Was not blown away by this like everyone else. It’s impressive in that it ties together so much (“I pulled you behind a dumpster!!!11”. Cheap), but I really detest how they ended James’ arc. He was an extremely interesting character when you didn’t know where you stood with him, but, oh well, he is actually just “unredeemable-psychopath-#345” afterall. Not to mention the whole psychopath angle was very distasteful and crude treatment of a serious mental illness (wikipedia says the proper name is: anti-social personality disorder because of the poor associations ‘psychopath’ has). Ending on a twilight-zone zoom into the child was repulsive.

On top of that, to mark alienate myself further, I’m often not a huge fan of Snyder’s writing. Often it feels rushed and sloppy, and otherwise perfunctory at best, perhaps he just has too many books on his plate. “Maybe deep down I knew how vicious… how positively cruel, the city could be”. Dot dot dot. To be fair when it’s good, it is good though, more often with a great artist like on Survival of the Fittest, where it is elevated enormously. Neither am I a fan of Jock’s sketchy angular art. It doesn’t do anything for me at all, frequently downright ugly and ill-fitting, and I sometimes skip the issues he does alone.

However, and it’s an enormous ‘however’, Francavilla is a god amongst men. His art on Detective comics over this run has been phenomenal, and bears more than a passing resemblance in draughtsmanship, composition and colouring to Mazzucchelli. He’s possibly the sole is the reason I’ve been following this run honestly. I was disappointed this week by his work on Black Panther this week which I decided to check out, and which didn’t live up to the quality he reached here. Whether he just spent less time and effort on it, or he’s just a more natural fit for Gotham, I’m not sure.

Again, my main problem with the issue is my fundamental distaste at the treatment of a mental illness easily demonized and misunderstood. While I would have preferred James being redeemed, it’s now clear the question about him wasn’t whether was “good” or “evil”, but whether he was a psychopath or not. At least Gordon did hold onto his son after shooting him a good few times, it’s okay he wasn’t taking his medicine! The poisoning of all the children was particularly distasteful. I sincerely hope this thread isn’t picked up by some cocksure writer in 10 years. Fundamentally what I’m getting at is that there’s a very very large gap between being a psychopath, lacking in empathy, and being psychotic… But again Francavilla saves it for me.

Nowhere near the heady quality, the thoughtfulness and ambiguity of 875, which was as good as comics get. I guess this is super hero comics anything more subtle than black and white is too hard for us to digest!