Michael Palmer

The art is fantastic and really beautiful, but unfortunately the story is saturated in the same morally relativistic nihilism that many fictional heroes have found themselves subjected to over the last decade or two. While the surface-level story is intentionally fractured and dreamlike, the underlying subtext is the part that's more worrying in its subversion. As with David Lynch's revival of "Twin Peaks", objective good vs. evil is 'out' and spiralling, fractal chaos is 'in'. Heroes (Batman, in this case) are portrayed as naive, flawed man-children who try in vain to impose their confused ideologies on the world while the forces of evil are portrayed as unavoidable, unstoppable, and very often sympathetic and reliable. As an art project or a musing on futility I would recommend it, but as a story involving (what I consider to be) the greatest fictional hero of all time I couldn't say that it does any favours for the character or the brand. As with many Batman comics of recent times, you're left wondering why you should care about the character at all - if he's now stripped of every virtue that he's ever previously had.