Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Gotham City: Year One

Gotham City: Year One (a volume of collected issues released in September 2023) by Tom King, illustrated by Phil Hester and colored by Jordie Bellaire, is terrific. The story is a gritty noir throwback to Bruce Wayne family origins, and does not really feature Batman at all, except that 96-year-old Sam (Slam) Bradley, on his deathbed, tells the story to Batman. Hester’s artwork, more than bolstered by the colorist Jordie Bellaire, is distinctive. I see sixties funky expressionist notes in here echoing Frank Miller’s Sin City, Eduardo Risso’s 100 Bullets, and the stylized work of Darwyn Cooke in his adaptations of Richard Stark’s Parker novels. Stylized sixties and not pulpy fifties style.

So Slam gets hired to deliver a letter to Bruce Wayne’s grandfather, and he gets involved in a kidnapping/murder plot that would seem to echo the Charles Lindberg story. Both Wayne and Lindberg were racist, and both were rich. We find Wayne is adulterous and wants to build a chemical plant in Gotham at the expense of the health of the economically disadvantaged Gothamites. So you pine to MGGA (make Gotham Great Again)? Return to that glorious past? Well, it was corrupt and seedy back then, same as now.

In the process, Slam gets beat up a lot. We alsofind he is bi-racial, with a black Tarot-card reading mother who figures in the plot interestingly. We’ll see if there is a second volume, but I like all the grimy slimy backstory vs the romanticized versions we may have been led to believe about the Wayne heritage.

PS: Kudos to Rod Brown, comics sleuth and historian extraordinaire, whose review I read before mine goes to press, who reveals to us: "Bradley is a nifty choice to lead the series since he is already a forerunner of Batman, having debuted in Detective Comics #1 in 1937, a couple of years before Bruce first dons the cowl in #27." Cool! gGreat Batman origin comics that do not in the least romanticize his family history.