Batman: Killing Time (2022-) #1

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With art by David Marquez and colours by Alejandro Sánchez you know you're in for a wonderful journey! It makes the cuts between days, minutes, months, and even years feel like an extension of the story instead of a gimmick. After checking out what else Ponsor was the colorist on, I didn't even realize that he had been the colorist on most of Peter's and Miles' Ultimate Spidey run. In Batman's second year of his crusade against crime, while he is still changing and perfecting his craft and the art of the vigilante, the cowardly lot of criminals in the city are changing as well-giving rise to darker, specialized rogues. And as they move about the city they're hunted by an inexperienced Batman who knows two things: One, he'll need to be better than he's ever been to catch these two psychopaths; two, Penguin survived and if he gets to them first, it'll be a bloodbath like Gotham's never seen.

One of those tricks is his use of non-linear storytelling, which for the most part has been successful, and yet when it comes to a certain Dark Knight Detective, of whom King has done many great things, that type of storytelling doesn’t really work well. Batman grapples up to the helicopter, knocks out the two crew, flies it high enough, then jumps away as it explodes with the two agents.This story has none of that to levan the flat misery that the four villains unleash on Gotham – but King and Marquez’s brilliant storytelling makes the dark pill slide home much more easily.

While you do get some pretty big reveals to demystify the mystery, the reveals are most surprising for just how unsurprising they really are. In Year Two, facing the new threat of Batman, the group of Catwoman, Riddler, Clock King, and Penguin conspire to steal the Eye of God from Bruce Wayne and sell it to the government, interfacing with ludicrously foul-mouthed agent Nuri Espinoza. I love the intrigue and connections throughout Batman’s iconic rogue’s gallery, sort of allowing the hero to take a backseat in this story himself.King neatly answers it here, with information provided through the whole of the issue, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he does with it in the next issue. We don’t find out the significance of this until the end not only for its connection to the mystery item but also in understanding the point of the story.