The Batman creative team continues to win me back over to the monthly adventures of the caped crusader, despite my general annoyance with the way he's portrayed in the DC Universe these days and a general disinterest in the stories going on in most of the other half-dozen Bat-books. The reasons why I like this book are many and varied, but they can be most easily nailed down to two: One is that Winick brings us Batman the superhero again, placing him more firmly in the context of the DC Universe and using all those neat super elements, not unlike what Morrison did with Bats recently in JLA: Classified. The other is that Mahnke, along with Nguyen and Sinclair, is doing probably the best work of his career on this book, and the action set-piece that makes up most of this issue is beautifully drawn and expertly choreographed.
Winick scores one in the win column for me already by utilizing an Identity Crisis plot point without annoyingly pointing up the many problems I had with that series. That plot point, of course, is the rogue Amazo android mentioned in issue one and then forgotten (as with so many other plot threads in Identity Crisis). It's not even deliberately referenced, but it's a nice little touch of continuity for those who are paying attention, without requiring you to buy into the actions of the heroes or villains of Identity Crisis in the way that the recent Flash and Teen Titans stories have. In other words, it manages to include Identity Crisis without reminding me how much I hated Identity Crisis, which is a nice bit of continuity wrangling, and the sort of thing I respect.
He also scores by choosing to plop Batman and Nightwing down into the superhero (or supervillain) side of the DC Universe with his choice of adversary. Amazo is a cool villain, and his doofy Silver Age look is made very scary and effective by Mahnke, who presents him as an enormous powerhouse facing down what amount to two skilled, hopelessly outmatched crimefighters. Winick loses points in that I think he cheats Amazo's power level quite a bit in order to give Batman and Nightwing a chance to look cool. Fortunately, they do look cool, and while I might argue that someone with Flash's speed and Superman's invulnerability shouldn't have been remotely touched by most of the things the two heroes try, I also can't deny that Batman's little plastic explosive trick was a nifty bit of writing or that the notion of the heroes stripping away the effectiveness of powers (speed, flight, heat vision) one by one to even the odds is a good way to handle the obvious power imbalance.
Meanwhile, while Amazo has the powers of the Justice League, the predominant power of Winick's villains seems to be snark, embodied by the somewhat engaging and yet borderline annoying verbal tics of Black Mask, Red Hood and Mr. Freeze. Given Black Mask's predilection for torturing and murdering those close to the heroes of Batman and Catwoman, I can't really find him terribly amusing, and he's already reminding me of the Joker, a villain who has become more than anything a symbol of Batman's impotence as a crime-fighter, unable to protect even those close to him. The dialogue in itself is funny for the most part (I kind of liked the snark-off between Black Mask and Red Hood at the end), but it's the kind of thing that works best in moderation and it's already wearing a bit thin.
While Winick's character bits seem like the kind of thing that might grate over time, though, the artwork is gaining my appreciation more and more with each issue. Mahnke has never been a favorite artist of mine, but Batman is changing all that. His rendition of some of these characters, especially Black Mask and Amazo, heightens their freakish nature and yet contains a certain real quality that really makes them pop off the page, and I can't say enough about the work done on the action sequence in this issue. Mahnke, Nguyen and Sinclair really convey the speed at which Batman and Nightwing move and act, and the sheer physical power of Amazo besides. The approach is sort of like treating Amazo as the Terminator, watching as bits and pieces of him are blown away and he just keeps coming, and Mahnke does a nice job of indicating each bit of damage as crucial but not fatal. 7/10
