Oof. How long has this storyline been going on again? I
finally got around to finishing off the conclusion to Zero Year, and to be
honest, I’ve sort of forgotten that it is the flagship Batman comic. It isn’t
that Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo are doing a bad job, but the title has been
sitting off on its own, telling flashbacks. It has been off in the corner so
long that I have had a hard time getting invested in what is going on!
My complaints about the book are pretty much in line with
everyone else’s that I’ve seen online. I find it ludicrous that anyone would
live in Gotham City after the Riddler flooded it and then turned it into a
jungle hell. There is a page in this issue that states the city is totally back
to normal in one month, which again, is insane. The local crews can’t
re-blacktop a highway in a month. You expect me to believe that Gotham could be
deforested and have its infrastructure back that fast? Assuming that Cataclysm,
No Man’s Land, and all the other insane events still happened, Gotham has got
to be the most dangerous place on Earth.
I also never really came around that this version of the Riddler
was too much more dangerous or threatening that he is normally. I enjoyed the
calcium-based villain, the dude with crazy bone spurs, but Riddler never seemed
important enough to anchor the last 2 years of stories (or however long it has
been).
And the pacing. Doesn’t it seem like James Gordon, Batman,
Lucius Fox and those Navy SEALS have been traipsing around ruined Gotham for 6
months? Maybe it has been that long. It sure feels like it.
So Zero Year is done, and I’m thrilled. My subscription runs
out in 2 issues, so Snyder has 2 issues to convince me to re-up for another
year. With Peter Tomasi taking over Superman/Wonder Woman, it is going to take
more than an AVERAGE, meandering Batman comic to get me to stick around.
1 comment:
I didn't know, or hadn't been interested enough to investigate, that there were a lot of readers like me who have been viewing Snyder's work like this. (Though for the record, "Zero Year" has only lasted about a year.) I don't know why there are fans who swear by his Batman. He flashes brilliance every now and then, but he never delivers. It's extremely frustrating. So I really have only read three or four issues of the whole run, dating back to its Detective Comics origins.
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