Gotham City: Year One (2022-) #1

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I'm not at all disappointed with what I got instead, but don't go in expecting anything other than a Slam Bradley tale with Batman ties. Despite Sam's assurances that there was still hope that they may recover Helen, Constance was adamant that she was dead.

It manages to tie up all the loose ends, meaningfully place a thematic poignancy on the characters’ actions, and remain tense and exciting through to the end.Slam Bradley, no matter how his character is modified in this series, that modification doesn't really change anything, even though it really should. The story of its fall from grace, the legend that would birth the Bat, has remained untold for 80 years. If saving her fortune meant sacrificing her daughter on the altar of wealth and privilege, so be it.

My only complaint with the art of this issue is the opening fight scene, which is confusingly juxtaposed with the chaos of rioters in the streets of Gotham. After all the excitement, there is simply emptiness between Slam and Constance, and the area between them becomes an impenetrable void occupied only by the silhouette of Richard’s body. I'm honored to play a small part in bringing Siegel and Shuster's landmark creation to a new audience, and in giving one of DC's oldest legends the white-hot spotlight he deserves.

Gotham City: Year One by Tom King, Phil Hester, Eric Gapstur, Jordie Bellaire and Clayton Cowles will debut with a variant cover by Ryan Sook and a 1:25 variant cover by David Marquez. You might argue “well none of that matters because it’s an elseworlds” (and I’m not really even certain whether that’s supposed to be true for this story) but the broader context of the existing world is still relevant. I really enjoyed the first 5 issues of the book, with King crafting a great noir set in Gotham with everything you would want: hard boiled crime, damsels, smoking guns, and double and triple crossings. Private Eye Slam Bradley is thrown into the middle of the case and will do everything in his power to rescue this baby girl. Two generations before Batman, private investigator Slam Bradley gets tangled in the “kidnapping of the century” as the infant Wayne heir disappears in the night…and so begins a brutal, hard-boiled, epic tale of a man living on the edge and a city about to burn.

It's great that the author includes a warning textbox to prepare everyone for the horrendous things going on in this comic. Constance reaches out to Slam to try and get him to help raise the boy so that he doesn’t do something stupid like “march down some alley at night”. It’s no coincidence that the story is set in the early 1960s, during the height of the civil rights movement. Richard was getting pushback from South Gotham because his new industrial refinery would contaminate their water supply. Or why not include "mature language" in the title page disclaimer also and be done with the ridiculous symbols?It will point to the injustices of society, and it will muck around in those injustices and really make you absorb them, and then offer little to no resolution. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Despite her calm demeanor, there is a righteous fury that exudes from her has she talks about the ways Richard treated her. Plenty of people talk about revitalizing of “slums” and improving the city, but the people who live in those neighborhoods are an afterthought at best and something to be dealt with at worst. In the six-part series Gotham City: Year One, Constance approaches Sam at his office, insisting that "a mother knows" when her child is dead, and she did.

He was able to adopt white privilege, and justified it by how much easier it made going through life: “there are certain spaces I’m not allowed into unless I mark the wrong box”.

Set in 1961, it’s supposedly the last era of the city before it became the perpetually crime-ridden nightmare we all know and love. The reality of the system which Slam chose to be a part of becomes unavoidable when he finds his brother’s criminal records at the station. The world is on fire, death has happened, and the detective with too big a heart needs to find some justice.