Batman: Orphans #2(of 2)

Overall: We start off with Bruce Wayne attacking that annoying reporter and her even more annoying cameraman because of the delayed action fear gas he inhaled last issue. Don't worry about the fear gas, since it leads to absolutely nothing... Anyway, trusty Alfred pulls Bruce away from the Annoying Duo, and tells him that he had inhaled fear gas, which leads to Bruce getting over it. From there, those interchangeable Orphan characters fool around, but are called away by Fake Batman, who wants them to do a mission or something. Bruce then goes to Arkham Asylum with Tim Drake where he questions a doctor who had worked with many of the missing Orphans. Oh, and this doctor, Dr. Nigaff, worked with Hugo Strange, which IS important later on in the story. While Bruce, Tim and Nigaff talk, the Annoying Duo hack into Nigaff's computer from a nearby office to see what he knew about the missing kids. Dick Grayson strolls over and sweet talks some of the information the Annoying Duo had learned before meeting up with Tim and Bruce outside to compare notes. Oh, and somewhere along the line, there's a story about a “Fed-Lex” package that has every villain in Gotham hunting for it. Merlyn manages to get a hold of the package, but is confronted by the Orphans, two detectives from the Gotham City Police Department, Firebug, Talon, some random gang members and the Riddler... Man is this making my head hurt... In the end, the Orphan kids mainly get squashed, but are saved by the timely arrival of Batman, Nightwing and Robin. One of the Orphans betrays the others(don't ask me why)and escapes with the package while Bats and company mop up the riffraff. Dr. Nigaff sneaks away to an abandoned underground lair, and is followed by the Annoying Duo, while Bats is told by a suddenly helpful Merlyn that he had placed a bug on the package. Merlyn then proceeds to GIVE Bats the tracer for the bug, because that's what Talia Al Ghul would have wanted or something... Good old Merlyn. I guess... Anyway, Fake Batman confronts the Annoying Duo and locks them up or something, while the Orphan's Traitor returns to the Orphan's base with the package, and naturally betrays Fake Batman. The Orphan's Traitor is then confronted by two of the Orphans he betrayed back at the big battle from earlier... Now how the hell did they arrive at the base THAT quickly?! The female Orphan then kills the Orphan's Traitor by kissing him and sliding a razor blade from her mouth into his... Yes, really. She then dies a dramatic death, leaving one Orphan. The lone Orphan, Francisco, goes after Fake Batman, but Fake Batman manages to sneak away. By this point, Bats, Nightwing and Robin arrive on the scene and run around the base looking for... I don't know, the package, Fake Batman, the Annoying Duo, the Orphans and a partridge in a pear tree. They all split up and Francisco attacks Bats, thinking he was the Fake Batman. Francisco beats up Bats for a bit(because Bats wouldn't fight back), before Bats decides he's had enough of that and swings away... Why didn't he do that from the start? Fake Batman tries to run away, but literally runs into Nightwing and Robin, who unmask him as... Dr. Nigaff. Yeah, there's a shocking reveal. By this point, the two GCPD detectives from earlier have rescued the Annoying Duo and are met by Nightwing, who has found the package somewhere along the line. Unfortunately, they are surrounded by pretty much EVERY Gotham City villain. D'oh! Meanwhile, Batman and Robin locate Francisco, who doesn't want to fight anymore and just wants this whole ordeal to end... Sort of like me... As for the big, climatic battle between Nightwing, the two detectives and the Annoying Duo against the entirety of the Gotham Underworld, Nightwing reaches in the package and pull out... Well, we never find out, but whatever it was must have been powerful enough to defeat/scare away ALL of the villains, because from there we skip ahead and discover that Bruce, Tim and Dick have rescued everybody, and that Francisco had gotten better. The end. Really, that was it!

After putting this comic down, I was really tempted to go the, “Stuff happened, the end.” route for this review... This comic/mini-series was THAT BAD! However I decided to do the LONG, drawn out review you just read/skimmed/skipped altogether as a warning to anybody out there who may have been tempted to give this story a read... It was bad. REALLY bad. It didn't make sense, the story was a mess, the dialogue went WAY too long at times(there were some pages that were literally FILLED with words, to the point where you couldn't make out the scene going on), and the Orphan characters, who were the stars here(I guess...)didn't leave me with any impression. Francisco was supposed to be the main Orphan, but until the end, I couldn't tell him apart from any of the other Orphans. And then there was the end... What the bloody hell did it mean?! The annoying reporter wrote a newspaper article at the end stating that(apparently)the package that EVERYBODY was after didn't contain anything, and that the villains all thought it had the Holy Grail in it. That's all well and good, except it doesn't explain why the villains didn't kill Nightwing, the Annoying Duo and the detectives... Nightwing opens the box, reveals it was empty and the villains... walk away I guess? Get beaten to death? Start dancing? Who knows! Plus the dialogue/scene on the last page made zero sense... Bruce is talking to Dick about how things ended and refers to Tim as “Tom”, which was the role Tim was playing at Arkham Asylum when they first met Dr. Nigaff, which led me to believe that maybe there really WAS a Tom character that I missed, because why else would Bruce call Tim “Tom” to Dick? Bruce then seems to imply that Tim WAS Tom all the time, which is what I figured. So Dick and Bruce are talking while Tim/Tom plays basketball with Francisco when all of a sudden, LITERALLY in the middle of Dick and Bruce's conversation, the scene shifts to the Annoying Duo, with Batman swinging past them overhead... This was definitely one of the worst things I've read all year. Hands down. Wow, this was a really negative post... Well, let's end it on a positive note! I liked the art...

Score: 1 out of 10.The best thing about this issue? Well there was a Young Justice poster in this scene...