Comics

New 52 – Batman: The Dark Knight #0 review

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These reviews will be short and sweet this week since I’m still in LA and don’t have a whole lot of time on my hands. Basically there were four books that came out yesterday, I read them all last night, and now that it’s 24 hours later I can say that this is how I would rank them according to how memorable they all were.

1. Talon

2. Teen Titans

3. Batman: The Dark Knight

4. Batman Inc.

None of these comics were particularly bad, but none of them satisfied quite as some of the earlier zero issues I’ve read this month. Talon and Teen Titans stand out the most. Talon is something you should give a chance to because it’s new and has an ambitious creative team behind it and the retconning of Tim Drake’s past in Teen Titans should be read because it will give you and your friends plenty to discuss.

This comic right here, Batman: The Dark Knight #0, would be fine for new readers who didn’t know Bruce’s parents were killed by a guy named Joe Chill…but new readers like that don’t really exist, do they? The comic doesn’t really cover anything we didn’t see handled a whole lot better in Batman Begins.

Again, it’s not a bad read, but you won’t find yourself flipping through it again anytime soon because it all feels too familiar. There were a few things that aggravated me and I’ll put them in spoilers.

Spoiler
Bruce, as a child goes back to the alley where his parents were shot. There’s no explanation as to how he got there and to me I would think that Bruce would be under constant guard after the death of his parents and he’d not get to sneak away to that spot again. When he’s there he finds a homeless man who claims to know who killed his parents, but he refuses to tell and attacks Bruce. There’s no followup of Alfred asking Bruce where he’s been or how he got the bruises, and Bruce never tells the police or Alfred that there’s an eye witness to his parent’s murder. That really bugged me! He kept is to himself for years! I know you could explain it away as, he’s just a scared kid OR that he wants to handle this personally, but that doesn’t sit well with me at all. I think his desire for some kind of justice and need for the bad guy to not vanish from the city would outweigh any of that. And at the end of the story when Bruce finally tracks down Joe Chill and confronts him, he just lets him go. Sure, he could pity Joe Chill and the horrible conditions he’s living in, but that’s not enough. I, as a reader, should not want to see the Wayne’s avenged MORE than Batman does. Chill should’ve gone to jail. Who knows how many other people he’s hurt besides the Waynes!

As for the art, it looked great (except for some shading that looks like it was done with a Sharpie) but the work is split between two artists that look very, very different. I don’t know why DC couldn’t find one person capable of doing an entire issue nor do I know why they would hire two artists with vastly different art styles, but that’s what happened. Both halves of the book look nice, but they do not make for a cohesive reading experience. They don’t complement each other. That said, I’d be happy to see more from either Mico or Juan in the future.

I think Batman: The Dark Knight #0 is an okay comic, but totally skippable.

SCORE: 6.5/10