Like Joshua Williamson’s Bane story, Tom Taylor and Ivan Reis' Batman: One Bad Day: Ra’s al Ghul is a keen Ra’s story, explicating some of the most interesting aspects of the character that so often get overlooked. At the same time — lest I sound like a broken record with this, the last of the current “One Bad Day” specials — it is hardly deserving of the “One Bad Day” moniker.
And so the tension, as with the rest: the “one-shot to graphic novel” format is one I’m inclined to support; that format gives these stories extra cache that many of them, with their writer/artist pairings, deserve that cache; and many of these stories have also been very good. But intimating these books' place alongside Batman: The Killing Joke suggests an element of horror that many of these have not provided, and in failing to live up, a cynicism emerges: that if we take away the format and the creators, many of these are “just” more Batman stories, unlikely to have any staying power. The potential of these has ultimately been greater than most of the books ever were.
