Batman One Dark Knight

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The Van transports a criminal known as EMP that can turn himself into an electro-magnetic bomb, he can do this on purpose and sometimes not. That would also explain the abundance of gangs on the streets: plenty of targets for the player to have fun beating up, like in Arkham City, because the best part of the Arkham series was the fight mechanics of those games, which was second-to-none.

It’s like Jock was given too many pages and didn’t know how to properly utilize each one with his pre-written story, which feels especially weird for a seasoned artist as talented as Jock. Even the Police is in on it, to the point of murdering one of their own without any plausible reason given. Undoubtedly a large part of this book is for the purpose of having another Batman book out there with Jock’s art in it, not an unworthy goal by any means, but the plot was perhaps secondary. Rita Vasquez, the head of the Prison Bureau of Gotham City, is in charge of transporting villain EMP From Arkham to Blackgate. The whole thing was very dark (hence the title), but maybe the coloring is what threw me, or maybe it was too much of that Jock grit all at once, rather than something like Black Mirror with alternating art every other chapter.It gets a little messy story wise at the end and honestly I think it could have benefitted from a fourth and/or fifth chapter to the story. There were also a few points in the book where it wasn't clear to me what was going on, from a visual perspective. What surprised me was how the writing was really well done Jock is proving to be a good storyteller. I notice too that, despite the black-only Bat-symbol on Batman’s chest here, his costume is devoutly gray and blue, even with etched blue eyebrows. No more of Gordon from then on before he conveniently pops up in the last pages for a hackneyed twist.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. However, Jock had a vision for this book, and he stuck to it all the way to the very end, and all things considered this is one hell of an achievement.

I would say, however, that the book’s unrelenting, street-level violence put me very much in mind of the classic Jim Starlin/Bernie Wrightson miniseries Batman: The Cult, and a Batman logo from the Starlin era among Jock’s sketchbook cemented that impression. If the action is decently managed the plot itself reads as a rulebook which isn’t very entertaining when you’ve read so many already. Disclaimer: DC Comics provided Batman News with a copy of this comic for the purpose of this review. I won’t reveal what it is, but I do want to bring this up because I think this is an example of great writing in this issue. Of course I’m not suggesting that there should be an entire fourth issue that deals with just arresting all the criminals, but it’s really just the sudden switch from the war zone to the GCPD rounding up the criminals that I find a little jarring.