Frankly it's pretty bad now.
Snyder has been tasked with a task that is far beyond his skill in my opinion.
- His best batman stories are the black mirror and gates of gotham.
- Court of owl is a great concept with a great start and a poor finish. You can start to see some of the problems of Snyder writing (not very subtle symbolism, overanalysis, problem of pacing)but it's overlooked thanks to freshness.
-Then you have death of the family where things start to go bad very quickly. Bad concept, worse execution. The in your face symbolism and overreaching analysis start to get very troublesome.
-Zero year is ok althought he constantly references the past and fails to bring anything new to the plate. Basically it's a cute update. Making the red hood gang leader competent was a nice change but by the end of the story he tries to make it look more complex than it needs to be which kind of spoils it.Give me Year One or even Earth One any day.
-Endgame is simply awful. Same problems as death of the family but 10fold.
His good stories and his bad stories have a clear difference : he's on new grounds in the former case and he's retreading old ground in the latter. In black mirror he can flesh up a brand new batman in the person of dick grayson, in gates of gotham he can make an important tale about a little known period with the first families of gotham, in court of owl thanks to the reboot he can come up with a brand new threat of his own.
But when it comes to writing old characters... oh boy.... Snyder has decades of history and he s tasked with living up to this legacy and show he's the main writer for DC with johns. And that's when he s completely out of the water. Snyder tries to reinvent the character and it's either shallow (death of the family, zero year ) or so bold that it simply ignores the very thing that made the character. I m not saying it's an easy task, simply Snyder has to deal with the marketing machine and he has to overwrite or overhype those piss poor stories. He's like this guy that always has to come up with a twist so-very-clever that ultimately it makes no sense.
His Joker is painfully bad. I dread the second he's going to open his mouth.He lacks any kind of real spontaneity. Snyder write the Joker like some kind of DC Doctor Doom, an evil genius mastermind able to overcome everybody at the same time (death of the family) omnipotent and omniscient and who now turns out to be immortal (endgame). Morrison had the BatGod, now Snyder has the JokerGod. In some ironic way in spite of all this power and plenty of shock value (joker playing with his own cut face, batfamily disfigured, alfred's hand severed) he does nothing of consequence . The joker beat to death jason todd with a crowbar, crippled barbara gordon, killed sarah essien. All those things had long lasting consequences or/and conveyed important point (in barbara gordon's case the nature of evil and the legitimity of justice system) . That's pretty powerful and gives him some cred. Snyder's joker was supposed to do something unspeakable in death of the family : no one died. Snyder argues that he destroyed the batfamily : except they are all back in line by endgame. Now he cut alfred's hand : how long before Batman use the dionesyum and give him back his hand?
As far as I am concerned, I hope his run on Batman ends soon. He's a pretty good writer I think but he's no moore or miller and he's completely unable to treat skillfully those old characters.
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