Is it too early to call this the GOAT Batman story?

Not a bad list, but I wouldn't put Superheavy so high. Mr Bloom is truly one of the dumbest characters ever put to page. It's really hard for me to evaluate any Snyder book drawn by Capullo because I love the art so much I'd read it even if there was no text.

I only read it once but I remember really liking Superheavy as it came out. It was a nice left turn

I kind of really like Bloom's core philosophy as motivation for a villain. He does everything he does to liberate Gotham from the people who control it. He's the twisted version of occupy wall street.

I also think his costume is cool and in line with Capullo's artistic ethos

No, but is really good.

I just thought he talked way too much, in classic Snyder wall-of-text fashion. All his villains monologue like there's no tomorrow. I don't think he understands that the scariest villains are the ones who walk softly and carry a big stick.

I'd agree there. Snyder tends to write like a novelist and it hurts a lot of the time. I think it worked with Riddler because Riddler is grandstanding and pompous

> I think it worked with Riddler because Riddler is grandstanding and pompous
Yeah I don't remember having a problem with his riddler. That's a character who loves the sound of his own voice

Just read Return of Bruce Wayne. Why read Synder's rip off of it?

China Mieville is a much more prolific novelist than Snyder and his comics managed to have realistic dialogue and snappy pacing. Snyder is just shit.

This is nothing like RoBW

Different types of novelists. Snyder is a student of the overwriting school of Stephen King.

Yeah honestly I see Snyder as the Aaron Johnson of DC. Give him free reign over big, overarching plots and ideas and he tends to shit the bed. But give him something tight and small to work with and he can almost accidentally put out some decent stuff. And yeah, as sad as it is to say it’s nice to see at least one person who’s currently in the main storyline limelight is interested in playing with Morrison’s toys. Even if that person writes like his main inspirations are the DCAU and The LEGO Batman Movie.

But I’m not genuinely mad about the Perpetua thing. I love watching trainwrecks that go absolutely go full ham, and I’m more wondering if Snyder is actually going to resolve this one by going “Yeah, actually Superman can just punch out people who can dissolve hypertime and pose a threat to multiple multiverses”

No. Because it's mostly flash and no substance. Just because it has "cool" stuff in it doesn't make it an engaging story. It has pretty art. Remove it, and what is left, but a string of scenes woven together but a generic dystopian future narrative where nothing is developed far enough because the book is busy jumping from the next cool thing to the next.

If you enjoy Snyder overarching continuity narrative l whatever. But to claim this GOAT is just ludicrous and shows how you're basically blinded by hype and have very little frame of reference when it comes to good storytelling. I bet you also liked Metal.

It's like DC's attempt at Old Man Logan

yeah, i mean the Flash(s) just fly by in a tornado just because

This, and I didn’t like Old Man Logan the first time around. Give me Ruins any day of the week, even though Marvel canon is such a garbage fire it feels like it’s hilariously the better future in retrospect.

>HURR DURR what if the Hulk just decided to become evil, fugged his cousin and spawned a whole inbred green clan of assholes! Boom, there’s our main villain!

I did also like Metal.

This is 20000000 times better than Old Man Logan.

Not him but Metal is dumb. Metal is utterly retarded even by cape standards. Metal handed over a plot device, Event X, the League has no excuse for not using to instantly put Luthor in his place.

I still liked it. I just recognise objectively it is a really, really dumb event. Which is actually really jarring for me? Because I’m reared on the bulk of DC Crisis events having reasonably compelling character drama even if the villains are shallow, Hal Jordan or incomprehensible eldritch nightmares. On the other end of the spectrum I’m used to Marvel Crisis events revolving around eldritch horrors and also everyone turning on each other like rats on a sinking ship BUT with reasonably consistent characterisation and respect for the knocking disaster until Doom/Richards/Thanos pulls out a Macguffin.

