Snyder starts the issue poorly. He’s got two pages of Harvey Bullock narration. There’s no point to it. Then he moves to Jim Gordon and I kept waiting for Dick to show up to take over the first person. But he doesn’t; Snyder sticks to Gordon.
The issue is layered—almost confusingly so—between the present, with Gordon dealing with Junior’s return, and a flashback to the past, when everyone thinks Junior killed some girl. It turns out—in a convenient turn of events—maybe he didn’t.
Snyder can still backtrack, but the discovery does—at least in the context of a desperately hopeful father—raise reasonable doubt.
While using Jim Gordon as protagonist has gotten to be a crutch (how can he not be a compelling character), Snyder does well with all the layering. It’s his best issue since his first.
And Francavilla does better real people than superheroes.
