The Doomsday Prophecy will reprint just in time for the June 20th release of Warner Bros. Batman IV, starring George Clooney, Chris O'Donnell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Uma Thurman and Alicia Silverstone. The first three Batman movies each grossed over $100 million domestically--Batman IV is poised to break box office records.In this Archway novel, the Caped Crusader is up against the craftiest criminals ever to try and foil the crimefighter. But readers can help Batman outwit his arch-enemies in this Super Powers Which Way book--they're in charge of the action
An entertaining number of plots available in this “choose your own adventure” style Batman book, with several of his rogues gallery utilized. It avoids repetition at the cost of believability, since choosing for Batman to go one way or another changes details as important as who the villain behind it all is. If you can ignore that, it’s a fun read with a silver age comics tone.
Even by the admittedly low standards of Choose Your Own Adventure style books, this one is awful. The overall goofy tone seems most similar to the Batman from Super Friends or the old Adam West show, but several endings have either Batman or the villains dying. Endings come out of nowhere, there's absolutely no knowing what any choice you make will lead to, and things are solved mostly through random illogical events. The story is completely different depending on which paths you take, with alternate villains being behind events and those villains plans being totally unique to each branch. At one branch point there's a whale that attacks a cruise ship, and whether the whale is a real whale that is being mind-controlled or actually a submarine that has been disguised as a whale changes depending on which way you choose to go; essentially, a totally new reality is being written as the story goes along, aggravating to me as an adult and likely confusing to the young readers this book was aimed at. Ridiculous contrivances abound even within that changing reality. In one path, The Joker has set a trap within a phone booth to capture Batman, despite the fact that he has no reason to believe that Batman will have to stop and make a phone call or the slightest idea where Batman would be even if he did need to make a call, it's literally a one-in-a-billion lucky break that Batman somehow managed to do precisely the thing that would make him fall into the Joker's trap. The entire book is ridiculous, incoherent, inconsistent, insulting to the intelligence of its intended young audience, and only worth reading to the extent that it is amusingly awful.