Gotham In Ruins
THE BASICS
Devastated by a cataclysmic earthquake, Gotham is abandoned by the government and left to its own devices. It becomes a place without law or structure and those left in the once great city are forced to survive by any means necessary.SO WHAT HAD HAPPENED WAS...
NML Vol. 1 is divided up into two stories by two different creative teams. Up first we have...No Law and a New Order
This is easily the strongest of the two stories. What is essentially an introduction to the current state of affairs in Gotham turns out to be a very entertaining tale of survival. I really enjoyed watching the citizens of Gotham adapting to their new and hostile environment. Narrating duties fall primarily on to Oracle's shoulders and her voice is a good choice as a guide through the ruins of a once great city. While her building may be intact, the luxuries of technology she once enjoyed are not. She can't rely on her old methods of gathering information and has to employ comparatively primitive means. Her character is used as a good example of someone who's lost her accepted norm, but who still moves forward and puts one foot in front of the other. (Er... figuratively.)
While a large portion of the story is dedicated to Barbara, her father also gets a good bit of attention in the story as him and what's left of the GCPD attempt to reclaim their old headquarters from the different gangs who all claim their own slice of post-quake Gotham. A good job is done showing how Jim struggles with the moral ambiguity of the world he now inhabits. There are no more "law abiders" and "law breakers", because there's no law. So how do you enforce what isn't their? What is there for a cop to do in that type of world?
Those two elements combine to create a great story that I ate right up. It's an incredibly strong starting point for the story arc that left me really excited to read...
Fear of Faith
Unfortunately, that excitement didn't last very long. The second story in Vol. 1 focuses on the psychological experiments the Scarecrow conducts on a group of refugees holed up in a church. It's interesting enough to start, but it just lasts too long. There's not enough genuine material to fill up the pages it occupies. Much of what is there feels like filler that just doesn't need to be there. To give an example: The GCPD could have been completely removed from the story with only a few, if any, changes to the script needed to compensate for there absence. Yet we spend a good portion of the tale with them.
In addition to the story being full of unnecessary parts, what actually belongs there is just boring. It seems to me that there are just too many players involved. I'm fine with narrative balancing acts, and love them when they're handled well, but this story tries to juggle too much and lacks focus because of it. You can only cover so much in 100 comic pages and when you've got 6 different groups/characters playing major roles in the story, it's easy for things to get cramped.
ARE YOU SEEING WHAT I'M SEEING?
I was going to break up this section into two parts like with the story section, but my thoughts on the art of both stories are pretty much the same. It's pretty uninteresting.Have you ever been reading a comic book and realized that you've missed something important to the current events? Ever find out that the important something was a visual piece of a panel with no dialogue attached to the peice that you missed because you've only been paying attention to the speech bubbles? If you have, that's a pretty good sign that the book you're reading has really boring art, and I'd have to take my shoes off to count how many times I found myself doing that while reading this book.
I've said in the past that Batman is a hard character to make visually eye-catching (but not impossible). Our eyes like contrast. It makes things visually appealing, easy to identify, and attention grabbing. It's hard to make contrast with a character who dresses up in dark clothes and patrols a city at night. Now, I'm not saying that Batman should start running around Rainbow Land in bright pink tights, but attempts should be made to liven up the art surrounding him. If everything's dark, dull, and uninteresting, a reader is less likely to pay attention to the visual aspect of the story. Something that can be incredibly harmful to their experience.
Oh, and as proof that you don't have to abandon dark mood and tone to get a visually striking and colorful scene, I present this panel, colored by Dave Stewart:
