween-friendly antics in an entirely different corner of the DC Universe. But when the Night of the Owls strikes at Batman’s heart, this cover promises us that Tim will rejoin his mentor for at least one night and fight back against those devious winged bastards!

Lies! All lies!

What does this comic actually contain? Find out after the jump!

It doesn’t contain Tim Drake, that’s for damn sure!

Red Robin only appears for one god-damned panel of this wretched comic book, and he doesn’t do or say anything! He’s hovering in the background of a single panel, his wings spread out like some dingus who is trying desperately to impress everybody around him with the fact that his costume has wings now!

Put your arms down, dingus!

Hell, it half looks like he was photo-shopped into that picture as an after thought once somebody commissioned Red Robin on the cover. But Red Robin, Robin and Nightwing have NOTHING to do with this issue. That right there is their one and only appearance, accomplishing nothing more than standing nearby while Batman gets all the speaking lines.

And look at the solicitation information for this issue:

“NIGHT OF THE OWLS” continues here! Guest-writer JUDD WINICK joins artist DAVID FINCH for the return of RED ROBIN! Red Robin is back in Gotham City just in time to face off against TALON and THE COURT OF OWLS!

Those lying bastards!! May their esophaguses wither to dust while they choke on their heinous deceit!

So what’s the issue actually about? It’s about the freaking Talon! And surprise, surprise, he’s the same as every other god-damned Talon! One-dimensional and completely uninteresting! The comic tells the backstory of this idiot interspersed with a fight against Batman. That’s a fight against Batman, NOT against Red Robin, as the cover would have us believe. Such lies. But it doesn’t matter who the Talons were in their previous lives, or what they used to do. Every single Talon became a Talon in the exact same way, and all of them lived their Talony lives in the exact same way. They are all soulless, personality-less killing machines who do nothing but serve the Court of Owls.

Buncha jerks

The Talons make for great henchmen for Batman and his allies to beat up, but that’s all they’re good for! The Night of Owls will end with Batman and Co. defeating all of the Talons and then defeating the Court of Owls. And the next time we see them it will be through diminishing returns, because any future Court of Owls stories will just be a lame rip-offs of this first Court of Owls story. So it doesn’t matter how well this Talon’s story might be written by Judd Winick, or how well it might be drawn by David Finch, the comic itself is a WASTE OF EVERYBODY’S TIME AND MONEY!

I and every other Tim Drake fan out there were lied to by DC Comics. They swindled us with a cover teasing the long-awaited return of Tim Drake into the Bat-fold. Instead they feed us this unrepentant drivel about the uninteresting and completely one-note history of this stupid Talon. Every single tie-in issue of the Night of the Owls has been about one of the Bat-family fighting a Talon. This was supposed to be the issue where our favorite member of the Bat-family takes his turn fighting a Talon. It was supposed to be glorious.

Instead it was an evil bait and switch the likes of which scour my comic book-loving soul.

I’ll never get my $2.99 back.