What I’m trying to say is for better and worse Metal took me aback by how...CARTOONISH it played itself. Compare it totally to the Great Darkness Saga, or Parallex Hal, or Infinite Earths. Hell, at least Darkseid War had some passable side stories despite otherwise being 8 Bit Theater-level in sudden anticlimaxes. It somehow failed to intimidate me with a multiverse controlling dark god Dream himself is concerned about more than Decreator did just by showing up, and then I just ended up laughing at the Joker dragons. It doesn’t hurt Morrison’s Wild Hunt side story just pulled out all the stops on the audacity of Batman being a multiversal threat as a concept and then stopping that threat basically with callbacks to his old work.

Metal sold itself as a bleak and gritty profound apocalypse event, but it works better as a LEGO Batman Movie spiritual successor. The less seriously you take Metal the easier it is to enjoy.

No, even Redneck Hulk is better than "actshuthally guyzz Hulk was a Devilman rip off all along, his whole universe is a fucking Devilman rip off"

Seriously fuck immortal hulk, one of the most stupid and pointless retcons I ever saw, fucking adding magic bullshit in comics that never had in decades of history anything to do with magic, this is worse than speed force and spider token rectons combined.

The greatness of METAL is how smart it is in its dumbness. I don’t know how people took it seriously, there were Joker Dragons!!

Stay butthurt, batfag lmaaaaao

Her movie being the only thing keeping the DCEU alive has helped her a lot.

The minimal presence of Superman story also helps. Diana only take the idiot pill when kryptonians are around.

Not true at all. She literally had Batman explain magic to her in JL Dark. The DCAU made her the dumbass rookie who did nothing except pine over Batman.

Ironically it would be significantly better without text though Snyder is such a hack a lot of it doesn't make sense without dialogue (the sign of a bad comic script)

Batman didn't explain magic to her in JLD, he told her of the costs because he lived with magicians, and that was just Batman wanting to say his piece. She already knew what he was saying.

And her being a naive is better than her being a psychopath which is what happens when she interacts with Superman in Elseworlds.

Yeah, there were some real gems. I liked how cheeky it was here and there, like the Devastator’s backstory taking a fat hot shit on BvS. Or the sheer audacity of just taking the multiverse map, flipping it over and going YEAH LOOK AT THAT WE JUST DOUBLED THE SIZE OF DC’S SETTING FUCKERS. Or just...everything in Wild Hunt.

>Raven explaining why she isn’t goth
>”The carrier holds a darker authority”
>Gentry showing up as background at the EXACT MOMENT the Dark Knights catch up
>Flash talking about his sacrifice superpower
>The Drowned taking a moment to explain to the other Knights how sorry and pathetic their motivations actually are even though they’re fully committed

Seriously, Wild Hunt singlehandedly elevates the whole event. Props to Morrison not being afraid to job out his own OC superteam and Nix to play to the event’s ridiculousness, these days a lot of authors seem to be protective about their darlings being fucked up in major storylines.

Huh, I’d almost forgotten that was a thing. I still find it bizarre how bipolar Wonder Woman apparently is about “love and peace” and “DIE FOR DARKSE-I MEAN SUPERMAN” depending on whether or not she’s in a bad future where Superman is an asshole. Other characters get whole arcs dedicated to explaining how they were broken or fell to villainy, but Diana just kind of offscreen gets so hooked on the Kryptonian cock she apparently discards all her ideals to protect it.

Not really. I knew you were one of those Wonderbat fags. And Batman totally explained magic to her, but as long as it’s Wonderbat you’re ok with it.

>GOAT
ask me how i know you're a retarded nigger

They need to justify why Diana just doesn’t stop an out of control Clark, rather than Batgod once again saving the day so they make her evil too.

...am I the only one who finds it deeply strange on several levels that Wonder Woman seemingly knows less about magic than Batman in the main DC continuity at the moment?

Like shit, say what you like about Earth-2 but there Diana talks about gods like she knows her shit. Think she did in The Return of Bruce Wayne too, and about New Gods to boot.

No, man. You just caught me after i had just finished reading JLD. Batman was being paranoid and acting over-protective.

