Batman #9: The Gotham Job

Batman #9 hits the ground running with a heist-movie-style montage in the vein of something like Ocean’s Eleven or The Italian Job. The storyline has fun with its premise while taking enough short breaks to focus on its stellar character work.

Each member of the team Batman assembles comes across as completely realized to the reader with their own narrative threads and authentic dialogue that plays into each of their unique personalities. Stephanie is daring, Duke is careful, Damian is well… Damian, and Barbara is their woman in the chair from which she directs them all like the criminal mastermind of the issue’s aforementioned heist movie format.

Bruce’s portrayal feels particularly fresh in the issue, especially compared to the previous few issues, due to his characterization as a team leader and his burgeoning self-doubt being framed through his fatherhood of Damian. This comes out in a conversation with his hallucinatory version of Alfred, who represents the fatherly part of Bruce’s psyche for obvious reasons.

The art is dense and tightly packed across the issue’s 20+ pages. While Matt Fraction plays with panel count, Ryan Sook does the same with the arrangement. An 8-panel page filled with context is able to condense a lot of information-heavy dialogue effectively without slowing down the story’s pacing more than a necessary beat or two.

Wade Von Grawbadger was added as the inker for this issue, which explains why the art is able to do so much with the limited space of the comic book format, as having two star guest artists adds a lot of versatility to the visual presentation. This also results in a lot of extra finer details, such as a packed crowd with detailed faces on a full single page or a page littered with Batman silhouettes that show cinematic motion playing out in what feels like real time.

Tomeu Morey’s colors are rich and vibrant, adding extra flair to Ryan Sook’s and Wade Von Grawbadger’s already high-quality and engaging artwork. The glare of police lights fills the streets of Gotham while each of the various team members are able to stand out from one another easily. No one is given the same lazy textures: instead, everyone has their own slight polish to them that feels indicative of their character and the motion they exude in the line art.