Batman One Dark Knight

Product Information

It’s such bad writing: the gangs are simply generic bad guys with seemingly no motivation while the main bad guy has a generic motivation and the ending is so cheesy, with the villain monologuing their entire diabolical plan only for Batman to reveal he was recording it all for the cops the entire time.

It takes the whole first issue for that set-up of the blackout to happen, so initially you are reading a Batman story you have seen many times, which is our hero escorting a villain (albeit a new creation for this book) with help from the police, at least from Commissioner Gordon. From high above the sweltering summer streets of Gotham, Batman would escort the GCPD as the dangerous metahuman super-villain known as E. The art is good, the storytelling is good and I liked the dark/bright color chart (seems Jock colored the book himself) but this isn’t enough to redeem this boring and poorly constructed plot. There’s no reason given for why they want to do this but I’m going to be charitable to Jock and suggest that he meant to imply that Vasquez was offering a substantial bounty for them killing EMP - because this simple explanation is never once mentioned in the dismal script. It is woefully written and so stupid that I can’t review it properly without going into SPOILERS so I’ll say that now and recommend everyone who’s leaving the review here to save yourself the time and effort, don’t bother picking it up and avoid this utter drek entirely.Its not the greatest Batman story and sure has flaws like it could have used more fight scenes of Batman vs other gangs but it does its work in 3 issues and I love the art here, Jock is a master at that and he makes you feel for the character of EMP and also has some great art pages here and I think thats the main draw of this story. If anything — and here even I’ll suggest I might be reading too much into it — there’s a little bit in terms of the colors Jock uses and the sparsest of homages that suggests to me a way in which One Dark Knight might be further understood. Throughout this series, the streets are swarming with criminals and we’ve seen them carrying all kinds of weapons, from melee weapons to actual rocket launchers. However, Jock had a vision for this book, and he stuck to it all the way to the very end, and all things considered this is one hell of an achievement. I like how he sometimes zooms in on Batman’s cowl, showing his white eyes as he readies himself for battle, only to zoom out again and show how Batman’s punching and kicking the criminals around him.

Jock has been one of my favorite artists since hitting the scene and finally gets to be showcased in an oversized DC Black Label series. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.My introduction was upon reading his Vertigo work from Faker to The Losers, and then eventually his collaborations with Scott Snyder where he illustrated Batman: The Black Mirror and Wytches. The only single issue of Batman I have sought out and purchased was a one-shot by Jock from a handful of years back. Gangs all around Gotham and set out to attack the prison convoy in an effort to either rescue or kill EMP.

The writing in this issue is a little weaker than in the previous issues, though, and I think this story wraps up a little too quickly. The premise and introduction did the work well enough but the middle and ending were just so dull, it was hard to stick to it given how little interest I had in seeing the arc play itself out.I’ve seen the plot 2 billions times already- a prisoner has to be transferred from A to B in hostile territory- but I can live with that if the story is well told with good pacing, tension points and stuff in between. Would have been nice as a one-shot and not a series of issues that just dragged the already thin premise way too long.

This book as a whole was just not my thing at all though, and I appreciate my roommate for letting me read all of the singles he bought. was transferred from a temporary holding cell to his permanent home at Blackgate Prison in Gotham Harbor.There is simply no way that Croc is actually going to put Batman down that early in the issue and so close to the story’s ending. Jock has also produced key art and concept design for films including Dredd, Annihilation, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and the Oscar-winning Ex Machina. There were also a few points in the book where it wasn't clear to me what was going on, from a visual perspective.