Batman: Bad Seeds – Sunset #1 Perfectly Sets the Stage
The Bat-Signal, if you will, that shines when a Batman book has been going for a minute is the eventual crossover. It’s not a particularly novel concept, you can trace it back to Snyder and Capullo’s Night of the Owls in the pages of Batman. I think it’s exciting when the eventual crossover happens on a purely conceptual level, it’s cool to see all these different books kind of come together and give the reader the high-level overview of what’s been going on in Gotham, as Batman: Bad Seeds – Sunset does.
In the case of Bad Seeds, the Bat-Office’s new summer event, writer Matt Fraction told me in our interview it was a way to celebrate and highlight G. Willow Wilson and Marcio Takara’s (and a wider assortment of collaborators) Poison Ivy for hitting 50 issues (which it will as of the issue right after the ending of Bad Seeds), which is a remarkable feat all in its own way.
To be honest, I’m only caught up with one half of the two books that are headlining this event, Batman. Poison Ivy is a book I stopped reading a while back, around the time of Knight Terrors, but I did pick up a few issues as well as the prelude to this event, #47 (out this week!) to get a taste of what’s been going on over that side of the aisle.
I really dig Ivy as mayor of Gotham City. Admittedly, I think some of the political satire in the pages of her book and in Bad Seeds – Sunset is a little on the nose, but on a conceptual level it all makes sense within the tonal context and design of Matt Fraction and Jorge Jimenez’s very superhero-forward Batman, drawing from the strange, pre-crisis hijinks world of the Bat.
And in hand with that, they made Police Commissioner Vandal Savage work as well. Of course, in a city where a grown man dresses as a Bat, his son dresses like a bird, a monstrous crocodile that goes to therapy, and a plant controlling woman is mayor, then an immortal man as the corrupt leader of the cops isn’t too far out there. It all rocks.
Bad Seeds – Sunset is written by both Fraction and Wilson, with layouts by Giuseppe Camuncoli, finishes by Cliff Rathburn, colors by Tomeu Morey, and letters by Clayton Cowles.
This issue does a great job at structurally giving the reader a rundown of what’s been going on in Gotham, where every character is, and what they’re going to be over the course of the story. Specifically, for the side characters in the story (Nightwing, Catwoman, Batgirl), it leaves them in their own worlds as they navigate through the plant-infested streets of Gotham. Similarly, it quickly sets up smaller titles like Gotham Central and Gotham General.
It doesn’t expect the reader to have read anything that’s happened already, although having done so is rewarding. Specifically on the Batman side of things, #7 by Fraction and Ryan Sook lays some of the groundwork for this event, and the following issues lay the seeds for where the “Bat-Family” is at large in the wake of that issue.
All of this is illustrated beautifully by Camuncoli and Rathburn. Morey adapts to their style really nicely, and if you didn’t already know he was coloring it, you wouldn’t because it is such a shift from how he colours Jimenez (and I mean this as a compliment). Cowles keeps the same lettering style he’s maintained in Batman, while also picking up on Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s style from Poison Ivy and makes it all cohesive.
I do remain a little skeptical, but that’s just what I do with event books. But if anything, Bad Seeds – Sunset leaves me excited for the next 10 weeks and that’s all I could really hope for.
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