Batman: Death of the Family – A Review

Following Geoff Johns’s lead on Green Lantern, a few of the writers who took over DC Comics following the New 52 relaunch did their best to reinvent the characters’ mythology, adding texture and background to deepen and freshen up the characters and the world they inhabit.And while Jeff Lemire has received high marks on Animal Man and Joshua Hale Fialkov has delighted fans with I, Vampire, it’s Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman that has stood out as the most consistently excellent comic of the New 52, while simultaneously fulfilling their promise to examine and enhance what makes Batman special.The Court of Owls and Night of the Owls, after all, were all about adding something to the mythology, crafting something that would fit in with Batman’s previously-existing backstory but that could have been missed all along, not entirely unlike the way Johns crafted the Parallax entity into a millennia-old part of the Green Lantern story.That was all some pretty heady stuff, though, and heading into Death of the Family, it felt a bit oppressive. There hadn’t been much room to breathe, and Joker has traditionally been a character who tends to work better in smaller, more brutal doses.Luckily for fans, that’s what we got today with the release of Batman #17, the final chapter in the story. Tacked onto the end of this protracted, baffling story filled with double meanings and strange twists came a finale that’s effective, in no small part, because it plays by the same rules as the story itself.