The End is near! Ragnarok! Armageddon! The Apocalypse as arrived – That’s right, I am about to award “Batman: The Dark Knight” a 4.5 rating!!!!

I’m as shocked as you are, believe me. This series has been on life support from the get go. Originally developed as a vanity project for superstar artist David Finch before the New 52, Batman: The Dark Knight offered little more then pretty art. The story was atrocious and the book suffered even more from delays due to Finch’s overly drawn artwork taking for days to get done.

Cue the New 52 and Finch gets a “do-over”. This time he brings in a better writer to help him out but things still sucked the ballsack and most of us dropped the title faster then a whores panties on prom night.

So why the fuck did I buy this issue? Two words: Alex Maleev. I love this dudes art and figured since I dug those backups he’s been doing over in Batman and Detective Comics I would take the 2.99 hit and buy the damn thing. Glad I did cause Maleev and Hurwitz have just delivered one of the best Batman stories of the year in this issue.

Remember that Clayface two-parter over in Batman that Snyder and Capullo did a few months ago? Yeah we all loved that one – well we get the CODA of sorts here in this issue – but things are not all about Clayface, we get some Commissioner Gordon pages the likes we haven’t seen since Batman: Year One – a series that kept popping up in my head when I read this and that’s a good thing.

Maleev’s art is the right amount of messy/realistic that this story needed to succeed the way it did. He shines the most bright on the pages with Gordon, giving things a hard edged crime-noir feel that elevates Hurwitz’ story and grounds this world in a grime and darkness that we haven’t got much from any other of the Bat titles out there.

God I hope this creative teams stays on for a while and sneaks in wonderful issues under the radar.