By: Paul Dini (story), Dustin Nguyen & Derek Fridolfs (story), Nguyen (pencils), Fridolfs (inks), John Kalisz (colors) & Sal Cipriano (letters). Manhunter Back-up by: Marc Andreyko (writer), Szymon Kudranski (art), Nick Filardi (colors) & Cipriano (letters)
The Story: The minor character the Carpenter tries to design a way out of a murderous movie production that she has fallen into. Will anyone show up to help her?
What’s Good: This is the type of non-Batman story that Streets of Gotham promised us when it launched last summer. At times this title has strayed too close to being a book about Batman (who we get plenty of in other titles) or Robin (ditto), so it was nice to see a two-issue arc wrap about the Carpenter and a quandary she found herself in. The story revolves around a new (?) villain called the Director who wants to film a movie where Batman dies in the production. He had hired the Carpenter to supposedly build the deadly traps for Batman, but when the Carpenter discovers that she is also supposed to die, she has to engineer a way out of the mess.
I like the Carpenter as a minor character. She definitely answers a question that has bugged some of us: Who designs all the ultra-intricate hideouts that super-villains live in? But, there isn’t a LOT of story you can tell with a character like her (honestly, how many hideouts do you need to watch her design?), so I think it’s a bit of a creative triumph that the team came up with another story for her that works. It isn’t deep or meaningful to the Batman ethos, but it is a cute little tale and doesn’t require much additional knowledge of Batman to enjoy it.
What’s Not So Good: Haven’t we seen this story before? How many times has Joker (or others) tried to film the “death of Batman”?
I’m also not sure what it added to have Batman show up at the end of this issue to help save the Carpenter. It would have been a more interesting story to just let her design trap doors and guillotines to get herself out of trouble. The cynic in me can only assume that Batman shows up at the end so that DC could justify having the cover be a BIG picture of Batman punching some dude with the text “The DARK KNIGHT takes Gotham!” WTF? How did this issue have anything to do with Batman “taking” Gotham? Didn’t he “take Gotham” a long time ago?
I’ve become a fan of Dustin Nguyen’s art, but this looked a little rushed to me and that isn’t surprising because he’s been working on a few other titles too. Mind you…..this isn’t BAD, it just isn’t quite as good as his regular work.
What I just didn’t care about: The Manhunter back-up. This started out as such a good story and boy has it drifted into irrelevance. Now you see why she cannot sustain an on-going title: We’ve had 13 issues of ~10 page back ups, so they’ve told enough story to fill one trade-paperback and the story was getting painfully dull by the end. I’m pretty sure this title gets a new back-up feature next month.
Conclusion: An enjoyable, but unspectacular story about a Gotham B-lister.
Grade: C
– Dean Stell
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