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A review by rhganci
Batman Vol. 6: Graveyard Shift by Scott Snyder
2.0
This was the first collection of the New 52 Batman that I found to be a poor series of stories. It's basically the collection of the "stand-alone" issues and other collected matters of the issues that dropped kind of randomly between the Zero Year chapters. I found it rather difficult to follow, and I found the stories to be less than compelling.
Aside from the patchwork nature of the stories themselves, what really sort of bothered me about this collection was that the one-shot, stand-alone stories weren't actually that way at all. They really read more like disparate chapters from earlier stories that got buried under Snyder's seemingly exclusive focus on the Joker as Batman's inverse. That really took me out of the whole collection, and of the stories themselves. They seem to be happening in the cracks between Batman's seemingly endless slog against the Joker. It just really didn't make much of a statement about heroics, justice, and seemed nihilistic to a Millerian extent: Gotham is lost despite its hero's best efforts--and if it's not, it's going from bad to worse.
I really shouldn't be asking "what's the point" while reading a superhero story.
Aside from the patchwork nature of the stories themselves, what really sort of bothered me about this collection was that the one-shot, stand-alone stories weren't actually that way at all. They really read more like disparate chapters from earlier stories that got buried under Snyder's seemingly exclusive focus on the Joker as Batman's inverse. That really took me out of the whole collection, and of the stories themselves. They seem to be happening in the cracks between Batman's seemingly endless slog against the Joker. It just really didn't make much of a statement about heroics, justice, and seemed nihilistic to a Millerian extent: Gotham is lost despite its hero's best efforts--and if it's not, it's going from bad to worse.
I really shouldn't be asking "what's the point" while reading a superhero story.