Batman: Gates of Gotham #3 – Review

By: Scott Snyder, Kyle Higgins, Ryan Parrott (writers), Trevor McCarthy (artist), Guy Major (colorist)

The Story: We’ll cross that bridge when we get there—providing it doesn’t collapse first.

The Review: Business is a dirty field; even with the best intentions, it’s pretty difficult to wade into it and come out as clean as you started.  Traditionally, DC has portrayed the Waynes as an almost saintly exception (perhaps a consequence of the somewhat martyred circumstances of Thomas and Martha’s deaths), but recent writers have started digging the dirt on the illustrious Gotham family, revealing their history hasn’t all been as honest as previously believed.

This issue suggests hopes for a better Gotham may not be the sole motivator of Alan Wayne’s investments.  After all, is it really a coincidence he’d like to change the partner location for the newest city-building bridge to land he owns?  Possibly.  After all, other than Cameron Kane’s avarice and Edward Elliot’s suspicion, you have no evidence of Alan’s duplicity.  But then again, how could you?  He’s a businessman, after all.

But loyalty, not business, encourages Nicholas Gates to choose Wayne’s land, not Kane’s, as the end site for the new bridge, a choice spun from his eagerness to accept Alan’s declaration they are now family.  The raging bitterness he later levies against his employers thus seems sudden and somewhat unjust.  It’d make more sense to blame the tragic events on Kane, but you also have to remember Nick himself admits the Wayne land is less ideal for the bridge’s construction.

These intriguing questions and more make the past sequences the strongest parts of the issue, partly because the Bat-family’s investigation in the present stalls a little.  It offers no major revelations, nor even much in the way of enlightening facts.  Instead, it’s mostly a reactionary interlude from last issue’s explosive events, allowing each character to deal with their failures in their own way, sparking some fun exchanges (Red Robin: “You don’t trust anyone…”  Damian: “And your eagerness to trust makes you weak.”).

Batman: Gates of Gotham #2 – Review

By: Scott Snyder & Kyle Higgins (writers); Trevor McCarthy (artist); Guy Major (colorist)

The Story: This city’s getting way too hot for me—it’s freaking on fire, man!

The Review: It’s a well-known phenomenon in fiction that the more effort you put into giving your story background and depth, the more life it takes on.  You can tell a perfectly adequate tale without all that work, but it won’t immerse the reader into its world the way one with a fleshed-out history will.  It’s all the difference between enjoying yourself and coming away feeling like you’ve really been transported somewhere else.

It’s been a long time since Gotham has felt that tangible; that it now largely comes down to Snyder and Higgins’ thoughtful work in laying out the city’s historical roots.  The narration takes on an almost literary quality in the opening sequences that let us into the origins of the “Gates of Gotham”, but never do they seem superfluous or forced.  Dense as it is, it reads very naturally, taking care to let you infer some facts for yourself.

Though at points during this five-page sequence the narration gets a little too luxurious with its time, you can’t help feeling that all these developments—the partnership of the Gotham architect brothers, their grandest commission, and the venerable families who commissioned them—will have a vital role to the story.  It’s a testament to Higgins’ craft that he makes each line and detail worthy of your attention.

In fact, some of these details get some quick payoff once we return to the present action, where the Bat-family is trying to get ahead of this steampunk mastermind before his plot affects any more innocent lives.  When Wayne Tower becomes victim to the mystery villain’s attack, you actually feel its loss more than you would with any other comic book building.  Thanks to seeing its conception and construction earlier, you empathize with what it represents, and its fall takes on added levels of symbolic significance.

Batman: Gates of Gotham #1 – Review

By: Scott Snyder & Kyle Higgins (writers), Trevor McCarthy (artist), Guy Major (colors)

The Story: How’s that song go again?  “Gotham Bridge is falling down…”

The Review: One special, endearing feature of the DCU is the multitude of fictional hometowns for its heroes.  As the characters have grown in stature, so have their cities, to the point where they have as much of an iconic status in our culture as the heroes they host.  While Metropolis will always be the shining city of tomorrow looking to the future, Gotham is a city mired in its past, with little hope of escape.

Snyder opens the issue and follows it up with exactly that premise in mind.  The Gotham of 1881 already has as many shadows as its modern-day parallel, but Alan Wayne and architect Nicholas Anders’ concept for the city shows how at that time, there was still hope Gotham could reach the brilliant heights of Metropolis.  It makes a commentary on the value of architecture: the building of bridges and skyscrapers, beyond their practical uses, symbolize the promise of better things.

And when those structures fall, so too does the city’s pride.  In this case, the destruction of Gotham’s major bridges preludes an attack on its proudest, oldest families, obviously including the Waynes and therefore giving Batman a personal stake in this story.  But this mysterious vendetta also intriguingly targets some unexpected Gotham bluebloods: the Cobblepots and Elliots, whose infamous successors are the Penguin and Hush.

In making these connections, Snyder shows us how world-building can be so valuable to a story.  When you can take the threads of this fictional history and wrap them together, the current action takes on that much more life.  And the fact Snyder ties these threads so tightly to Gotham really makes the city itself a kind of omnipresent character in the plot.  Note Dick’s personification of the town: “I forget how much the city’s been through—how few things rattle it anymore.”

Though Gotham at large may be untroubled by the recent tragedies, the Bat-family can’t let them go.  These disasters are exactly the kind of thing our only too human heroes are least equipped to handle.  They dedicate much of their vigilantism preventing such things from taking place, so it’s no wonder they take a failure to heart—especially with a firsthand view of the casualties, as Dick gets seeing the bodies of victims drowned and suspended in the river’s dark waters.