It's so hard not to hear Tom Hardy's voice when reading this.
This is another quick review because unfortunately personal issues have interfered with my reviewing pattern.
This was a disappointing issue, but not bad and pretty decent actually, but it didn’t wow me like I hoped Tomasi would do for villain’s month. This issue just didn’t deliver the sort of Bane story I wanted, but I think Tomasi has the potential to make him great it’s just not totally evident in this issue, but it does setup Arkham war very well though.
I have not read Talon, so I have no idea what exactly happened there, but I found this issue to be very new reader friendly and it was very easy to pick up what was going on. I found the first part of the issue to be a good show of Bane’s brute strength, but I think I found randomly beating up a load of men drugged up on venom to be slightly pointless as we already know and so probably do the people fighting him, so while it showed his strength I think it went on for a little too long and it could have been summed up really with one big show of strength. Also the girl asking to watch her father die and then the reason she did it was just to cliché and kind of creepy.
This issue also threw Bane’s origin in there as well and it worked very well in this issue and it did very well giving a brief summary of Bane origin and I just like the fact it was put in there anyway, as it helped any new readers understand him better.
Their are a few continuity errors hear as the moment the sun is covered by the moon, Bane is at the Crime Syndicate meeting, but here he's on a boat heading to Gotham, error or what?
A small part of this issue was devoted to Blackgate and we can definitely see that this is setting up Arkham war after we see Bane’s dislike of the Arkham villains and how he breaks open blackgate. Tomasi is handling up the setup for Arkham war and even though I would prefer if it was a less important part of the issue and it was only featured a little bit, rather than what we have here where several scenes are entirely devoted to it and the entire issue leads up to it. I do however like the mirroring of this and Scarecrow as it ends on the same type of note and you can tell one is leading to another.
The artwork was decent I would say I like the idea of Bane’s creator coming back for this villains month issue, but the art does feel severely dated in some ways even the colouring reminds you of the 90s, but maybe that was the vibe it was going for. Anyway I think graham Nolan did a good job showing Bane’s strength off and a few of the layouts are quite impressive especially some with the reflection in Bane’s mask. Bane himself looked very impressive on the page and a few moments you could see his strength like when he breaks a gun and when he’s fighting some thugs.
This is a decent villains issue but compared to some others it’s a bit skippable, but if you’re getting Arkham War I’d suggest getting both this and Scarecrow. This was a good story filled with some good moments and it’s worth a read, but I expected more for Bane considering his involvement in Arkham war and Forever evil.
3 stars
