The era of crazy ideas by Grant Morrison on Batman is over. In my eyes, Grant Morrison’s run started off strongly right from the start but once ‘Return of Bruce Wayne’ started to get delayed…..well we all know how I felt about that. Anyways, a new era in Batman’s career has come about thanks to Grant Morrison (once again). But before we get the idea of Batman into a corporation, we have some business to take care of.

While I would’ve liked to see more of the ending of ‘Return of Bruce Wayne’ (just a few pages trying to sum everything up would’ve been nice) this was a pretty good issue to bring everyone back to speed. Bruce is taking care of business; from having Wayne Enterprise get weapons rolling for Batman, to tell the rest of the Bat-family what their roles in the future will be. Morrison definitely seems to know where this is heading and the little pieces he throws in are pretty interesting. The idea of this Leviathan group might be the Cobra (la-la) of this new status quo so hopefull we’ll see more of them. Also, the…..well the Muslim Batman (sorry but Morrison didn’t give him a proper name yet!) might also be a great new villain in the making. There are also some nice touches in here like the opening pages with the Bat, or Bruce and Damian finally having some time together. If all of this continues in Batman INC to come, then I am excited for the new status quo.

What hampered my interest with the issue a bit was the art. Finch is a great artist, I am not question his talents. Some of the panel layouts are nicely done and again that opening sequence really set the bar high for this issue. Overall it is the inking that bothered me throughout the whole issue. I never really thought about the inker so much until I came on this site and now with a closer eye on the role, I can say that the inking is not good here. It should come to no surprise that my dislike of the inking in this and Batt being the inker is linked together. I thought Batt ruined a good amount of Green Lantern Corps last month and here he ruins a lot of great pages of Finch’s art in this. The back matter showing the process from pencils to inks really proves my point. Finch’s original pages look gorgeous, but once Batt gets a hand on them then it’s a sketchy mess.

It’s a shame that Batt’s inking in this ruined a lot what was on the page here. Finch did a great job with Morrison’s script and I was enjoying the issue in the beginning. But once Batman comes into full view (the first two page spread) and I groaned from then on. Again I though this was a well written beginning for the Batman INC status quo, and Finch had some great layouts in this one-shot. If only the inking could be so improved, I think it would’ve had a great chance to be pick of the week material.