1. Batman #25 by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo (DC)
26 issues in (counting the #0 issue) plus annuals and I'm convinced Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo can't make a bad Batman comic. They just can't! After last month's epic double-sized Batman #24 that concluded the first arc of Zero Year - Secret City - they return this month with another brilliant issue in Batman #25, the first issue in the second Zero Year arc, Dark City. Reflecting the blackout caused by the Riddler, the cover is a replica of Batman #21's cover (the first part of Zero Year: Secret City) but utterly blacked out. Like Batman #21, Batman #25 is the beginning of a new story and Snyder masterfully lays it out, giving Bruce a cool new toy - not as cool as that dirt bike in #21 but still amazing, courtesy of the inimitable Greg Capullo - and throws in some seemingly non-sequitur scenes to entice the reader's curiosity and unbalance their expectations once more. The comic opens with a US Army patrol in Nigeria discovering a doorway in the desert before we cut back to Gotham where an inferno has ripped into a fleet of ships in Gotham harbour and... is that... the Joker? Then we see the airships, the blimps, that famously dot the Gotham skyline, most memorably in the Batman Animated Series - the GCPD are chasing Batman who's trying out his first Batmobile. I couldn't describe it well enough to do it justice but it's really something - it kind of looks like a mechanical bat and kind of flies like one too and yet it looks so unlike something you'd expect Batman to drive! I love it. Listening to Kevin Smith's Fatman on Batman podcast episode where Snyder and Capullo were interviewed together, Capullo mentioned being frustrated by Snyder's script which described a flying car and Capullo spending days trying to figure out how to make it work on the page - Capullo, sir, you figured it out, well done! The Riddler/blackout storyline is dealt with peripherally; this issue is more concerned with a new threat for Batman in the form of Doctor Death! Death was one of Batman's original foes, appearing in Detective Comics #29 in 1939 and, like a lot of characters who've popped up in Snyder's run, is brought back to play a part in the Zero Year storyline to once more become one of Batman's earliest foes. In this storyline he's created a formula for creating rock hard skeletal structure in human bodies - but things have gone wrong, the formula has gotten out of hand and killed people, and warped the doctor into a monstrous figure. This whole issue is filled with wonderful little easter eggs that'll reward the careful reader for their attention - we meet Officer Bullock, a younger, less jaded, slightly less obese version of Detective Bullock whom he'll become in the years to follow (in one panel, his famous cigar is replaced by a flashlight!). In Doctor Death's original appearance, Death escaped using a gas pellet, and in this comic we get a panel showing a villain escaping the scene from the lab with a gas pellet. There's also a brilliant page where in blacked-out Gotham, a mother and daughter are being accosted by looters in their electronics shop and Batman quietly appears in the background, then the perspective shifts to the little girl as her mother stands in front of her and in the brief glimpses behind her mother's figure we see Batman dealing with the looters, disappearing with the thugs defeated and leaving behind a case of supplies for them with a torch for light - the little girl draws a Bat symbol on it, in the first appearance of the Bat signal (albeit a much smaller version to the grand light it will be). We even see Pamela Isley for a brief cameo! I love that the Bat cave is still so rudimentary and that only in this series could such a scene between Bruce and Gordon play out like it does when Gordon catches Bruce climbing out of the hole in the ground that leads to the cave. It just seems so right that things would have this great mix of professionalism and sloppiness - Bruce learning the tricks as he goes.
James Tynion IV continues to be Snyder's co-writer on the backups as we get a short story featuring Snyder's character Harper Row as a child, helping her little brother Cullen deal with the dark in her own way. We see how things were when they were little, how they only had each other as their deadbeat dad left them alone for days at a time, and how Harper became so proficient in her engineering abilities. I loved this backup so much, it was so sweet - even the rain on the windowpane formed the Bat logo! Batman #25, you guys - if you love Batman as much as me, you'll get so much out of this issue, there's so much to love. Snyder's writing and plotting is as pitch perfect as ever, going for the less obvious approach and pulling it off admirably, while Capullo continues to prove why he is now considered one of the greatest artists to draw Batman. Snyder, Capullo, Batman: the perfect trifecta - you can't go wrong! * Those are my picks this week - I know X-Men Gold #1 came out but I'm too burned out on X-Men comics right now to read it! Anyway, let me know what your favourites were this week in the comments below and send some recs you think I should be reading my way. See you guys next week - read some awesome comics today!