While true, I must say it’s a profoundly shitty, out of character justification on the level of Batman suddenly throwing everything away and pulling out guns. But I suppose Diana gets the shitty end of the stick because she hasn’t been popular for a long time until the DCEU of all things and Bruce is.

>Snyder
>GOAT
>Or even just good
Gonna be an extra-large yikes from me.
Though I guess if we're grading on a curve here then the fact your current alternatives for DC writers include the likes of King and Bendis would make your ability to actually enjoy Snyder a bit more understandable.

This is why I liked it.
Comics aren't serious. Especially not superhero comics.
A guy in rubber batsuit routinely whips the shit out of a superpowered alien god man.

I mean crazy quilt? Come on.
Lighten up.

Because let’s face it: Batman is fucking useless in a JL-tier physical fight. So you make him useful for his knowledge, so he knows about EVERYTHING, even stuff he really shouldn’t know. I do get a little irritated at him knowing more about magic than Diana, but
1. Bruce has that Zatanna relationship
2. Beyond Diana’s conception Themyscaria has never really had a strong magical tradition. The gods keep the island hidden and that’s pretty much it. Everything magical is the gods doing, there’s no Amazon sorceresses.

But at least they’re finally acknowledging that Diana is a part of DC Mystic. And Circe is being a big player for the first time in fucking forever.

Hey, speaking of JLD: Can we just talk about how Nabu implies the Otherkind are emissions or servants of the motherfucking Great Darkness? If I remember right, he says something about a “sphere” lying around the Dark Multiverse in which the Darkness is waking up and the saga where Giovanni seemingly died against it’s rampage into Heaven was acknowledged as in continuity. In the context of him warning Zatanna there was worse to come.

This is fucking with my mind on multiple levels.

>The God Sphere extends into the Dark Multiverse
>In the Great Darkness Saga the Darkness was only using 1% of it’s true power, and held back on the Otherkind
>Human-native DC magic has been a leakage from the Great Darkness all along
>The Darkness is still, as far as we know, the equal and opposite number of the Presence.
>Therefore based on JL where one character has been shown to unite 3 infinite multiverses at once and one character is the authority to an entire race that creates presumably infinite multiverses on it’s behalf given the DC multiverse is only one THE SOURCE IS STRONGER THAN THE PRESENCE

He's right tho, about everything.

Is really strange? Ever since the New 52 Wonder Woman was reduced into a barbarian that just know how to cut things down. Sure, she dealt with the Greek gods during the Azzarello run, but even there it was mostly the Greek Gods telling her what to do. Wonder Woman was usually kept completely in the dark while being pointed directions. Now after Rucka run she's completely cut off from everything. She's more a soldier with a sword than anything.

And Batman was fucking trained by Zatara Zatanna, Jason Blood/Etrigan, and several other mystical folks. Dude supports vampires, hangs out with ghosts, and so on. Batman should know something about magic.

He's not tho, and he can even properly extrapolate his argument.

>Because let’s face it: Batman is fucking useless in a JL-tier physical fight.
Strategy and detective skills, he basically cover Captain America role and a little more.

Wow Ewing fanboys sure are childish.

It's not because of Batman, but because of the dumb SMWW pairing that is all about the strongest male and female fucking to create the master race as well Superman needing to being shown as a big, strong, cool man by taming a fiery and out control woman with his manly muscles and sound logic. So where Superman goes, Wonder Woman has to follow. Its dumb as fuck.

I know people who like what Snyder's doing in Justice League right now won't feel this, but I think that connecting it so much to that story instead of his Batman run (Court of Owls should have been part of the story from page one, not end of book 2) really dates and dilutes the impact it has.

thanks for the bump

It's not even the GOAT Snyder Batman story

I get the impression major events like Alex Ross’ Justice and Kingdom Come, The Dark Knight Returns, Gaiman’s original The Books of Magic, The Great Darkness Saga, maybe some solo things like the Candlemaker in Doom Patrol and Megiddo’s attack and Final Crisis have given the expectation that DC events “should” read like novels tonally and in emotional breadth. Sort of like the high standard of behavior expected of Superman compared to, say, the Avengers.

