Batman: Anno uno

I think that the real protagonist of Batman stories is Gotham itself. The corrupted, twisted city represents the perfect cursed place where everyone is forced into madness, but not only the chaotic one, but also the diverse spectrum of psychoses and the way people interact with it. Because the justifier, the inspector or the villain are three different mad dreamers in a destroyed world, a hell on earth where fear will always reign unchallenged. And yet, for a twist of fate, the actions of the “goods” of this story always makes Gotham return to their new happy dawn.
Batman Year One is an origin story which takes everything I have quoted and uses the personalities of Bruce Wayne and Jim Gordon as the new arrivals in the city forgotten by God himself. Since this premise you can immediately see how these figures, so dutiful and obscure at the same time, are only the completion of a world made of different souls and characters, of enemies and criminal bosses, of masks and hard-boiled clubs, arriving at the menace of the Asylum, peering from upon its further reality. Frank Miller is exceptional in representing a terrific Gotham, unpredictable but colorful, powerful and alive while its fundamentals are dying. A great help arrives from the style of David Mazzucchelli, in which the lights and shadows are marked by a heavy china, in which pop tunes borrowed by the best Japanese productions mixes itself with expressive characters, iconic for costumes and appearances. The way all the main actors of Gotham are here represented has made school not only in the comics medium, but also in the cinematographic one, where “The Batman”, “The Dark Knight Trilogy” and even the Tim Burton's iterations on the crusader takes inspirations, for style and writing, from Year One. This labyrinthic, deep immersion inside the quoted city, however, weakens the emersion of the two faces of the quoted franchise. Because Batman and Gordon soon lose their interesting points for the human essence they shows, for being so run in and for the choices they make which never evades from their known archetypes. Furthermore, the absence of iconic Batman villains, substituted by escaped patients, violent military men and corrupted members of the police never evokes the extraordinary cases in which Batman has investigated in the past. In this sense, Batman Year One is a foundational comic about the superhero and its modern presence in Pop Culture, in an epic origin story which sees Gotham as the absolute selling point.

STYLE: 5
STORY: 3,5
WORLDBUILDING: 5
RHYTHM: 3
PROTAGONISTS: 5
ANTAGONISTS: 3
ARTISTIC FEATURE: 5
ATMOSPHERE 5
EMOTIONAL IMPACT: 4,5

FINAL VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐⭐