GRAPHIC NOVEL
Batman
Year One - Deluxe Edition

Author: Frank Miller
Artist: David Mazzucchelli
Titan Books
RRP: £8.99, US $14.99
ISBN-13: 978 1 8457 6158 5
ISBN-10: 1 84576 158 8

Available 27 April 2007


Lieutenant James Gordon takes up a new post in the corrupt city of Gotham, while billionaire Bruce Wayne returns to the scene of his parents' murder, intent on vengeance, and on cleaning up the city. Each faces trails and challenges of their own, as their lives become irrevocably and potentially tragically intertwined... and a legend is born...

The deluxe edition of Batman: Year One is indeed a thing of beauty. Not only do you get one of the greatest Batman stories ever told (Miller's The Dark Knight Returns still holds that title in my book), but the last quarter of this collection is given over to rough sketches, scripts, covers and insights into the creation of this monumental graphic novel.

While David Mazzucchelli's art is not as memorable as Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley's work on The Dark Knight Returns, it's more fitting to the origins of the Batman.

The story is told more from the point of view of Jim Gordon than the Batman. This helps to ease the reader into the origins of the Dark Knight rather than suffer the Bruce Wayne/Batman anguish and turmoil as Wayne remembers his parent's murder. Batman is a little naive, a little too confident and invariably walks into the wrong situations unprepared. The result is he gets stung quite badly by criminals that he would easily deal with in later years. This makes this collection extremely believable - even superheroes have to start somewhere.

If you can't afford to buy the hardback edition of this graphic novel, then this is worth getting your hands on. However, for me personally I would spend the extra and get the real deluxe edition. It really is worth spending that little bit extra on.

Nick Smithson

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