Batman One Dark Knight

Product Information

Whether Black Label granting creators such license with the characters is a good thing is debatable; at least, the moment is among the most shocking and affecting of One Dark Knight overall. s past crimes influencing the current situation involving street violence, vengeance and the occasional superpowers, One Dark Knight is at its best when it just embraces its action-filled premise that evokes John Carpenter’s films such as Escape from New York.

Heck, I would have forgiven a lot but even the lettering looks like I did it and not done by a professional. One of the most iconic Batman artists of the 21st century, the incomparable Jock (The Batman Who Laughs, Batman: The Black Mirror), has focused all his storytelling powers on the tale of one very, very dark night in Gotham City. I was also surprised when Batman let opposed factions of gangbangers kill each other without intervening.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. If anything — and here even I’ll suggest I might be reading too much into it — there’s a little bit in terms of the colors Jock uses and the sparsest of homages that suggests to me a way in which One Dark Knight might be further understood. It’s like Jock was given too many pages and didn’t know how to properly utilize each one with his pre-written story, which feels especially weird for a seasoned artist as talented as Jock.

I'm much more into story than art, but I will recommend this book, while it could have been better I still ended up liking it. The art takes advantage of one-page and two-page images utilizing the full panel to tell one image or have a full image in the background.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.