Batman: Gates of Gotham 1

I’m not entirely sure what to say about this – I found very little to get my teeth into. The story starts in the late 19th Century with a Wayne and some other guys planning some unclear but ambitious architecture, including some bridges. Cut to now, and the bridges are getting blown up by someone new, to me at least, for unstated reasons. And that’s it. We are given no reason to particularly care about the bridges, no reason they are more important to the city than bridges naturally are, no sense of what the attacks are for or who the perpetrator is.

It strikes me as a very poorly thought through first issue on other levels too: the timing of the panels and splashes is bizarre and puzzling, though that may be partly artist McCarthy’s fault. Both splashes in the first seven pages are totally blown: one is a clumsy look at Batman threatening some stooge, a generic image if ever there was one, and he does nothing with it, failing even to make Batman look scary; the other is a long shot of two bridges exploding at postage stamp size, perhaps ineffective both for the scale and because of the gloomy, lifeless colouring by Guy Major. McCarthy gets worse in the action scenes of Batman rescuing people, which are not easy to read and are dull and routine when decoded. He does give us some lively character faces, to be fair – the stooge is good, as is Gordon, and the pointless scene with the Penguin is nicely done, but the faces deteriorate for the main heroes when out of costume, who are stiff and characterless.

I can’t find a lot to say. It reads as if written for a collection rather than as a first issue to hook a reader, as if it is assured of an automatic following. It has little of clear substance in it, nothing to make me want to know why the events are happening or to think they matter, nowhere near enough in the art to make it a more powerful experience. I know Snyder has some sort of rep (don’t know about co-writer Higgins), but there is nothing here to make it obvious why. It feels like a spacefiller for the schedules, another Batman title because DC can always sell one of those.