The key page is in this issue, in my opinion, the the full page where Boy wakes Bruce from sleep, his head swimming with images of giants bats and skulls and fragmentary speech bubbles. At first glance, it seems that those bubbles are ideas floating around in Bruce's semi-concious mind. It is easy enough to assume those words are in his own mind because they gesture towards Bruce's conception of the Batman. But then Boy's head pops up from the bottom right corner of the page and you realize, those are all Boy's words and he's telling Bruce a story. It's a simple one: The Deer people, tired of being preyed upon by the Blood people, have been inspired to use the superstitions of the Blood people as their weapon to strike back and ward them off.

So it is not so surprising that Boy, with his people now fashioning themselves as the Bat People, has donned a shield with a bat on it and has painted a vaguely Bat shape over his eyes, very much familiar to us as Robin's domino mask.

The words initally thought to be Bruce's thoughts, are actually from the mouth of the Boy in front of him, ot encapsulates entirely what my sense of the project  isof this mini so far: The idea of the Batman, a concept we take for granted as an externalization of Bruce's inner self, is actually quite independent of him. It has been a few decdes now, where writers have hammered in the inseperability of Bruce Wayne and the Batman persona, sometimes going so far as to say(like in the Nolan films) that Bruce is the mask and Batman is the his real self. To be honest I find that less than compelling, and now reading a story that seems to want to seperate Bruce's drive and the dark, grim, moodiness of the Batman as distinct facets of the concept of the character is quite refreshing.

I do dislike trying to quantify how like a story by number of stars, so what hell! Full marks! :-)