Batman stories by Scott Snyder. Thoughts?

[Batman Begins 2005]

Wondered what you make of Scott Snyder's Batman.

I like the majority of them. By far Scott Snyder's best is Batman: The Black Mirror with Dick Grayson under the cowl. Endgame is another favourite of mine. The Meek is underrated. However I find Court of Owls to be overrated. That opinion won't be popular, I suspect. Wasn't keen on All Star Batman but Metal was a return to form. How's Justice League?

Snyder's had some great artists on them in Jock, Greg Capullo and Rafael Albuquerque.

[jb681131]

Snyder has interresting ideas, but never succeeds in writting them well. To me his Batman run New52 or All-Star are the worst run I've read.

[rev516]

I used to like Snyder, but now his 'big, crazy, bombastic' stories are getting boring. I'm talking about JL here, it's basically a universe ending crisis every week in that book.

His Batman run was decent, the expansive monologues were a bit too much.

All Star Batman would have been awesome if it wasn't for the whole Cursed wheel subplot that I just remembered while writing this.

All in all, Snyder is decent IMO.

[TheJudge95]

I got into reading comics through Snyder's Batman. Maybe it's nostalgia but his run has held up as my favorite Batman run. I actually agree that the Court of Owls is overrated - my favorite arcs were Zero Year and Superheavy. I read Zero Year first, and was saving the Court of Owls for later cause I had heard the hype - maybe the hype set my expectations too high. Snyder himself says Zero Year was his favorite arc, and that he was struggling/unsure of himself for the first dozen or so issues. He has fallen off in recent years but I think he is getting back in the saddle with the Batman Who Laughs miniseries, which is more up his alley.

[failo.legendkiller]

More lows than highs.
Endgame was the best one, I really enjoyed it and Court of Owl was good.
Otherwise Death of the Family, Zero Year and Superheavy are mediocre and too long and boring in some cases, and I don't want to count the poor Eternal titles.
Metal is totally not my cup of tea and I choose to ignore it along with his Batman who laughs.
Snyder is certainly not my favorite writer, he has some good ideas but he has a vision of the Batverse that does not coincide with mine at all.
I'm not pleased that Snyder is considered so high in the ranks of the company.

[Batman Begins 2005]

Thanks for the contributions.

What I liked: The Black Mirror, Gates of Gotham, the Clayface story and Metal.

The middle part of Zero Year I thought could be cut.

As noted, feel Court of Owls is overrated.

What I didn't like: Death of the Family, Superheavy, Eternal and All-Star Batman.

[Batman Begins 2005]

So far, I'm enjoying the Batman Who Laughs. If that keeps the form up, that would make the likes category.

[Restingvoice]

He knows how to build hype, and he knows how to write suspense and expectations leading to the climax.
Whether the actual climax is good has been debatable

Like, The Court of Owls was really good with its mystery and horror imagery leading up to Night of The Owls, but when you expect the whole family to round up the ringleaders of the Owls, they're all dead and the climax is replaced with a quiet, private duel between long lost maybe brothers.

Death of The Family, same, there's this big mystery about what Joker knows and what he'll do to everyone, with Alfred kidnapping made everyone worry, but everyone turned out to be physically fine. The story was meant to be pyschological, but we never actually know what caused this separation of the family, and since people think the family's stronger than whatever Joker can whisper to them, it came out contrived.

Then, later on, after Snyder's original characters Harper and Duke started to get featured more and more, people starting to suspect that Snyder just wanted to get rid of the old family so he can write his own. Which made the story sounds even more contrived.

Zero Year is fine. I don't think I've heard anyone that dislike it barring that it replaced Year One... or that he made Riddler to OP no one can possibly top it, not even himself.

When Eternal came though, I was starting to get fed up... because in the four Batman books published at the time, Gotham has been a war zone of Arkham breakouts, Scarecrow's gas, Mad Hatter's hypnotism, The Court of Owls, and so on. There's almost no moment of Gotham taking a break from city wide disaster. So when the first page Eternal came out with Gotham burning, I was like... come on.

[SixSpeedSamurai]

Way too dialogue heavy, but his stories were far more exciting than the trash King is slogging out right now.

[LooneyKoala]

I love Black Mirror and the first twelve issues of his New 52 series (so the Court of Owls stuff). But other than that I've found his work to have interesting ideas but just not be very good (I much prefer to Tom King's run so far to everything that came after the Court of Owls).

Really enjoying the Batman Who Laughs miniseries so far though!!

[Batman Begins 2005]

Way too dialogue heavy, but his stories were far more exciting than the trash King is slogging out right now.

Co-signed.

[Batman Begins 2005]

One I haven't mentioned, Twenty-Seven.

[babybats]

I've never hated anything he's done. I think he paces stories well and that makes them really enjoyable to read. He's really great at creating memorable set pieces and making everything feel large in scale. I don't mind lots of dialogue, but he does get really self indulgent sometimes.

Overall, I'd say he's a good storyteller. His execution is fine. But the story itself isn't always a win, and often suffers from a case of taking itself too seriously and promising too much.

[nonsense man]

His lows in storytelling isn't as bad as kings lows which are really low

[Scott Taylor]

Generally I felt his stories were well-founded and interesting, if a little bombastic at times. But almost all of them ended in a kind of unspectacular, unsatisfying way. He's like the gymnast who does this fantastic routine only to fall on their butt on the landing.