As the main storyline of DK3 starts to come into focus, It’s a little strange how this series has me feeling like it’s moving too quickly and not quickly enough. And I’m sure a few of you are nodding to that sentiment, even though it makes no sense.
The radicalized Kandorians are beginning to make their moves on Earth, and while Bruce Wayne is still very much alive, he’s clearly in no shape to take them on as-is.
This means a trip to the Fortress of Solitude to get the Man of Steel thawed out. And in a moment uncharacteristic of this Bruce Wayne, he tells Clark straight-up how busted up he is, and it’s going to be up to him to handle this threat.
One of the nice payoffs of that is the Big Two rolling in on the would-be capitulation of the worlds’ leaders and Batman getting to make his first official appearance, three books in:
Unfortunately, especially for Superman, Kandor’s dark tribe was able to influence another to their ranks:
And just like that, now there’s even more to contend with.
But back to what I said at the jump — I’m not sure this pacing is working for me, at least at his point in the story. The first issue brought up some very interesting elements of civil unrest, and brought us a Batman back to fighting the cops just as much as the crooks. I was initially very interested to see Bruce’s take on that situation, but zoom! We’re off to wake up Superman-cicle to fight the bottled city of dickwads. Maybe we’ll come back to it later? You know, in between earth-shattering battles with Kryptonian fascists? Probably not.
And on the flip side of that, the point of admission for this entire book, old man Batman, finally makes an appearance, almost at the end of #3. And this old man Batman is practically sidelined from the get-go. It took three issues to get to that point? I mean, I realize there are five more to go, but I feel like that’s the kind of thing that could’ve easily been covered before we got into the Kandorians.
Yeah, it’s still a decent read, and it is a midpoint in the story, so it’s tough to be too hard on it. But I feel like people are paying the high sticker price to, you know, see the guy that’s on all the gorgeous covers. And thus far, there’s not been a lot of payoff for that in particular. Call me crazy, but I’m mostly here to watch Batman beat the crap out of bad guys while bitching about being too old for this. Even the dreaded sequel had given me more of that by this point.
It is worth noting, however, that virtually all of the special covers are based on the original series. Combine that with the current narrative from the current series, though, and it does genuinely have me wondering: Are this Batman’s best story moments well behind him?