Batman: Face the Face - James Robinson et al.
Found this one at the library. Since I never know any more what Batman timeline any given book might be following, I just try to roll with whatever's happening and hope that it makes sense. In this particular volume, Batman has been gone from Gotham for a year. Commissioner Gordon was gone for awhile and is now back. Harvey Dent is no longer Two-Face, but has had both surgery and psychiatry to put him back together.
In fact, Batman put him in charge of Gotham during his absence, and Harvey Dent has been out on the streets, doing his own vigilante justice (but not killing them). Until now. Batman has returned, only to find that somebody has been killing off Gotham's villains with Two-Face's twin revolver. All the evidence points to Dent, of course, but no murder mystery is that easy. Dent himself is struggling with the reappearance of Two-Face in his own mind, and isn't himself sure if he has committed the murders or not.
The artwork in this volume is not bad, though I've always found Two-Face to be a bit much. In particular, despite the however many times that Dent has had his face destroyed and repaired, every time it happens it looks the same again, right down the center, eyeball and teeth and everything. The scenes of Dent arguing with himself are a little like that scene with Gollum in the movies: okay, yeah, it's all taking place in his mind, but we get the point long before the scene is over.
What I found most interesting about this particular plotline was Batman's thoughts about Robin. (I believe this was Robin Number 3.) It actually ends up showing a more human side of Batman than we usually get, and I actually liked it; Robin brought out a different attitude in Batman and change the way he thought about being on a team.
The overarching mystery plotline is okay, but involves a couple characters I'm not familiar with, so I wasn't really invested in that part of the story. I'd be more interested in Batman's year off, I think.
Fed to jonathan's brain | March 09, 2010
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