We expected Chip Zdarsky’s Batman run to be akin to his Daredevil run, primarily gritty and ground-level, and instead of (because of?) that, it’s been four volumes of killer robots, sentient alternate personalities, and multiversal spirits (sometimes embodying those same killer robots). All of that said and done, we have just one volume, Batman Vol. 5: The Dying City, to finish out Zdarsky’s run before the next team takes over, and finally we get the story we’ve been awaiting all along.

I like my comics ambitious and risk-taking. When mainstream superhero comics are always swirling back to the status quo, a writer who dares what others wouldn’t or shouldn’t will always earn my esteem. I am even surprised DC allowed an aspect of Dying City, but it’s insane and I love it. For his last hurrah, Zdarsky fashions a whodunnit ripped from the headlines but that smacks of classic 1980s Batman and is crazed getting there to boot. I came around in the end to Zdarsky’s Zur-En-Arrh saga, but I can’t help wonder what he’d have done with five volumes like this, too.

[Review contains spoilers]

In the certain kind of “good guy is inexplicably a murderer” story we find in Dying City, there’s Bat-villains who are almost always the culprit, and indeed one from my list had a role to play. Of course, neither would we expect that the Riddler would be present and not be involved. But the hallmark of a comics whodunit is the creative team hiding clues the reader can spot in the art, not just in the narrative, and that’s here in Zdarsky’s NygmaTe(t)ch bit, as well as, for instance, the targeted use of the color red on the second chapter cover and elsewhere.

KGBeast has not been wholly absent from the Bat-titles over the years. To have the Beast accompanied by a Russian handler, however, on a mission of misinformation, feels nicely Jim Starlin/Jim Aparo-esque, back to the Beast’s original depiction. And yet, weirdly, unfortunately, the geopolitics are as relevant now as they were in the 1980s. The high action plane crash finale reminds of the moon jump from Zdarsky’s Batman Vol. 1: Failsafe, though now more integrated into the overall plot. All of this smacks of a kind of new-classic Batman approach; Zdarsky’s techno-fantasy Batman had merits of its own, but again, I’d have been eager to see this as the start of a new four-book run rather than the end of a five-book run.

Into this, Zdarsky brings former commissioner James Gordon. It seems initially that this is a nod to the DC All In era and the kinder, gentler Gotham introduced at the beginning, that the “dynamic duo” of Batman and Gordon are fighting crime again — comics, indeed, contracting back to a welcome status quo. But things are not really so sanguine, in that Zdarsky comes to reveal that Gordon’s been having an affair with Mayor Nakano’s wife and murdered the mayor. We learn Gordon was mind-controlled (maybe), but indeed Zdarsky bringing Gordon on the scene as if he and Batman would be partners again is a fantastic feint when ultimately Gordon’s role in the book is as one of the partial antagonists.

It’s an outrageous swing Zdarsky takes here, that grizzled old Gordon is shtupping the much-younger mayor’s wife, one of those wonderfully ill-conceived things I’m amazed DC let through and am so glad that they did. The revelation issue is drawn by Jorge Fornes, whose art bears strong resemblance to David Mazzucchelli’s, and the visual evocation of Gordon’s affair with Sarah Essen in Batman: Year One can’t be a coincidence. Though the years haven’t borne this out, there’s the suggestion of Gordon as an unrepentant lech, the less mature in the Gordon-Harvey Bullock relationship, someone we still can’t trust to make all the right decisions. It’s so unexpected, such a left turn, that it elevates what might otherwise have been a fairly straightforward Bat-mystery.

Not to mention that Zdarsky suggests Gordon knows Batman’s identity (though it remains to be seen if any other writers pick this up), that Batman knows Gordon knows Batman’s identity, and that this isn’t a big revelation — that it happened somewhere, sometime, and the reader just wasn’t privy to it. I don’t think it changes all that much if Gordon knows, except for my dislike of the rapid dismantling of the secret identity trope. At the same time, Zdarsky also suggests that Thomas Wayne had an affair and that there was a child that might have been his; I do see how this goes toward Zdarsky’s “no one’s perfect” themes, but it seemed crude besmirching the reputation of dear departed Thomas Wayne.

Arguably Dying City is an add-on, five issues disconnected from the rest of Zdarsky’s run (though Failsafe does get a glancing mention at the end). Jorge Jimenez has a variant cover for Zdarsky’s final issue that echoes his cover for the first, but it underscores to an extent how the end doesn’t match the beginning — Robin Tim Drake, prominent on Jimenez' original and in Failsafe, is completely absent here, his arc and that of the Bat-family largely tied up in Batman Vol. 4: Dark Prisons. Though the end of Dying City is ending-ish, for the most part it feels more like a beginning than an ending.

Still, from Batman: The Knight to Failsafe and on, Zdarsky’s Batman run has been a story about how Bruce Wayne has achieved such perfection that he perceives himself to be a danger, and then how do you manage to be “the best” and also be taken down if you need to be? The answer that the Dark Prisons finale comes to, rather par for the course for a Bat-title these days, is that Batman is not “the best” on his own but rather with his team, and that he need not create murderbots to mitigate himself as long as he has his family.

I’d like to think Dying City also has something to add, however. In the wake of Batman really causing a lot of damage due to his own hubris (given the hubris of having tried to outsmart his own hubris), he’s faced with other good people doing bad things — Gordon, his father — and also “the benevolent corrupt” — Commissioner Vandal Savage, CEO Edward Nygma. Zdarsky doesn’t get all the way there explicitly, but it seems like there’s another lesson here, that “the best” Batman is trying to be in Knight and has achieved by Failsafe is perhaps a fiction. Dying City argues that there are no “bests” out there, and thinking such caused this mess while letting go of that idea solved it.

We do get the missing story from Batman #150 at the end of Batman Vol. 5: The Dying City, so Chip Zdarsky’s run is completely collected. It’ll be an energetic omnibus when it comes, as has been DC’s custom these days. That anniversary short is lovely — it’s always nice to see Denys Cowan — and perhaps further underscores the idea that Batman’s secret identity is not so precious as it has been in the past. For thematic reasons I might have preferred the story where it was published, or at the beginning of this book instead of at the end, but collected is collected.

[Includes original covers, upward of 30 variant covers]