Plot: A hostage situation in a church looks nasty - can a rookie Batman persuade Captain James Gordon to give him a chance?
The acclaimed Whiteout team take on Batman in an early meeting between Batman and Captain Gordon, and it falls a little flat unfortunately. The problem may be that I was expecting too much - for the lead-off issue of this limited series, I expected something completely beyond a standard Legends of the Dark Knight story. Don't get me wrong, I like LotDK very much, and think that it is usually miles above the standard Bat-books, so I was hoping that Turning Points would be as far beyond LotDK, as LotDK is beyond Batman and Detective Comics.
But it's not to be.
What you do get, however, is a well-told tale of hostage situation in a church, with Gordon attempting without success to negotiate the hostages' freedom, and Batman popping up to suggest he be allowed a chance. This meeting between the pair shows Gordon remarkably open-minded and even encouraging in his attitude towards Batman, which ties in with their (almost) meeting at the end of Year One, but rankles a little given the confrontation between the two at the end of the book.
Batman is given his chance, the meeting ends as you'd expect (with Batman vanishing whilst Gordon is still talking), and the hostage situation resolved - although you feel for the perp, driven off the deep end by the death of his wife and young son in a car crash earlier that day.
You'd maybe expect Gordon to take a little solace by the issue's end in that whilst the subplot in this issue is his wife taking their son and moving to Chicago, at least they are still alive and hope therefore exists of a reconciliation. Instead he takes it all out on Batman, and maybe we get the beginnings of an understanding (tentative for sure) between Gordon and Batman; maybe Gordon takes it in that Batman has lost something dear to him too.
A good story, involving and reasonably interesting, although not the special event you'd like. Lieber's art is excellent (hope you checked out the Sneak Peek last week), nice to see him have the chance to draw some detailed backgrounds rather than the snow and ice of Whiteout!
Think Legends of the Dark Knight, though, and you'll have this pinned.
