As a writer, Neal Adams is a good artist. When you look at "Batman: Odyssey" that way, it almost begins to make sense. What if Adams thought of a bunch of cool stuff to draw and then failed to connect it all into a narrative?
"Batman: Odyssey" has more intersecting timelines than "Pulp Fiction," with no indication of which one we're in any moment, and half of them are Batman telling an unseen listener a story about a story he told Robin, which contains other stories inside that.
Every first draft seems to have gone straight to print. One character's name might be Blades or Irons, depending on what page you're reading. Beyond that, the characters refer to a tribe of underground dwellers as trolls and gnomes interchangeably — which gets even more confusing when a totally separate tribe of gnomes shows up. As Hudson and Wolkin point out, the first- and third-person narrators seem to be arguing with each other: "This is unusual for Batman." "This isn't unusual ... for me."
On a sentence-to-sentence to level, the writing's even more bizarre. Here are a few standouts, and rest assured, only some of them make any more sense in context: "For television? Yes. Yes." "Watch yer drivin', ya foul-breathed kite-lizard." "Sworn to secrecy! Such a thing! Such an octopus of a thing!" and "Aquict yourself, you kung fu movie guru," from Killer Croc, who has apparently bought a word-a-day calendar. A subterranean gnome uses Stephen Colbert's catchphrase, "truthiness."
"I'm sorry ... for the lameness of my words," Batman narrates in the penultimate issue. Too little, too late, Bats.
