"Mystery" Is An Apt Title
Within the first two pages of the issue, the reader will notice that the story is opening far from where we last left off. Batwoman is in space with her own team of heroes, and they're all fighting Morgan Le Fey for control of some kind of magic gem. The reader is given no clue as to how the story reached this point... and that's kinda the point.
Andreyko makes a very risky move here by choosing to open in the middle of such a radically different scene. People don't like to be left wondering what is going on and, as one can see from other reviews of this issue, they tend to have an incredibly negative reaction to it.
The common criticism here is that the issue is too confusing and the plot is too disconnected from where we were, but that's completely intentional. Andrekyo is basically trying to get his audience completely lost, then slowly guide them back as the story goes on. Whether he will be successful or not remains to be seen, but one shouldn't confuse misdirection with poor plotting.
Its in the nature of comic books (and serialized fiction in general) to give us only pieces of a story at a time, which makes it somewhat unfair to review individual issues as if they could truly stand on their own. What we get in most issues isn't a story with a beginning, middle, and end, but rather just a single fragment of one. While the reader can obviously judge whether the art looked good, or if the dialogue was out of character, or other such technical issues, one can't truly judge the plot of an issue until they know how it will fit into the completed story. Doubly so for an issue such as this where the whole point was to make sure that the reader can't easily guess the whole story.
Will this plotline pan out? I don't know. I'm personally pretty iffy about Batwoman having a team. But does this one issue make me curious as to how we got here? Did it leave me wishing for answers? Am I looking forward to the next issue to see where this goes? The answer is a resounding "Yes", and because of that, I'd call this piece of the story a success.
While I'm here, I'll also say that the art is pretty middle-of-the-road. Jeanty is a good artist, and he handles the action competently but, for an issue focused entirely on a magical battle in space, there wasn't anything particularly eye-catching going on. He's not exactly helped by having 3 different inkers on him either.
Overall, I'd give this issue a 3.5 (most of the points knocked off are due to the art), but I'll round it up to a 4 for the sake of Comicvine's even ranking system.