I like these events. BUT, like you say I also sometimes feel the expectation is a little unfair. So yeah, I don’t hold a grudge against Metal or even the current ongoing Year of the Villain thing for just axing that seriousness in the face and blatantly going full saturday morning cartoon for once.

I think it’s especially unintuitive to me because I remember originally when Wonder Woman was basically an Enkidu style golem animated by goddesses who often actually met and spoke to the likes of Zeus. The whole thing about retconning her into a demigod post-Nu52 feels, in hindsight, like an excuse to justify her relative mystic ignorance as much as anything now she no longer has oodles of goddess blessings to make her more spiritually aware of stuff and whatnot.

Also, strong agree on Circe finally showing everyone she can hang with the likes of Mordru when she gets off her lazy butt. Remember that time she almost remade the entire multiverse in her image by hexing entire pantheons, including APOKALIPS and NEW GENESIS, into fighting each other and siphoning off the energy during War of the Gods? She even has the same outfit in one of the flashbacks!

For all it’s flaws, I’m really glad JLD is acknowledging all the old magic stuff is canon again even if maybe there were other things going on behind the scenes. And while I gave it some shit while the issues were coming out, I have to say it reads a lot better when you can go through like 10 issues in one sitting.

The problem is that people forget that Batman isn't just a street level gritty vigilante. There's a pretty gothic, supernatural bent to him and this since his inception.

Is already done, a pointless retcon that add nothing to the story and contradict the theme of decades of story.

I’m the guy who keeps talking about how much I like Snyder’s JL because it’s goddamn retarded about powerlevels, and I 100% agree. There was a time when the Court of Owls seemed like an actual ominous threat. Now...it seems like a bad joke because Snyder (and to be fair, DC’s main consumer base clearly) decided to throw them away as a chew toy for the Batman Who Laughs to embarrass.

Like they turned out to be Barbatos cultists, so why are they even a thing come Laughs’ own series? They just...seem to be doing fine and business as usual for people who just got shat on by their own god, and stupidly dismissive to said god’s favourite knight. To job to him, that’s why. It’s like the Celestials, they’re plot armored to stay alive only so that the author’s actual villain can rip them a brand new asshole. If the Owls were still taken seriously, they should be having a fucking schism at best.

Yeah, when I meant it was strange I was thinking back to Wondy’s older stories. I meant more how goddamn strange the Azzarello run, Rucka and onwards did her like this.

Oh, man. You don't want to start me on Wonder Woman current status quo. It's a fucking travesty.

>a pointless retcon that add nothing to the story
It explains why the Hulk can return from the dead over and over again.Y'know,the who point of the book?
>contradict the theme of decades of story.
No, it doesn't. Nothing was contradicted in the "decades of story" because none of it properly was ever properly explored. PAD's run was mainly about Hulk's relationship with Banner, specifically.

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Actually... why Batman doesn't throw magic fire balls?

Lets see the guys that he knows:
>Zatanna's dad who's actually his godfather
>Zatanna
>Jason Blood/Etrigan that trained him in... something?
>Deadman who has been hanging with him since the 70s
>Swamp Thing who has been scaring his ass since the 80s
>I, Vampire who has been arguing with him about finally killing every living vampire since the 60s
>Constantine who has been trying to fuck him since Brian Azzarello got a boner a about up
>sometimes depending on the canon The Shadow who could have taught some nice jedi mind tricks
There are probably more niggas.

>It explains why the Hulk can return from the dead over and over again.Y'know,the who point of the book?
There was no need for this explanation at all, several characters always had absurd healing factors to the point the could return from being a skeleton like wolverine and deapool.
>No, it doesn't. Nothing was contradicted in the "decades of story"
Yes it was, Hulk comics always had a "science fiction" theme for all the monsters and their powers, it never had magic elements or explanations, this is no different than saying that all X-men mutants have magic powers and the X-gene is nothing more than a way to connect them to a mythic source.

