I also found Jock’s art to be lacking in some spots, his voice for Batman to be all over the place, and both the story itself and the subplots that run throughout it to feel extremely shallow and underbaked.

Pressler, aka EMP, (woah - his initials are the same as electro-magnetic pulse, which also happens to be his power set! Undoubtedly a large part of this book is for the purpose of having another Batman book out there with Jock’s art in it, not an unworthy goal by any means, but the plot was perhaps secondary. So while this is nowhere near the “Batman has been redefined for me for all time” level, I very much enjoyed it. Jock seems rather made for drawing Gotham’s crumbling architecture, and there’s a variety of great shots in the end of Batman battling marauding gangs and facing off against Vasquez at the gaping maw of a broken bridge. Jock has also produced key art and concept design for films including Dredd, Annihilation, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and the Oscar-winning Ex Machina.Jock carefully sets up these fight sequences so that it makes sense how many enemies there are and from which directions they come. It takes the whole first issue for that set-up of the blackout to happen, so initially you are reading a Batman story you have seen many times, which is our hero escorting a villain (albeit a new creation for this book) with help from the police, at least from Commissioner Gordon.

In the final chapter, too, Jock has a sequence where Killer Croc can apparently create zombies, a change that seems especially incongruous again against a “normal” Batman backdrop. I’ve seen the plot 2 billions times already- a prisoner has to be transferred from A to B in hostile territory- but I can live with that if the story is well told with good pacing, tension points and stuff in between. But I was actually surprised when I saw Gordon literally abandoning a wounded Montoya with an unarmed civilian with gangbangers closing in. To boot, it ties some of the major dangling threads together, which results in a satisfying resolution at the very end in terms of character arcs and themes.Follow Batman as he traverses block by block across a pitch dark Gotham City while dragging a highly difficult E. The art is all blown up in the magazine-sized format, and the eventual hardcover will be well-worth any Jock fans' time.

I liked that the story came down to Batman versus just an everyday bad-intentioned person, as well as the final twist that Batman was hip to it all and recorded Vasquez' confession for Gordon. However, when rival gangs battling out what to do with the metahuman, his electrical powers go out of control, causing a city-wide blackout. If the action is decently managed the plot itself reads as a rulebook which isn’t very entertaining when you’ve read so many already.This book as a whole was just not my thing at all though, and I appreciate my roommate for letting me read all of the singles he bought. There is simply no way that Croc is actually going to put Batman down that early in the issue and so close to the story’s ending. The writing in this issue is a little weaker than in the previous issues, though, and I think this story wraps up a little too quickly.

This was something I was trepidatious about, considering the danger of artists having 100% control over the creation of a comic, a key example would be early 90s Image comics, where the art may be eye-popping, the writing has often been uninspired. This definitely belongs in the Black Label imprint because this Elseworlds / Multiverse Batman has a pretty wrecked universe. from a temporary holding cell on one side of the city to his permanent home at Blackgate Prison on the other side.The action is gnarly with a classic black-and-blue Batman being a brawler when it comes to the fights, especially his confrontation with Killer Croc where blood spurts out and our hero just looking battered and yet still manages to get up. It's not a bad attempt for a first time writing but it just falls into the seemingly endless list of average/below average Batman stories that have been published.