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04/28/2004: Batman: Broken City
Broken City (written by Brian Azzarello, art by Eduardo Risso) was published in Batman #620-625:
Overall I liked it. A lot of it was the art, which I think worked very well for the Batverse. I had sometimes problems to follow how the story developed, and Batman was somewhat more brutal than I usually like him, but the basic story idea worked for me.
I mean, I've seen similar ideas before, both that Bruce feels guilt because of something he said to his father shortly before his parents' murder as well as that Batman has a blind spot if a child kills his or her parents. Azzarello handled the flashbacks to Bruce's tantrum and his guilt over that much better though, than for example Batman #430 (at the root of Bruce's tantrum there was also his complaint that his dad doesn't spend enough time with him), which I think was the first time I've seen that aspect of Bruce's guilt.
I liked the plot with the kid shooting his parents less, somehow the whole thing didn't seem to make much sense to me. Maybe I didn't read carefully enough, but I actually reread all issues when I finally got around to reading the last two, so I should have been able to follow the setup. I liked this version of the villains, like Penguin and Scarface, individually, but the plot never quite came together for me. I guess that was part of the point of the story, that Batman assumed the wrong connections existed where there weren't any or rather just connections which were all once removed, and made mistakes because of that, but it left me vaguely unsatisfied.
I'm still not sure I got the plot(s) right: So Angel Lupo's girlfriend Margo hires Killer Croc to kill his sister Liz. She does this, because Liz was pregnant with a mob boss's child, and Margo fears Angel will go after him over the honor of his sister and get himself killed in the process. That part was fairly straightforward. The mob boss eventually turns out to be Scarface.
Then there is the gang war(?) about shares in Gotham's mob business/underworld. Angel somehow ripped off Fatman and Little Boy. Angel thinks that they killed his sister as reprisal? So Angel sets up a meeting with them under the pretense of settling the underworld thing, but intends to kill them, because he assumes them to be responsible for his sister's death. But Scarface shows up and shoots Angel, thinking he killed Liz, because Batman put that theory out initially.
The death of the couple turns out to be not related to that at all, they weren't gunned down by Angel when he fled from Batman. Somehow Joker knows (or intuits?) that Angel didn't kill the boy's parents (though how exactly did that work?), and taunts Batman with that in the middle of a love declaration. Batman finds the gun in the gutter and the traumatized boy, when given the gun, pulls the trigger again and again, so it turns out the boy killed his parents (for no apparent reason?) and that's why he's so traumatized and doesn't talk.
Somehow it all seemed very convoluted, though trying to summarize it helped a bit to make sense of it.
And not really related to the story as such, but before reading Broken City I never noticed that Killer Croc was black. Probably because I haven't read a lot of stories with him, and during his appearance in Hush he didn't look much like a human at all, and was, well, kind of green with big teeth.