Haha oh boy, I think I picked it up the current run around...something like issue 40something and read from then onwards? You’re right I don’t want you to, everything I’ve seen so far is like the Warp overtaking me and not in a good way. Veronica Cale isn’t a genius fem!Luthor, she’s an angry mom. Somehow Cheetah and Circe are both being hyped up as Diana’s archs when one is just borrowing the power of a deity while Luthor also gave her an OC DCEU synergy sword, and one is now the new MULTIVERSAL GODDESS OF MAGIC in an era they’ve finally flat out confirmed DC magic only plays by the rules it wants to.

And before that there was...I think Zeus’ firstborn son wrecked everyone? And then Diana wrecked him? And then surprise surprised, Hera turned out to not be trustworthy, all the Olympians Diana painstakingly befriended turned on her at once, and she’s left abandoned and alone at the end of the run? And then it turned out ALL OF THOSE were just fakes and dupes made by the true Olympians because ??????

And god, Jason. Everything about Jason.

It would be faster for me to just type that for like 15 fucking issues Wonder Woman’s main arch was GRAIL of all people. And that in the latest one they somehow managed to ruin a character it shouldn’t have been possible to ruin any more by having Grail forget about how to use all her convenient hard counter powers, how to fight and that someone tough enough to take hits from Kalibak and withstand the JL attacking while carrying a baby should logically NOT drop to one knee after being shot by a normal arrow. Or for that matter, be knocked out by an amazon.

It's just a poor man's Old Man Logan.

Prove me wrong.

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>why the Hulk can return
You know, I don’t hate Immortal Hulk myself but when you have Wolverine over there stretching >muh regeneration to the brink I can’t help but feel this specific question at least never needed a better answer than “he’s the strongest there is”

There isn’t a good answer I can think of, quite frankly. He should absolutely fly around on broomsticks and make enemy guns shoot daffodils. It would fuck like half his regular rogue’s gallery in the ass so hard they’d learn to run and never stop. Imagine the look on Joker’s face when Batman turns him into a frog, it also perfectly solves the I CANT KILL JOKER dilemma because you can just put the Froker in a terrarium somewhere and because he isn’t actually magic like Throg, he’s not getting out.

I want my Harry Potter Batman.

> it never had magic elements

Fucker, Hulk could see Ghosts.

>There was no need for this explanation at al
By your logic, most comics should remain stagnant without introducing new concepts forever. Fuck outta' here. And Wolverine and Deadpool have died permanently before.
>Yes it was, Hulk comics always had a "science fiction" theme for all the monsters and their powers, it never had magic elements or explanations
You know how I can tell you're either a speed-reader or one of those readers who camps forums all day? The comic specially tells you twice (in #12 and #20 specifically) that it's neither magic nor science, and both at the same time. Gamma doesn't give you powers normally, bro. Even in sci-fi.

Batman's WAAAAAAY more popular than Wolverine.

No seriously, to me the biggest plothole about Batman knowing more magic than Diana is-

-if Batman knew even that much magic?

His life should be a thousand times easier than it actually is. What’s Bane going to fucking do when his Venom is suddenly apple cider? Where is Selina’s bullshit going to get her against a simple lie detecting spell? Boom. Magic would have ended ALL of Tom King’s bullshit story before it even happened.

>”Bruce, I love y-“
>”You’re going after me as an easy mark again. Pack your shit and get out. Again. Steal things in my city again and I’ll turn you into a siamese”

>”So, you came back to die with your city!”
>”Actually, I just came back to let you’re under a curse to never succeed at breaking my back or my city again. An actual, magic curse. Don’t mind me Bane, I’m just passing through on my way to Zatara’s multiversal timestop lessons”

>”Riddle me this, Batman-“
>”42. Michelangelo. Second avenue. The mayor’s daughter”
>”How-what-you can’t! I’m setting the detonator now!”
>”I just teleported her home”
>”You...you!”
>”I just teleported you into Arkham”

>”Batman should be the apex predator, Bruce! You’ll never defeat me until you accept this!”
>”Yeah, but can you turn into a dragon?”
>”N-no...”
>”Are you immune to being mauled?”
>”Um...well...”
>”Then I guess I’m already the apex predator. How about that?”

