Batman #567

Skipping a few issues, and here we are in the midst of the No Man's Land mega-story.

Title: Batman
Issue: 567
Date: July, 1999
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Kelley Puckett
Penciler: Damion Scott
Inker: John Floyd
Colorist: Greg Wright
Letterer: Todd Klein
Editor: Joseph Illidge, Darren Vincenzo
Cover: Damion Scott, Robert Campanella, Patrick Martin

This issue focuses on Cassandra Cain, and her father David Cain. David Cain is trying to kill Commissioner Gordon, while Cassandra is determined to prevent that from happening.

Meanwhile, the Batman is trying to decide what to do with a captive Harvey Dent in a world where there is no longer any "justice" for criminals to be brought before. 

I'm not really a Cassandra Cain fan, and I found the action to be choppy and not always all that coherent. I did like that they filled in a bit of Cassandra's backstory, although more questions were raised than answered.

GCPD officers getting killed off like Star Trek redshirts is a severely overused trope, and it gets thrown into this issue entirely unnecessarily.

Rating: 4/10

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