After doing digital first titles that tied in with video games, and TV shows, DC is now rolling out books featuring their characters in untethered to other medium titles.
First up, is Legends of the Dark Knight. Taking up the mantle of the 223 issue series published between 1989 and 2007, that was, for the most part, out of continuity stories and at the beginning focusing on the early days of Bruce’s career, but soon widened the scope to Bruce’s career through the years. While it did take part in Bat-Title crossovers such as Knightsquest, No Man’s Land and War Games, it was mostly used as a showcase for writers and artists. And currently you can find issues #0 (yes it was a part of the Zero Hour event)-191 on line in the digital store as of the week of 6/8/2012.
The digital version kicks off with a tale written by Damon Lindelof, with art by Jeff Lemire. It is a story six months into Bruce’s career, and features Bruce getting a taste of humility from Alfred in the form of an attack by what appeared to be the same situation that got Batman started in the first place.
It’s a pedestrian one-off story that goes by rather quickly and doesn’t quite seem to be the 20 pages of content that it is listed as being. Maybe that’s due to the digital pages being smaller and when it goes into print it will be padded out due to the multiple stories in each issue.
As a story, it was pretty one-dimensional, and portrayed a wildly out of character Bruce yammering to Alfred about not having any vulnerabilities, which leads to Alfred needing to teach Bruce a humility lesson. Now granted the Bat-God era, well more like Batman since Year One and later The Animated Series, has led to the idea that Bruce can and do anything. But Bruce himself has never been so over the top overconfident about his abilities as he is shown to be. Especially a half year into his crime fighting career. And Lemire’s art was not doing this story any favors.
It was passable as a story and maybe I would think better of it if it was somewhere in the middle of the title’s run, but not one to launch a brand new title, and not this weak of a version of the story.
Legends of the Dark Knight #1:
Reviewed by Steve J. Rogers
