Azrael #1

Barry Kitson may not be Joe Quesada, but if you take a look at the fantastic first cover you'll know he's a perfectly acceptable replacement. Not only is the art quality excellent, the balance of the heavy black and red Azrael down in the front and center superimposed in front of the gray and white shade of the past is a fantastic design.

This issue begins with a fantastic impossible scene involving Azrael in his former Batman costume battling a demonic Batman in a ring of fire with a backdrop of shifting locations. The dialogue was hilarious, but had a slight undertone of uncanny weirdness that showed you just how much Knightfall screwed up Jean Paul Valley.

Jean Paul Valley has undergone a fantastic character arc from an average college student all the way to a psychopathic Batman, and in the aftermath of Knightfall, he's living on the streets, his mind not completely broken, but his recollection of the past is like a broken mirror. From the streets we see a rare vision of a more real criminal and downtrodden element. From the alcoholic but still fairly functional Brian Bryan, to the mentally ill hobo with an unusual desire for shoes and his friends willing to burn down a homeless shelter to help him get them. It's not the normal type of Gotham scum we see, showing us that Azrael does take the extra effort to avoid being a Batman clone, or even a rehashing of his Valley's time as Batman. Jean Paul Valley himself especially is in a completely different place than he's been before, and he's having trouble adjusting to the calling of his past lives. His transformations into Azrael are fantastic scenes, getting us into his head as they blend the sense of what's real and what's The System crawling around inside his head, still hooked in the deepest parts of his subconscious.

Jean Paul Valley has always teetered on the edge of sanity, not quite multiple personalities in the usual sense, but there were always multiple facets to his person. When he was thrust into this world of capes and costumes, The System surfaced and Jean Paul Valley was invaded by Azrael, but Batman came and pulled JPV out of the darkness. But when JPV was given the mantle of the Bat, Jean Paul Valley was all but erased by the tug-of-war game for his mind between Batman and Azrael. After the real Batman saved Jean Paul Valley with a forced awakening, the Batman in JPV has faded away, with Azrael still lingering. And the original mind of Jean Paul Valley is lost behind a detached and nearly empty self that doesn't know what it is. The advice he gets from an amateur psychiatrist leads the issue to a final panel that's a weird brand of subtly high tension, with an emotionless Jean Paul Valley mechanically reciting to himself that the flames he sees aren't really there. He's not a traumatized man huddling and rocking chanting to comfort himself, but stating it in a creepy kind of factual sense, even though he's actually wrong in this case.

In Conclusion: 5/5

This is a perfectly excellent first issue. Not mind blowingly incredible, but I have absolutely no gripes with it, even if Kitson's art isn't quite as fantastic as Quesada's, and his panel layouts are a little more standard. This was a perfect beginning to a new saga in the story of Azrael.