Flashpoint: The latest Batman Family crossover "event" gets underway here, and it's completely underwhelming. The prospect of having to buy 25 or more comics in order to read one completely story is not a pleasant one. Gabrych makes it clear that this is an ambitious tale of crime run amok in Gotham City, and I'm pleased to see that this has apparently been building up for some time, as the writer incorporates previous plot elements from recent releases in the Batman line of titles here. The problem is that I suspect only the most devoted of die-hard Batman readers will follow everything that's going on here, as the script is not at all accessible. One must be quite familiar with the workings of the Gotham underworld to follow along.
A gang war erupts in Gotham as the various factions -- some led by some of the more colorful denizens of the underworld -- jockey for position as the king of the criminal hill. The explosive developments take the Batman and the various members of his crimefighting "family" completely offguard, and they scramble first to save human lives. Putting an end to the conflict will have to wait.
I was surprised when I saw Pete Woods credited as the penciller for this issue. This is much darker and more mature fare than I'm accustomed to seeing from him, but he does well with the subject matter... as well as can be expected, anyway. There is so much going on here that it's impossible to follow, and it makes for a chaotic series of visuals. Mind you, that chaos is pretty much what the characters experience as well, so Woods does a good job of plunking the reader in the middle of the action.
I'm not wild about crossovers of this nature. Self-contained stories, ones limited to a single title, such as Identity Crisis, are more my style. Still, the concept here makes sense, even though the landscape of the criminal underworld in Gotham changes as often as writers on these various titles do. What's needed here is a crib sheet, a listing of the dramatis personae that allows the reader to keep up to speed on the multitude of players.
Low: Does this story fit in with the gang war of "War Games"? I have no idea. The writer provides no context for this backup serial, save for the fact that it flows out of the Riddler's abuse of the man known as Hush. The Riddler's ignorance of Poison Ivy's might and psychosis makes no sense, as they've been well established for some time now. The story meanders, and a point never seems to arise.
The art is at best generic. There's no real sense of movement or of place. Perhaps that's the point; perhaps the storytellers were aiming for a surreal, Through the Looking Glass feel, but it didn't work for me. Also, between the Riddler and Poison Ivy's plant world, the art is just so incredibly green. The constant greens begin to blur and blend after a while.
