zero year ranks up there with year one as the best batman origin stories

A brilliant story where The Riddler is presented as a worthy opponent for Batman. I've always seen Riddler as the smartest in Batman's rogue gallery, but he was never given a chance to shine in any stories. This is a story where he outsmarts and nearly destroys Batman. The Riddler has gained my respect. m/ ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed the continuation of this origin story and how Batman develops as a character and interacts with several key characters in his early life. I also really enjoyed the villains - one was really creepy and the other one was diabolical. The art, as always, is top notch. ( )

Still working through my comics review backlog!

This is a serviceable entry, but ultimately feels like kind of a sidebar in light of volume 1 and what's to come in volume 3 - the villain never really seems like a marquee threat, and the whole Batman-coming-to-trust-Gordon-and-vice-versa storyline running behind it I could take or leave. Greg Capullo continues to just absolutely knock it out of the park, though, with some truly gross monsters and the incredibly vibrant color palette of Zero Year constantly working when you think it wouldn't - everything really jumps off the page at you, which is a great change of pace for a Batman title.

So, full disclosure: I buy my comics digitally and then write reviews for the trades sometimes in an effort to keep track of what I've read and haven't read (so if I buy a trade I know I'm buying something I haven't read yet). I wrote the above assuming that this was just the Dark City stuff and there was a separate collection with the third act, Savage City. I WAS WRONG. Anyhow:

While Dark City is relatively weak, the final bit of this, Savage City, was my least favorite part of the storyline at first, but after rereading it, it was my favorite. It feels like the culmination of everything Snyder set out to do with Zero Year - hit the classic origin beats but with everything taking place at a million miles an hour and just a little off from what you might expect, so Gordon's learning to trust Batman at the same time as No Man's Land is (sort of) happening, and at the same time Lucius Fox is getting looped in to the Bat-team, and.... you get the idea. Snyder has this weird habit of cramming trivia into his stories (which, as someone who loves random facts, I actually kind of dislike), but using the Riddler as the archvillain behind the entire thing is a perfect fit to this. Greg Capullo might actually be one of my favorite Batman artists of all time - he has this ability to turn on a dime from superhero action to grim-n-gritty struggling-to-survive scenes to horror that's necessary for something like this, and he has it in spades.

Overall, I really enjoyed this. I wish I could say the same about later volumes in Snyder's run. :| More on that later. ( )

SO GOOD!!! ( )