I should admit my biases up front, which are that I'm kind of tired of Batman in general at the moment and that I hate the notion of these immense multi-part crossovers between multiple titles. However, the Batman titles have also done some pretty good multiple title crossovers in recent years, like "No Man's Land" and "Officer Down," and a gang war in Gotham does sound like a pretty neat idea for a big story. Unfortunately, in the end, the potential for good and the potential for bad tilts too far in the latter direction for me, and I suspect that this will be both the first and last chapter of "War Games" for me. There are some interesting moments in this issue, including a revelation about a third tier character that made him more interesting to me, and the artwork by Pete Woods and Nathan Massengill is fantastic, but overall it's just kind of a chaotic mess of a story that offers little in the way of surprises or "wow, cool" moments.
Before we get to "War Games," I should mention that, as has become the tradition of Detective Comics for some time, there is a backup story here. This one pits the Riddler against Poison Ivy, and amps Poison Ivy's power levels up considerably. Though I was somewhat intrigued by the notion of Ivy becoming something of a plant goddess rather than a second-rate criminal, I actually prefer her in the latter role, and McCarthy's script has one notable flaw, in that it doesn't really have a sympathetic character. So Ivy decides to off the Riddler? Well, who cares, he's been a bad guy for as long as we've known him. It also seems a shame that one of the best things to come out of "Hush," a more effective and dangerous Riddler, is undercut here where he looks like a helpless dupe.
Gabrych starts the gang war off with a bang, a big slaughter of the organized crime lords orchestrated by a mystery figure. Was it one of the crimelords? An outside force? We don't know yet. What we do know is that Orpheus, Batman's agent on the inside, is one of the survivors, that an ambitious reporter with a desire to prove Batman is real is on the scene and that the chaos left by these murders begins immediately across the city. I've got to give Gabrych credit, he really does convey the notion of how fast the city goes to hell when the balance between crime lords is disrupted, but because I don't have any particular investment in most of these gangs, I don't really care who lives or dies. Which means that for me, at least, all this chaos is just a lot of noise without a strong emotional hook to bring me in.
I was surprised to learn a few things about the state of the current Bat universe while reading this issue, though. I never did finish reading the miniseries that introduced Orpheus into the Bat-verse, so I didn't know that he had become essentially an undercover crimelord secretly working with Batman. As a fan of the undercover cop genre and similar character The Shroud in Marvel continuity, I rather like this idea, and think his involvement in "War Games" is one of the most interesting things about the crossover so far. I also kind of like Batman and Oracle coordinating the troops like generals rather than vigilantes, although on the flipside, it does make Batman appear a lot less heroic and effective that he's compromised to working with the organized criminals in order to get the information he wants.
Though the story didn't exactly drag me in, I was pleased to rediscover the art of Pete Woods on this book. Woods has always been a talent, but it's clear that he's grown considerably over the last year or two, and his work here is just beautifully detailed, giving a real sense of the chaos in the streets, the power of the costumed crimefighter and the claustrophobic urban nightmare that is Gotham. Credit should also go to Massengill for his inks, which provide a touch of darkness without splashing too much black on the page, and Jason Wright, whose colors maintain the dark tone but keep things bright and colorful enough for a superhero comic as well.
"War Games" suffers a little bit from "been there, done that" syndrome for this reader, at least. While "No Man's Land" and "Officer Down" both featured stories that were radically different from what had gone before, we've seen any number of gang wars in the pages of superhero comics and even in Batman comics (hell, it was basically the point of Batman: Dark Victory), and while the craft here is solid enough on everyone's part, I'm not sure the ideas are strong enough that they merit a gigantic crossover. We're only one chapter in, and I'm already kind of bored by the proceedings.
