Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #3 – Review

By: Grant Morrison (writer), Yanick Paquette (artist), Michael Lacombe (inker)

The Story: Part Three, The Bones of Bristol Bay: Bruce Wayne is washed up on the shores outside of Gotham with pirates (Black Beard) and is mistaken for one himself. The other pirates hold him hostage so that he will lead him to the pirate’s gold.

What’s Good: This story was a lot of fun! The action and conflict shot out of the first page, and didn’t let up (with one exception), until near the end of the book. Bruce is getting more of his memory back, but it’s still patchy and we as readers don’t know where the patches are. This makes things more tense for us, because we really have no idea what Bruce has to work with. He’s at least got his detective skills (as we saw in the last issue), but the reader gets to share in Bruce’s disorientation. The narrative appears to be deliberately under-explained, but as the story progresses, enough pieces are laid out that the reader can figure it out. It’s great to be treated intelligently by a writer! Also, and as I said in my review of Return of Bruce Wayne #1, I really, really like the realistic way Bruce’s physical skills are handled by Morrison. Another writer would have had an unarmed Bruce mop up a dozen armed pirates without working up a sweat. Morrison doesn’t strain credibility with that – Bruce is obviously outgunned. Another part I really enjoyed with this story was the time travel. Morrison is now showing us the effects of Bruce’s previous episodes in the past and shows him starting to take active measures to deal with what he’s going through, leaving those pieces that Red Robin and Batman have been discovering in the present. It’s eerie and cool.

On art, jury is still out for me on Yanick Paquette. He did well with the dark, stormy mood of Gotham and the caves and his work on faces did the job, but I’m not sure how well they showed emotions. And for some reason, the eyes in many panels were just dark zones on the faces. Like I said, jury’s still out on whether I’d turn to a book because of Paquette, but he told the story competently.