Patrick Gleason is one disturbing dude. Seriously, the last issue of this series freaked me out in a bunch of different ways. Mainly because the way he draws the Joker made me scared to turn the page. This issue continues the dread as we continue the ‘Death of the Family’ tie-in with Tomasi delivering more disturbing moments for me to read.

What really makes Patrick Gleason’s pencils work for me is the inking by Mick Gray. I always forget to bring him up in every review because he is the unsung hero of this series. The images of Joker wearing his face backwards is chilling enough but Gray adds in a few lines to make it even more disturbing. There’s one panel where you can see the tendons from Joker’s chin and….well apart from being gross it is strangely beautiful to look at. So when we get to the next half of the book and there’s an entire new inker on board it was really jarring for me. The pencils still look amazing but now the pages look cleaner than what they were before and I’m not a fan of it. Keith Champagne is a great inker in his own right and again I’m not saying his work is bad here. But what made this and last issue so damn beautiful was the ugliness to the drawings from Gray’s inks. So to have them look more clean really dampers the tone in here.

I don’t know how many more disturbing images Tomasi can create with this tie-in. Eating popcorn is really going to be hard for me now after seeing some of these pages. Also, he is really good at writing crazy dialogue for Joker. This is crazy even for him and this issue really brings a ‘Doug Moench’ paranoia vibe to the issue. The only issue I had with this was it really wasn’t that difficult to tell the twist by the end. It’s pretty obvious this isn’t the right person under the cowl so the reveal really isn’t shocking here.

It’s a shame that the issue changed inkers midway through because this was close to being the best issue of the week again for me. Tomasi has wrote one hell of a crossover and Gleason’s pencils are making it really hard to turn the page with his disturbing images. It’s been a while since I have loved this series as much as the main Batman book. Thankfully, or weirdly it seems, a tie-in arc has made this book one of the best at DC again. If you’ve avoided this title because of the tie-in I hope I can change your mind with this review. The tie-ins have been that good.