Mike Benson

Short summary: Leviathan is a perfectly good continuation of Dini and Nguyen's work on the first Streets of Gotham collection.

The title story starts off the collection nicely - The Huntress tracks Man-Bat across the city, and both of them end up in over their heads when they crash into an old church. Dini does a good job of blending Huntress's wit with the spooky situation. My one little grumble here is that it seems like this would be a natural place to address the cross iconography Huntress uses, but it doesn't come up once.

"In The Bleak Midwinter" is a sad, Christmas one-shot featuring Humpty Dumpty and continuing the Zsasz story from the first collection. Really well done.

When I first read through the collection, I wasn't really a fan of "Hardcore Nights", but I enjoyed it a little bit more on the second pass. It's a pretty good Batman mystery story, but ultimately forgettable. (This is where I drop a star.)

The collection gets rounded out with "The Heroes" and "Final Cut", which wrap up the Zsasz storyline and reveal the identity of Abuse. This is another bit that I originally wasn't a huge fan of, but came to enjoy more. I still have mixed feelings about the reveal of Abuse as a little kid -- while he works as a nice complement to Damian, I feel like there could have been more done with him than we see in this arc.

All in all, Streets of Gotham continues to entertain (and Nguyen's art continues to wow)

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