With OMAC slowly creeping up as my personal favorite DC book right now; Batman and Robin is going to have to churn classics and fast. I trust Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason to deliver a great issue month in and month out at this point. They haven’t failed so far, but a monthly schedule can be a tricky thing with one issue having a weak link then the rest. Sadly, I hate to say that this is the weak link of this strong arc so far. But it still doesn’t make it ‘bad’.

My ultimate problem with this issue is that I just don’t care much about this Ducard guy. Nobody could be interesting but so far we haven’t got much to see why he’s better then just another hitman. I feel like spending so much of the issue spending on his origin was a mistake. Damian leaving Bruce should be the focal point of the issue and seeing more of his mission with Nobody. The origin of Nobody just doesn’t feel original and while Damian abandoning his role as Robin isn’t either; I think Tomasi adding more of the family dynamic to it would have been better. There are some good moments in this though from Bruce giving his heartfelt speech to Damian in a recording (before it segways to a flashback), and I definitely loved the opening sequence with the drawings Alfred finds. But those are early on in the issue and it only gets uninteresting from there.

While the art is still great to look at, it looks like Gleason had to rush a bit to get this issue out. We all know a monthly schedule is a bit much for him sometimes but I was getting impressed how it all looked the first four months. Here, his pencils seem a lot looser and not as detailed as it should be. Oh there are some great pages in this; from Batman riding off in the Batmobile, or the various tiny panels of Damian/Nobody sneaking around; but the faces and anatomy are wildly off from page to page. He’s always had a loose interpretation to anatomy but it gets a bit weird to see Damian literally change head structure in the same scene. The layouts are still pretty good though, and I loved how he ended the issue with the dutch angle.

By no means am I saying this is a terrible issue. It’s a good issue through and through; but good isn’t ‘good’ enough for this series. From the moment this book relaunched it has been one of my all time favorite comics to read. But with this issue I just found myself a little uninterested in the origins of Nobody and Gleason’s pencils are a bit too loose for me to fully enjoy. The passion is still there but hopefully this was just a small misstep and we go back to the perfection next month.