Totally by-the-numbers. Not bad, but nothing to get excited about, in my opinion.

Capullo’s art was the best part about this. I hadn’t seen his work in a while, and it was a nice fit here. Not amazing–not J.H. Williams quality–but pretty good.

Snyder’s script almost put me to sleep at times. I’ve read a hundred Batman comics that had similar plot-points.

It baffles me how people can give the writing five stars. All of the characterizations save a few seem very mediocre to me–not “bad”, but mediocre. The mayoral candidate–Was this guy really so interesting? There’s just not much…there. And we already know he’s going to become a villain, so the most potentially interesting revelation about him is already off the table, because Snyder set up his introduction in such a generic way that you just KNOW that the guy’s going to turn out to be a villain. Predictable.

The opening, with all the villains? Don’t characters like Two-Face deserve more than to be used as canon fodder like that?

The twist ending on the last page? We already know it’s not going to play out that way. Bruce should already know it as well. Snyder shouldn’t’ve tried to sell this with such a straight face.

There were some neat ideas along the way, like a certain good guy dressing up like a certain bad guy. But unless that incident actually turns out to mean more to the unfolding mystery here, I don’t really see the point of it. I mean, it was a nice little twist. But is it a twist just for the sake of having a twist? If so, fine. If not, then it doesn’t really score MAJOR points with me if it was just shock value for the sake of shock value.

The whole “Gotham is…” motif was very laborious and boring, in my opinion. I cringed when Snyder started off with that on page one. I knew I was in for a long tedious monologue.

Overall, I don’t think the writing was horrible, but I continued to be baffled as to why people think that EVERYTHING Snyder writes is worthy of five stars. This isn’t even as good as most of his Detective issues. If you rated them as five stars, then how can this be five stars? This was a LOT more generic of a Batman issue.

I just don’t think rating every book so high shows much perspective. This was okay but it doesn’t come anywhere close to many great Batman comics of the past. I can see people loving this if they’ve only ever read a handful of Batman comics, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near “5” status. It’s just not that deep or original.