Batman #19 Review

Since their debut on Batman, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo have been almost uniformly focused on telling sweeping epics; Court of Owls was nearly a year long, Death of the Family was a multi-faceted Bat-family event, and this summer’s Zero Year is the start to another year-long tale. In the interim, however, Snyder and Capullo are offering up a comparatively small two-parter in Batman #19 and #20. It’s a pretty straight-forward tale – someone appears to be doing terrible deeds under the guise of Bruce Wayne – and Batman’s out to set it straight.

It’s refreshing to see the creators just go off the cuff a bit without having to play to a larger narrative. There are references to Zero Year and certainly consequences of both Death of the Family and Batman Incorporated #8 at play here, but Snyder is more concerned with building a fun mystery for the readers to enjoy. The narrative is pretty predictable in its first half and you’ll likely be guessing the culprit as you read along, but it’s the enhanced twist that Snyder offers the character that is most interesting. It’s not a reintroduction or a revamp, merely an evolution of a character we’re all familiar with; it manages to paint the character in a new light without changing a thing that’s come before. More importantly, Batman #19 is an effective, if simple, detective story; something we’ve seen Bruce doing all too rarely in the last couple of years.

Capullo delivers more of his usual great work here and gets to traverse some new ground thanks to the aforementioned new villain. So far in this series, Batman has dealt mostly with some of the more “grounded” (I use that term loosely) members of his rogues gallery, but here Capullo gets to explore one of the more fantastical. But Capullo’s devotion to physical accuracy and perspective never lets Batman #19 stray too far from what we’ve come to expect from the visuals of this series, and he manages to deliver panel after panel of stellar Batman action. There are some great brooding scenes in the cave as well that just have “iconic” slapped all over them.

Also a delight this month is the back-up feature by James Tynion IV and Alex Maleev. Not only is it an immense joy to see Maleev drawing Batman, but this issue does one better by bringing Superman into the fold. That’s right, the back-up here is a classic World’s Finest team-up. It’s very much Superman coming into Batman’s world – Tynion plays up Superman’s weakness to the supernatural – and it’s just a blast to read. Tynion jams off of some beats in the main narrative where Alfred references Clark calling Bruce to talk about Damian, and it works like a charm. It might not be the most memorable Batman/Superman pairing, but it’s certainly the best we’ve seen in the New 52 and it’s gorgeous to boot.

Joey is a Senior Editor at IGN and a comic book creator. Follow Joey on Twitter @JoeyEsposito, or find him on IGN at Joey-IGN. If he could, he'd run away to live amongst wild cats for the rest of his days.

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