I wanna kiss Frazier Irving on the mouth.

That’s a bit forward I know but can you blame me? Just look at this issue and tell me that he isn’t a gifted artist. At this point I don’t even care if a lot of his stuff is digital work ala Ariel Olivetti. It was a pet peeve of mine cause it always seemed too fake. But I just can’t ignore the talent no matter how he does his work.

What makes me love his work is his color palette. You don’t normally see pinks, greens, and oranges used so effectively as he does. There’s a rooftop sequence where it’s a light red mixed with pink and it is amazing to look at. His colors set the tone of each scene or gives context to the scene. In that moment, you can tell it’s happening mid-morning and in another scene in Russia the light blue really sets the wintry landscape. Outside of his color scheme I do love his layouts and his character models have improved greatly. Because it is a digital effect, it can be tough to get emotion out of his people. In this issue though, I see a vast improvement and it’s nice how you can see the subtly in his work.

This issue in particular, with it being a #0 issue, is the origins of Batman Incorporated and to be honest….This should have been a regular issue a long time ago. Just as a primer for the start of this series and more importantly, it’s one hell of a fun read. Now it looks like, or at least from what I read online, a lot of this is Chris Burnham writing with a Morrison plot and to be honest it is hard to tell the difference. I’m sure Burnham got a lot help in this but it was a pretty fun issue to read. The concept of Batman INC has always been a great one and at times it feels like Morrison hasn’t used the concept properly. Seeing all of the character be asked to join from Knight and Squire to El Gaucho is a blast to read. Shame we couldn’t get more this fun in the past then what we got. (Not complaining on what we got in terms of quality. Just it turned into a ‘Black Hand’ plot instead of a ‘Golden Age’ Batman as promised.)

This is a great issue of Batman INC for a variety of reasons:

1) It’s a gorgeous issue by Frazier Irving.
2) It’s a fun issue by Burnham and Morrison with a lot of great concepts.
3) It’s a origin story so it’ll be a great read and you won’t get lost.

A lot of the zero issues I’ve read have been okay. But this is the first one I can truly say did the job right.