Making Gotham Great Again
Written By: Dan Jurgens
Art By: Brett Booth, Norm Rapmund, Andrew Dalhouse, Travis Lanham
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: January 2, 2019
Our journey into the future of Gotham continues as we see what the Joker is all about thirty-five years from now. It's weird though because we've had the Joker out and about since this series restarted and for some reason, it seems like maybe the Joker has Alzheimer's or something because it's taken him a long ass time to think about just killing the "Jokerz" for ripping off his brand and in turn, making Gotham the way it was when he was in his heyday, which this issue is all about. Let's jump into this review and see if the characters are acting the way they should after having a Wayne Family Center of Tomorrow........ essentially, a giant-ass tower destroyed, killing thousands in the process. Let's check it out.
Well, the answer is no........ the characters are all over the place in this issue and for some reason, none of them seem to know what to do with themselves or even how to act after finding out that the Joker is back in town and has just killed thousands of people. We have our current Batman Terry McGinnis, who decides that flying around and looking for the bad guy is too hard and instead of going back to the Batcave with the rest of our cast of characters to continue looking with the Bat-Computer, he instead decides to go on a date with Ten........ Some weird ass choices for our characters here.
The best bit that we have in this issue is when the Joker decides what he wants out of this future Gotham and how he wants to make it great again..... essentially, the way it used to be, but even this feels odd and out of place because we're given a bunch of former Jokerz, who are now the Joker's "Throwbacks", who are supposed to represent what our villain wants........ but they're just essentially Jokerz........ so yeah, I don't get it.
All in all, our characters act weird as hell for the situations that they're put in and the biggest takeaway from this issue is the idea of now we know what the Joker wants.......... That and the amazing art of course, which I love with only one small exception........ Joker seems way too young to be the original Joker. Besides that though, I love the art completely and am happy as hell that this art team is back together again and entertaining me thoroughly........ With that being said though, I don't understand what Dan Jurgens is doing with this story. It feels just thrown together and like he wants to wrap some things up whether it makes sense to the situation right now or not.
Bits and Pieces:
While the art looks great and the Joker's motivations are fun, this issue just feels really off for how all the characters act......... or fail to act in this serious situation that the story presents. There's still some fun to be had if you don't look to closely to whats going on, but I was hoping for way more than what we're getting here. Still though....... Great art.
5.8/10
I wonder if a big part of the problem is that the story is copying the beats of RotJ without having all the details that made those beats work. In RotJ Terry blew off the Joker crisis and went on a date with Dana who was in the dark about all the trouble he was having, so in this he goes off on a date with Melanie who is also ignorant of what he was just doing. Except that in RotJ the date came after he was fired as Batman so he thought he had nothing better to do and Dana had no reason to pay close attention to what the Joker was doing. The date with Melanie just makes him look like he's blowing off his job in the middle of a crisis for a date, and Melanie's generic "yeah you'll be late a lot I bet" line rather than, y'know, showing some awareness of what he was just doing paints her as disinterested.
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