Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsThe worst of the bunch so far.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 5, 2020
The individual issues in this one were published from September, 1999 and until January, 2000. That's another four months of real time and who knows how much of Gotham time, it's never mentioned anywhere. Any semblance of structure and direction is abandoned at this point. Gone is the Gotham map and Oracle is somewhere in the background, not documenting much of what's happening. Not that there is much to document in the meta-plot of the event since the majority of the stories is just filler material which is getting old. A bunch of fill-in writers and artists dominate the second half of the book with passable stories that don't get anywhere.
There are only three issues that are important here, they're called Homecoming and Goin' Downtown parts one and two. The first one describes how Bane comes into town and the other two are about his mission - he destroys Gotham's Hall of Records hinting that this is what his employer wants. The first one is written by Larry Hama and pencilled by Mike Deodato, Jr and has its moments of awesome. Though the latter are written by Chuck Dixon, I'm not a fan of Mat Broome's art.
We finally get a full story about the Joker. Up to this point he was lurking in the background making cameos here and there. But now he's trying to win the bonkers election and get into the good graces of his girlfriend Harley. And we get some fun Robin stories from Chuck Dixon as well.
The final story that deserves a mention is called The Message and is about a guy hearing a voice of the city in his head that commands him to bring a message to a certain place in the Gotham cemetery. It is set at a point in time just before the bridges are destroyed so its inclusion here is a dubious thing. For this one they've used one of the artists from the Sandman series, Michael Zulli. Alisa Kwitney as the writer does a good job of emulating Neil Gaiman.
At this point I'm fairly certain that half of the total content for this event should be moved into a separate "companion" series like they usually do with DC universe events. A single "main" narrative would work much better than this sad heap of detritus.
