Sweet Jesus. This arc was so long, depressing, nihilistic, meandering, and cumbersome that I'm surprised Frank Miller didn't write it. If you want a good dark Batman story, read The Court of Owls. It does a much better job with the "conspiracy" angle.

The end does nothing to justify reading through the whole thing, as it's revealed the whole thing was based on a lie by the mother. Hardly anyone is shown being brought to justice, and there's a lot of unnecessary filler pages showing the people who suffer/die because Batman's not there. ( )

I always believed that, if a non-superhero writer could write a good Batman story, it would be David Lapham of Stray Bullets fame. His dark, gritty noir style, everyday-meets-crime-fiction kind of stories--I really thought he'd be a good choice.

This book proved me wrong. It's not awful, but the story is convoluted and complicated (and I'm not just whining it's too harrrrrrrrrrd! I'm a girl!!)--there are too many red herrings and dead ends, too many twists and turns, to really keep track of in a story. I'm left with the impression that Lapham was trying too hard to write episodes that would become a full story, once his 12 issues of Detective Comics were done. It just didn't work.

The art was pretty good, though, so it gets 3 stars instead of 2. ( )