A fun trip, with a little Darkseid
There’s a fine line when writing an earth-shattering event in my opinion, and it can be crossed by making assumptions on the readers’ prior knowledge of DC events past. It must be a difficult job to be tasked with as you want to change the fabric of the known reality but how can you do that without addressing roughly 50 years’ worth of history. Understanding this, I still feel the same way about this issue as I did about the first, there’s a lot of setup and prior understanding needed to gain the most from this comic. Let me put it this way, if I said you need to know that Darkseid is a baby now (and why), you’ll need a well-rounded understanding of the multiverse that DC has, including the many crises’ that affected it, the history of Batman from at least the end of Grant Morrisons run (including his role in Final Crisis) to now, and who the Antimonitor is… would that be the in the general knowledge of the average reader? Probably not! I can’t even imagine what would be going on through the head of a new reader who just so happens to like Batman.
Now I’m not saying the story isn’t good, it’s actually very intriguing and I’m already hooked. But I know that from a previous experience with these writers that the pay off it probably going to be pretty great and I am definitely in it for the long haul. The story, in a nutshell, is Batman has been stalked by a being from a dark alternate multiverse, who is trying to use him as a gate to come to “our” side of reality. Batman, being Batman, doesn’t want help from the Justice League as he can always do it on his own and, as such, has been avoiding his crew for most of the story. The issue ends with revelation after revelation about the last few years in comics and its their hidden meaning (whether this was planned from the start or not, I can’t say). Then by end of the issue situations are dire and without spoiling anything; saving the universe may not be left up to the trinity.
It was a particularly fun and interesting read. As I said before, I’m hooked and I will certainly continue reading if you put my favourite comic characters in you issue for literally no reason, you have my complete attention, and this comic does that perfectly!