Comics! An Epic Run!

Last week, in addition to being pleasantly surprised by the “Last Days of Superman” storyline unfolding in the DC’s various Superman comics, I was equally pleased – though not surprised – by issue #51 of Batman, a story titled “Gotham Is,” written by Scott Snyder and drawn by Greg Capullo. The reason I wasn’t surprised to be pleased by this issue is because the team of Snyder and Capullo has been delivering utterly fantastic Batman adventures since the first “New 52” issue five years ago. I’ve come to expect that this comic will be really good.

I’ve been a fan of Capullo’s artwork for a long time, since his short run on Marvel’s Quasar back in the early 1990s, and it’s been thrilling to watch him steadily improve over the years. When his run on Batman started, I was unsure how his style fit the character, but he quickly won me over. Snyder is a harder sell for me, and nothing in this long run on Batman has changed my mind. He’s great at fashioning gripping moments and single scenes, but he can’t long-term plot worth a damn, with the result that time and again in his Batman run, he plotted himself into a blind corner from which he could only extricate himself with logical contortions and absolutely massive blocks of exposition.

So his first arc introduces a character named Talon and then buries the reader in prose about whether or not the guy is Bruce Wayne’s long-lost brother, to the point where those readers won’t really care one way or another. Or a super-villain will gain control over a mutating virus … and then drop the ball even though on the grounds Snyder himself set out, his villain would be unbeatable. Or, in the worst possible case, he orchestrated a plot where the Joker returns, attacks the now-sprawling family of Batman’s friends and allies, has all of them entirely at his mercy, and then … doesn’t do anything to them except talk – because Snyder didn’t think out his plot past the point of its dramatic climax.

But issue #51 is a standalone thing, a self-contained story in which Batman, riding into Gotham City for his nightly patrol, sees the entire city go completely dark in a massive blackout. He and his faithful retainer Alfred immediately start looking for the reason, even as Batman speeds to Arkham Asylum in order to contain a breakout by the super-villains incarcerated there. But the prisons backup generators kick in, and, oddly enough, the rest of Gotham seems equally peaceful and orderly.

It’s a “night in the life” story, and Snyder handles it very well, making beautiful parallels with his very first issue, five years ago. And Capullo’s artwork is superb, especially in a terrific two-page spread of Batman swooping over a darkened Gotham, glimpsing the lives of all the Gothamites as they make do during the blackout (they’re all oblivious to his presence, except little children, who aren’t afraid and happily wave).

I loved the issue, and it reminded me of how often I’ve loved the Snyder/Capullo run on Batman – as I pointed out five years ago, this was one of the only “New 52” titles that was an unqualified success right from the first issue. This was a fine send-off to that run, and coming up right beyond it is yet another DC re-invention. We can hope to be this lucky again.