Batman has never been a favourite character of mine and so I have not read a lot of his books. This issue grabbed me with its cover art, really nice old-school style stuff. The other clincher in buying this book was the fact that it offered me more than just the main storyline. It comes with an extra short-story named Spore and a preview of the first issue of the new Aquaman. With all these extras and the ultra-cool looking cover how could I not grab this one?

The story was definitely the shining part of this comic. The writing is primarily in the 3rd person and told by the narrator for 99% of the story. This is great, I was really happily surprised by this style and it should be employed elsewhere in the mainstream comic world. Bolles pulls off a great crime-driven, undercover cop drama that manages to tell the story of an unknown cop as well as linking it all up to Batman. The great thing for new readers is that this is a one-issue story line, and a really good one at that, with an interesting writing style.

The art in this issue is not flashy but does a good job of telling the story. The colours help the pencils a great deal and set the “crime drama” scene nicely. The use of duo-tone styled colours and the basic style in which they are rendered, bring the grit of the rain-soaked streets of Gotham to life. Black noise is used well to create ash in the smoke in some of the more fiery scenes in the book. Getting back to the pencils, the one big negative for me was the way in which Batman was drawn. He seemed to do some very strange and unrealistic looking moves during many of the action scenes. He comes across as very plastic looking and stiff, almost like if you drew an action-figure in his place. His boots are also very “out” with the rest if his outfit. Jim Lee’s “Timbaland”, worker-style boots have been carried into Rosados’ artwork, and I don’t really see why, all they do is stand out like a sore thumb in a retro-style issue like this.

On to the extras that came with this one, mainly the Aquaman preview. Aquaman has defiantly been something I rarely read, rarely being not since I was 13 years old or so, and even then I can’t promise you I remember much. So onto the preview, which I must say wasn’t all bad. Small page sizes mean that you get to read through 5 interior pages and see a nice close up of the cover-art. The cover is done by none other than Alex Maleev of Daredevil fame. This was a good preview which at stages was a bit confusing / intense for a first issue but overall had a nice visual style and vivid colouring too match. I can’t really tell you much more without reading the full issue, but I’m not sure I would buy it from this preview alone, the story seemed way to intense and continuity-based for my liking.

The second extra was a short story called Spore by Nancy & Michel Gagne. I can’t say this riveted me at all. A wordless picture based narrative of an alien spore heading for earth and Batman himself. Well that was about it for me, I found it really uninteresting.

A middle of the road book with a lot of extras too puff it up. The main Batman story was nice and I enjoyed it. Artwork was standard, with somewhat stilted character pencils especially in Batman’s case, colours were a nice match to the story style.

Score 5/10
Reviewed By:Iain Duncan