Why does anyone want to live in Gotham? On a daily basis its inhabitants are at the mercy of a pantheon of costumed criminals each with their own uniquely twisted sense of humor, and on special occasions Gotham gets to be ground zero for the plague, or the center of a major earthquake, or designated a no man’s land by the government. This time around it’s gang warfare. Someone invited the heads of all the major Gotham gangs to a meet and killed them all. Now the gangs are leaderless and everyone is making a grab for power and it’s all out war on the streets of Gotham. Batman is pulling in help from everyone he can think of to try and keep his city safe while he figures out what happened. What he doesn’t know is that the whole situation was set in motion by a misguided, but well intentioned, Spoiler trying to regain her place at his side. She took a war game scenario off his computer and decided to implement it. Unfortunately what she didn’t know was that the lynch pin in this particular war game – to consolidate all the gangs in Gotham under one controllable figure – is actually one of Batman’s many disguises. Without Batman as Matches Malone in place to orchestrate the deal the meet up between Gotham’s crime syndicates descends into chaos and violence.
The art in this volume was varied. Some of it was very good. Some of it was neither here nor there. And some of it raised my hackles. I was unimpressed by the cartoony aspect of some of the art. It made the characters less real and less vivid, and apparently increased Stephanie’s bust size from a B-cup to a DD which left me wholly unamused.
Batman: War Games, Act 1–Outbreak
ISBN: 9781401204297
By Ed Brubaker, Andersen Gabrych, Devin Grayson, Dylan Horrocks, A.J. Lieberman, and Bill Willingham
Art by Ramon Bachs, Raul Fernandez, Al Barrionuevo, Francis Portela, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Lorenzo Ruggiero, Paul Gulacy, Jimmy Palmiotti, Kinsun, Mike Lilly, Andy Owens, Sean Phillips, Brad Walker, Troy Nixey, Pete Woods and Nathan Massengill
DC Comics 2005
