Man, we're talking about the guy who created Ra's Al Ghul here.
Yea, and?
Listen, i own Tales Of The Demon, 2 of the Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told(1 that has a bunch of O'Neal scripted stories and the other with Joker's 5 Way Revenge), The Question vol. 1 and 2 TPBS as well as some various other stories.
That being said, i didn't think too much of them. I respect what O'Neal did for Batman, which is great. But i can't get into it. I can't get into alot of '70's comics, because the dialog is just melodramatic crap. Tomb Of Dracula is one of my favorite comics EVER, and re-reading the issues in the omnibus that recently came out, alot of the dialog in there sucks too. Dracula always saying how he needs to drink blood in some over the top expression, always talking about how badass he is. The love scenes are crap, too. Roy Thomas's Conan stuff was the same way. Conan running around yelling "BY CROM!" all the time. Gimme a break. Fun stuff to read, but terrible dialog. And alot of it impedes on the art work. The last thing i want to see is a bunch of crappy dialog covering 70 % of Barry Windsor-Smith's AMAZING artwork.
Example: Steve Englehart's "Night Of The Stalker" and Darwyn Cooke's re-telling of it, "Deja Vu".
It's an intense story. My problem with Night of The Stalker is that the narration boxes spoon feed you all that's going on in the panel, thus negating the art work. In the story, Batman witnesses a child's parents getting gunned down in front of him, and it reminds Batman of his own situation. He gets pissed off to the extreme. But what kills it is Englehart telling us this, Bruce remembering the gun shots, the pearls hitting the ground, his mother screaming, blah blah blah. We can see all of this in the art work. I don't need him telling me all that i can see.
Cooke takes the same story, and for the most part, there's no writing on the page. Cooke shows us visually, all that Batman is feeling. We see that he's angry and at the same time, feel his anger with him. Cooke doesn't tell us how angry he is, and tells us to watch as the Batman races across the rooftops in anger, cape billowing in the wind behind him, fists clenched with rage in some sort of over the top melodramatic way.
Im sorry, but that kind of writing just takes me out of the story. Hell, my dad stopped reading O'Neal's work with the Green Lantern/Green Arrow issue where Speedy becomes a junkie, because he felt they had no idea what they were talking about, and because it was stupid.
So i don't know. I just can't get into that stuff.