Its definitely up there as my second favorite story behind dark knight returns. Its epic. It’s just a little to cluttered. Maybe it should of been longer. Im drying to see Marvel make a story similar to this even if I have to make a fan fiction myself

It is never too early to be a moron.

>That is totally some shit they would pull in an old DC comic
>It's a comic rooted entirely in a love for these characters.
>ok now this is epic
Yea Forums once again falls for faux nostalgia.

>2. Zero Year
Fucking disgusting.

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Probably?

I don't hate this so far, but I don't rank it so highly on Batman stories scales. I do think that among Snyder's Batman stuff, it's certainly somewhere in the top 5. I'm waiting till it finishes for full judgment on it.

>This is why I liked it.
>Comics aren't serious. Especially not superhero comics.
>Lighten up.

I fucking hate this "but it was fun, bro!" argument. That's entirely subjective. The issue wasn't that it wasn't serious enough. The issue was that it was basically a child's idea of a story. It had nothing but flashy things happening, with little actual plot or character stuff to make it interesting. Just throw everything and the kitchen sink at the wall and then go OMG THIS IS EPIC! I mean, if you like superficial shit like that, more power to you, but I think more people want a little more substance from comics.

I had literally no reason to care about anything that was happening in Metal. All it was doing was leading you around going "look how cool this shiny thing is, now here's ANOTHER outrageous thing, and another, and another! Do you like my Morrison cover band now?" It was just a lot of retcons, empty exposition, it had heroes running around like headless chickens while accomplishing nothing, the bad guys were basically caricatures that had next to no depth to them even with their own one-shots, Barbatos was a completely superfluous background detail, and the fact that half the time you felt like there was no real point to any of it actually happening, because the villains would just do Batman keikaku shit until Batman himself does a better keikaku... by bringing in the Joker.

So much dumb fluff and nothing to really show for it. If you like that, okay. But at least admit that it has very little going for it beyond pretty pictures.

It's just Old Man Logan but with Batman. Are you really such an easily impressible capeshitter?

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I was gonna say a fallout fanfic myself. Or like fhat Atomic universe from that one moba.
Either way I'm not seeing why this is new or special yet

>It's just Old Man Logan but with Batman

But instead of having somewhat okay story idea, it's being convoluted and too complicated because Snyder is interested in doing a self-congratulatory story that wraps up his entire "mega-narrative" with Batman.

I mean seriously. If this was just straight up apocalyptic Batman story, it'd be one thing. But he has to try and cram in this completely unnecessary tie-in to his other storylines, which just derails and arbitrarily tries to make it be more complex than it needs to be, and that's how you get completely pointless sequences like the psychiatric hospital fake out at the beginning.

>NOW THIS is why I love comics
Scenes like this that had no relation to the story and only exist for the previews and viral clicks. Even Lobdell has a better narrative structure and he's a bonafide hack.

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That was the opening bit to the story, like the Simpsons episode that start about one thing, but then the rest of the episode is about something entirely else that ended up happening midway through the beginning.

I’m and I 100% agree. Yes, it is a child’s idea of a story. I’m not going to make pretences or try to push the idea Metal is something you should give to friends you want to actually like comics. I’m not even going to say we need MORE things like Metal, and I’d probably like it a lot less if there were more things like it in recent history.

But I mean, objectively it’s around the same level as Dimension X or Superman shooting little supermen out of his fingers. Trite as the execution was, in principle people have putting subjectively dumb things in comics since time immemorial. So I don’t have anything against anyone who hates metal, and I see Laughs as just our decade’s equivalent of the Batman of Zur-En-Arr*

*I mean, obviously before Morrison retconned him into a serious backup personality for Actually Batman

Batman of Zur en arr did not take up this much real estate. I can't just write metal off as just something simply dumb because It is part of Snyder "meta-epic" that is slowly taking over DC.

Metal lead to No justice which lead to his justice league which brings us to the year of villains. Magic is perpetually dying because of the events from No justice and Tynion doesn't understand the american gothic arc from Swamp thing.