Originally Posted by
Chubistian
I was really looking forward to this bit of the re-read of Tom King's Batman because I wondered how would it hold with the passing of the years, especially the wedding issue.
Batman #44: This issue is excellent. I love both lines of story, past and present, and Joelle Jones is amazing here. Maybe Janín wasn't the best fit to the flashback scenes and someone with a more classic style (Lee Weeks, Jorge Fornes) would have been better, but I think the modern style does help to make those stories feel fresh, though it wouldn't have been my predilection. Tom King does a terrific job at the moment of choosing which old stories to use for the past sequences. They mesh perfectly with the overall story he is trying to tell and it feels like those scenes were made especifically for this issue
Batman #45-47: I still have a lot of fun with Booster Gold and the crazyness of it all, maybe because I'm familiar with the character thanks to J.M DeMatteis and Giffen's run in Justice League, and Tony S. Daniel does a very good job (I usually find him moving between an average penciller and a good one), so it's an enjoyable story. But, I don't think it fits nicely with Bane's plan. It's way too convoluted and I find it hard to believe that Bane would endanger his very own existence with time travel in the hands of a volatile hero as BG just to start the doubt about the marriage in Selina's mind. When this story is recalled in The Fall and the Fallen, it doesn't exactly make sense as how it ocurred compared to what Thomas Wayne says, but maybe that is because Thomas didn't know everything about the plan and he was assuming certain things. I think it makes sense that Riddler was involved with reconfigurating Skeets, since we saw him work with technology from New Genesis in I Am Bane, so he can deduce how to operate a time travelling robot by looking at it and solving it like some sort of conundrum. That is the logic I got from his riddle in Batman #19 involving a horse. It's interesting that just like in Everyone Loves Ivy, we get a reference to an old Superman story
DC Nation #0: Tom King and Clay Mann make a terrifying Joker in just 8 pages, nuff said. PS: I think when Joker says "a banana told me" he is making a joke about Bane's penis (put some pants Bane!)
Batman#48-49: I can get a little saturated with Joker, but I love everything about this two part story, from the dialogue about chaos and God, to the exchange between Joker and Selina, which also makes me think about those old Batman stories where the Batman's rogues would do team ups to challenge Batman and that would be their main concern instead of killing hundreds of citizens. I do like how the Killing Joke is used to give more substance to the story
Batman #50: The (in)famous wedding, depending on who you ask. I want to leave the controversy surrounding the hype and marketing that was done to focus in the actual comicbook issue. I think the scenes drawn by Mikel Janín work (though I'm not a fan of the fish eye effect used in the kissing scene) and they take you through an interesting set of emotions. Also, the final page works perfectly for me. But the letter pages ... not so much. I love the illustrations, but they don't follow any type of storyline, they are just a mix of nice art. They could have been references to older stories, different decades of the character, etcetera. But at the end there's no cohesion. Some are reminescent of other stories, some are made just for the comic, and so on and on. The letters are nice, but a little forced at times. A mixed issue, but I think at least it works in the overall story