Review: Batman Eternal #1 and #2

From the cover of Batman Eternal #1 (image property of DC Comics)

Gotham is in flames and Bruce Wayne is chained to the broken bat signal. He is bleeding from multiple injuries, the most obvious being the bat-symbol carved into his chest.

There are a lot of ways the first page of the first issue of a new comic book series can go and I have to say the first page of Batman Eternal #1, a new weekly, is an attention grabber.

Even if that page doesn’t make you want to keep reading, just to find out how that happens, that first page is not the only thing the book has going for it.

Issue two is more dialogue heavy and has more character interaction between the very large cast of characters that make appearances in the book while issue one has more action, including a fight with Professor Pyg and a subway tunnel being blown up, resulting in a unrevealed number of casualties. That doesn’t mean issue one is solely focused on action. Characters still interact and those interactions do a very good job of setting the relationships between characters.  

For example, Jim Gordon and Batman are supposed to be friends, or at least as close to friends as you can get when one person is a cop and the other is a vigilante. In these two issues, the dialogue and banter between them does a really good job of showing that the relationship between them is one that matters to both of them.

You could probably know next to nothing about Batman and his supporting characters and when you finished reading these issues, you would have a solid idea of which characters are on which side and a vague idea of existing relationships. Sometimes the way the characters are written is kind of on the nose though. Just couple panels after we are introduced to him, Major Jack Forbes makes it clear that he’s more than likely a crooked cop, or at least on his way to becoming one.

“Gotham has more to offer than you can imagine, if you’re man enough to take it … Gordon can fight against it all he wants,” he says to the new recruit he met a couple a minutes earlier.

One last point on the characters, I really like how many characters are popping up so far in this book. A lot of Batman’s allies have made brief appearances by the end of issue two and it was really nice to see their reactions to things that happened. A couple characters have even made their New 52 debut in these issues, Jason Bard and Carmine Falcone. Neither are characters I’m very familiar with, but from what I’ve seen of them so far I’m curious to see where the writing team, which includes Scott Snyder and John Layman, will go with them.

One of my problems with the book is that the art is above average, but this makes mistakes and awkward poses stand out a lot more than they may normally. Weird anatomy seems to show up more in issue two, starting most obviously with Tim Drake, who shows up a for a few panels. He’s fighting some robots he built and he kicks one in the head. His foot is off panel and it makes his leg look freakishly long, especially compared to his other leg which is bent and hidden behind speech bubbles.

This pops up again when Selina Kyle appears. She leaps at Batman while dodging some Batarangs. Her head, arms and torso are facing one direction while her hips and legs are facing a different one, leaving her looking very oddly twisted. When she lands in the next panel, the posing leaves her with a very stubby-looking arm.

My issues with the art basically end there. The colouring is very nice, especially in the brief instances where we can get away from the drab and dark colours that seem to make up Gotham. The covers for both issues are, while not the most original out there, beautiful. Issue two’s cover, where Jim Gordon is being escorted by police officers while handcuffed, stood out to me as the better cover. It is a lot more interesting then issue one’s, where Batman stands on a gargoyle.  I can imagine people seeing issue two’s cover and wanting to know what happened.

And that’s where Batman Eternal #1 and #2 left me: a lot of questions have been asked and not many have been answered. But both issues serve as really well-done set up for future issues and that’s what the first couple issues of a new book should set out to do; keep the reader interested enough to pick up the next issue, which I definitely plan on doing.