This is…..This is well….How do I put this?….

This is a weird issue. Not a bad issue, but a weird one. So far Scott Snyder has given us a kick ass (and disturbing as hell) run on Detective so far. But I’m starting to see a trend here in his run and it’s not a good thing. In both this story and his first arc (The Black Mirror) I’ve noticed that while the issues leading up to the ending are amazing; his endings on the other hand are somewhat lacking. Again it’s not like those issues, and this one in particular, are bad. It’s just that I feel that Snyder has these amazing set ups to the story but then it sort of flattens out at the end.

In this issue we see who Tiger Shark is and the overall mystery of who killed the woman in the whale. It’s not like either of these endings are bad, I particular like this introduction to Tiger Shark. He’s a really disturbing villain (what would you expect) who may or may not be involved with destroying ancient civilizations. Basically he’s like Ra’s Al Ghul but has a shark tounge. I hope we see more of the guy before the new reboot, especially to see what’s under the bandana, but it did feel like Snyder had to rush to get him out of the picture. Then we have the conversation with Ms. Zucco and unlike the previous issues with Dick and her talking, this didn’t have much of a punch to it. More like: ‘Yeah you did a bad thing but whatever’ type of attitude on Dick’s part. It just doesn’t mesh with what we read before. Then you have the final page in this issue and it somewhat disappoints me that Snyder went for the obvious route considering how he’s handled the character in previous issues.

The further we go into the run, the more I am appreciating Jock’s artwork. While there aren’t a whole lot of pages, like the amazing previous issue, that wowed me; there were some great sequences in here. I did like the fake out on the first two pages and I also liked the final page of Dick flying through the city. Other then that though it’s the same inconsistancies I’ve seen in previous Jock work. Either we get some great pages or the next we get some really inconsistant anatomy and faces. Plus he didn’t bother with backgrounds in a lot of the panels which also annoyed me a bit.

I feel bad giving this issue negative vibes with this review. Partly because this has been a great run so far by Snyder, but mostly because Snyder reads these reviews and well….if you saw the final page in this comic you don’t want to get on his bad side. But overall this was a solid issue, with some great sequences in both the writing and the art. But I go back to how Snyder handles his endings. It’s not that he doesn’t prepair for a good ending, but I think he puts too much in his first couple of issues to give us a somewhat disappointing or lackluster ending. We only have a few more issues to go before the reboot and considering what Snyder and Jock has in mind for the final issue, I think we’ll see a great ending out of these two before it’s all over.