I'm a little off Batman in general these days, and nobody is doing a Batman book that really makes me want to jump back onboard. However, Judd Winick has been doing fantastic stuff on Green Arrow and very enjoyable work on Outsiders, so I thought I'd check in on his take on the dark knight. What he's got here is a very standard sort of Batman story, pitting the character against a pair of his well-known foes and serving up the sort of internal narrative that has been a staple of the character since Frank Miller perfected it. He's joined by artists Dustin Nguyen and Richard Friend, late of the late Wildcats 3.0, who are good here but not as ideally matched as they were to the unusual style of Wildcats. Basically, this is the start of a solid, effective Batman story by talented creators. It doesn't stand out as anything spectacularly different, but it does seem a lot more straightforward and clear than the previous run, a good compromise between the flash of the Loeb/Lee stuff and the darker, noir take of Azzarello and Risso.
I'm reminded of Winick's approach to Green Arrow in the way he writes Batman, actually. Not in personality, because Winick has definitely captured the darker, more serious personality that Batman has, but in terms of flavor. Just as Star City and its denizens have a definite personality to them when Winick writes them, so too do Gotham and its inhabitants. There's a brief but very funny scene of Robin going undercover, working in tandem with Alfred, that indicates the kind of grunt work Batman and his operatives must do but which is rarely shown on the page, and it's a nice little detail.
Where a lot of the detail and the personality comes from, though, is in Winick's narration for Batman. The entire issue doesn't have caption boxes the way the Loeb issues tended to, but the book is fairly heavy on the captions, as we see into Batman's thought processes as he goes about his unusual work. Little details like how much weight his line can hold, that he knows when he's about to fail but tries anyway and all the information he relays about his cute little toys show off not just the methodical nature of Batman but give the fans a treat in terms of hearing about all the cool gadgets. Winick's Batman also has just a slight touch of a cruel sense of humor similar to the one seen in Miller's Dark Knight Returns, most notable in the way he uses the Batmobile as a weapon.
Nguyen and Friend have really impressed me with the work that they've done on the corporate machinations and gun culture action of Wildcats, and their work here is impressive as well. I was especially pleased when they were tackling the kind of non-costume stuff they've been doing in Wildcats, notably the interaction between Tim and someone else in his undercover assignment, but I was also quite pleased with their take on Batman. The look they've got for him seems like a mix of a variety of takes on the character, from the detail of Scott McDaniel and Jim Lee to the shadows and rage of Frank Miller and Eduardo Risso, and I find their take on the character to say a lot about him, just as Winick's narration says a lot about the internal workings of the character. I'm not quite as wild about their take on the Penguin, who looks as inhumanly frenetic as the drug-crazed perps in the beginning, but in general this is very nice stuff.
Winick and company are turning in a fairly classic take on the character, not going deep into his psyche or setting up a mind-bending mystery or delving into the rainy, dark atmosphere of Gotham. Instead, they're treating him basically as a superhero whose powers are a sharp mind, trained body and more technology than Bill Gates after Comdex. Pitting him against foes whose defining abilities are their insanity and the themes that drive them. In other words, it's not the kind of thing Batman fans haven't read before, but it is the kind of thing the majority of Batman fans have probably been clamoring for more of.
