Batman: Gotham Knights #6

Title: Batman: Gotham Knights
Issue: #6
Date: August 2000
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Devin Grayson, Walter Simonson
Penciler: Paul Ryan, John Paul Leon
Inker: John Floyd, John Paul Leon
Colorist: Jean Segarra
Letterer: Bill Oakley
Editor: Dennis O'Neil, Mark Chiarello

Bruce Wayne learns the details of a city councilman's misdeeds during the Gotham Earthquake and the various catastrophes that followed. The evidence needed to put the corrupt politician behind bars is buried under rubble in a bank vault, and the Batman turns to Barbara Gordon for help in locating the vault. But it turns out that Oracle has a secret of her own hidden in that same vault. This story engages in a fair amount of retcon, but if you can get past that, the interplay between Bruce Wayne, Barbara Gordon, and Jim Gordon is excellent. It's also nice to see a Batman story where the mayhem really takes a back seat to the character interaction really. It helps that Barbara Gordon has become one of the best characters in the DC Universe, and that she's got the Batman to play off of. Penguin is also handled well here, as are the rest of the supporting characters.

This issue also features an excellent "Batman: Black & White" backup story, told almost entirely from the point of view of the Riddler as he searches the Mad Hatter's (booby-trapped, of course) mansion on a quest for the answer to one of literature's great riddles, a conundrum scribed by Lewis Carroll himself.

Two excellent stories in one issue make this one of the best single issues of an ongoing Batman series I've read in a while.

Rating: 8.5/10