More water treading between the Penguin storyline and City Of Bane. I'm not sure whether King has a degree in psychology or English (maybe both?) but his storytelling during this Batman run is often excruciating. I hated every page of this book, and can not recommend it to anyone.

A five star art book with a -4 star story.

Tom King writes Bruce Wayne traveling through dreams. It's dull, boring, trite, lifeless, uninteresting, mundane, tedious, insipid, monotonous, vapid. Nothing interesting happens. You don't get any new insight into any of the characters. It's one odd but not terrible issue about the kid who thinks he's Bruce Wayne, and then it's six issues of absofuckenlutely nothing happening.

The best of those six issues is the one that's nearly wordless, so you don't have to suffer through King's nonsense.

After the mostly strong run of Detective Comics by James Tynion IV, where Red Robin, Batwoman, Batgirl, Orphan, Clayface, Nightwing, The Signal, and more of Batman's associated formed a team to protect Gotham, we now see Batman farming out the remaining members of the team to Black Lightning, to operate without his involvement.

It's a perfectly cromulent superhero comic. If you're interested in Black Lightning of just want to keep reading Gotham-based team books, it's pretty decent.

The first 2/3rds of this "murder mystery" center on heroes getting therapy in an automated Sanctuary. It's an interesting premise, and it's pretty well-paced if you like superhero stories where they aren't constantly punching each other through buildings.

The art is cinematic and gorgeous in a way that I stopped noticing how good it was because it was serving the story so well.

Then, we start to see who the villain is, and it's kind of stupid. It's not offensively stupid or problematic, it's just sort of bleh. As a result, the ending isn't satisfying.

I still enjoyed the book, though. I'd have been happier if there were more therapy pages and if the ending were more abrupt.

Kurt Busiek excels at writing short superhero stories from unusual perspectives. He's great at world building without using chronological storytelling. What he's not good at, at least with Astro City, is long-form storytelling.

While not my favorite, I did somewhat enjoy volume one of The Dark Age, which tells the story of the downfall of superheroes through the eyes of two brothers whose parents were killed when a superhero failed to worry about casualties when chasing a criminal.

The story involved the breakdown of family relationships, the risk of being a moral police officer in America, and the risk of being a common, non-violent criminal in an age of violent superheroes. It didn't reinvent any wheels, and it wasn't amazing storytelling, but it was a decent read.

In this volume we get more characters, repeated family drama, plot rehashes, and the same morals over and over and over. It's very boring. It's like 60% of Batman or X-Men stories. The storyline has gone on for too long, and there isn't much to say, so you have to throw in unnecessary plot points and C and D storylines, etc.

This is easily the most disappointing book in the series so far. I'm going to take a break before reading the next volume (which has a clean slate, and new point of view characters).

A non-chronological set of stories about The Vietnam War that's mainly used as talk about the process of grief and writing.

Easily the most impactful war story I've ever read, as the author plainly tells you when he lied to make a scene more dramatic.

It is fairly insular, as you spend much more time seeing the narrator evolve than anyone else. But it deliberately spends time showing you strong women characters who aren't strong because of their relationships to men. The Vietnamese are also never shown to be villains.

It's really an anti-war book that rarely condescends, and never feels like it's trying to change your mind about anything. It's just telling war stories. Stories he admits he's using to manipulate you into feeling what he felt.