The cover of the latest volume of Batman: Detective Comics - with a rampaging Joker on a roller coaster full of hostages and a superhero trying to control the situation - promises a lot of emotions. Will we really experience them while reading?
Screenwriter Peter J. Tomasi is already at home in the classic Batman series, but has he managed to live up to the readers' expectations? He strongly awakened them with the first great volume entitled Mythology, but in the next part, that is, in The Knight of Arkham, he did not even brush against the bar that he hung high. From Gotham Greetings, therefore, is a kind of verification in which direction the writer is going and whether he is able to keep the interest of Batman fans. Well, that's not the best, unfortunately, but not too bad either.
The next adventures of the Batman do not start with the cover story, but with two notebooks entitled There Will Be Blood with the dark story of a joint investigation of Batman and Specter, which aims to find the abducted policeman Jim Corrigan. Readers who are familiar with DC characters know very well that Corrigan is the Earth incarnation of Specter, so it's pretty serious. However, the writer's attention is more focused on the relationship between the two than on the investigation itself. Here is Batman, who has gained a brutal face in recent decades, suddenly gets a partner who does not intend to make any compromises, which only inflames the tension between the characters and is much more interesting than a very pretext story that ends before it has had time to take off for good. . It's a pity, because also thanks to Kyle Hotz's drawings drenched in the decks of dark green, it was possible to create a thick atmosphere here, and Bruce Wayne himself looks darker here, differing from the image to which we are used to the main run with the Tom King script.
The next story is the title Greetings from Gotham. Unfortunately, this is also the weakest point of the third volume of Batman. Detective Comics. From the story of the Joker, who takes over the funfair, nothing comes out completely, Batman does not have to bother to deal with the problem and only the frame with the Joker raised by balloons can make the reader smile. If you could write about the previous story as a pretext, then unfortunately the best term for Greetings from Gotham is “unnecessary”.
In the middle of the album, we feel more disappointment than satisfaction with reading, and the quality can be described as not very vividly. It is known that it is extremely difficult for Batman fans to please, you never know whether they will better accept short stories with a quick punch line or laboriously developing an intrigue, which is probably why Tomasi tries both. In this case, the latter option is better, because only with the Survivor, consisting of three notebooks and building the foundations for a new conflict that is just emerging, we can finally say that reading becomes satisfactory.
In Survivor we have the opportunity to see that Batman, or in this case Bruce Wayne, can sometimes outgrow circumstances. For the most part, the survivor takes place on an almost lonely island where a plane crashes with Bruce and his company employees. This is due to Deadshot's planned attack and the forces of nature in the form of a lightning strike that changes the rules of the game. Wayne is unable to cope with the villain without his handy arsenal, fortunately, helpers quite unexpectedly come to his aid on the island. It is the idea of two men imprisoned for decades on a lonely island that positively winds up the plot of the Survivor, and the favorable impression is enhanced by Christian Duce's realistic line and consistently claustrophobic frames, in which there are no open spaces, which makes the natural scenery adequately associated with the place where you are trapped.
At the same time, Tomasi runs an intriguing plot from Luthor's alliance with Mr. Freez. The latter will most likely be able to heal the wife who has been kept in the cryogenic chamber for years, and the way in which this is to be achieved will probably be the focus of the events in the next volume. It can therefore be concluded that the second half of Greetings from Gotham has reawakened readers' expectations for another good story within Batman. Detective Comics and hopefully that's what we can expect in the fourth volume of the series.
