3 out of 5

First off – Andy Clark’s pencils simply look amazing here.  His figures feel so solid and real, moving with grace – when it comes to Batman – or feeling old and paunchy – when it comes to the Russian policeman in the story – or lumbering (the beast), or swaggering (the Russian criminal)… the pencils are so great that it distracts form a story which sets up a lot of interesting pieces and then doesn’t do much with them except let them fall.

Bats goes to Russia to follow up on a gang lead, worried that said gang might be crossing over to Gotham.  It’s nice that Milligan gives us one issue in America to try and justify the road trip, but these setups always sorta put me off, admittedly, because it’s super fun to put a hero out of water in a different country, but hey look, here’s Batman AND Bruce Wayne in Russia at the same time, woot woot.  It’s suspension of disbelief for this fiction world, I get that, and Peter tries to make it clear that Bruce is aware that he needs to lay low, but it’s unavoidable to have the story reek of the author’s idea being rooted elsewhere and simply needing some macguffin to transplant his lead there.

Anyhow, in Russia, we have a heartless gang leader who maintains fear with a “beast” – a large, violent creature over which only he seems to have control.  We also have a whole bunch of crooked cops being led by a dispirited cop who isn’t crooked, but has looked the other way for a long time.  Clarke’s pencils are really an assist in making the character types match Pete’s script directions.  Artists with less control would’ve rendered this story unemotive, but we believe the various angles thanks to the nuances in scripting and art.  Pete was at a nice high point between subtlety and the “spoken” word at this point, his excesses just peeking out around the corners.

So this all sounds great, why only 3 out of 5?  Well, there’s that initial story hump I mention – there’s no real reason for this to be in Russia except you need to not have to worry about the existing Gotham cops regime or Bats rogues gallery, you just want a classic Batman story that isn’t connected to anything else.  Even though this seemed to be the pitch for “Confidential,” (sort of what “Detective Comics should be, and what the recently brought back (as of the end of 2012 (thanks parenthesis within parenthesis)) Legends of the Dark Knight will, hopefully be for a little while) it’s unavoidable in the Batman universe for people to wonder where Penguin is if you have a new criminal empire popping up on Batman’s streets.  So maybe Pete was watching Solaris recently or something and wanted a story in Russia, but there’s no direct tie.  Also, although our story ends with leaving some characters in tact, Pete puts so much into the development of these people that it feels like such a defeat when we switch gears back to the crimes that brought Bats there and resolve that storyline.  Seems like a counter-intuitive criticism, I suppose, but perhaps if this were part of a series where we could see these characters live on, it wouldn’t have felt like such an empty conclusion.