Batman #557

Continuing to make my way through the Batman issues of Aftershock.

Title: Batman
Issue: 557
Date: August, 1998
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Doug MoenchArtist: Vince Giarrano, Sal Buscema
Colorist: Gregory Wright
Letterer: Todd Klein
Editor: Jordan B. Gorfinkel, Dennis O'Neil

Ballistic looks like he walked straight out of the pages of one of those 1990s Image Comics superhero team books. He's even got the wardrobe made entirely out of belts and pouches. So many pouches!

He's being hired to go retrieve an evidence bag buried in the ruins of Gotham. Except the guys who hired him haven't done their homework. Ballistic is former GCPD (before somehow obtaining a fairly generic package of superpowers: enhanced strength, endurance, senses, invulnerability, what have you). He may not look it, but he's a good guy, and he's going to take the job, but he's also going to make sure justice is served.

Which does not sit well with the mysterious suits who hired him. In a sudden case of buyer's remorse, they try shooting him, which works about as well as it usually does on invulnerable-types. Plan B, then, is to arrange for a bunch of generic thugs to ambush ballistic in Gotham, begging the question of if the bad guys had this many thugs already in Gotham, why not use them to retrieve the bag?

It does get better once the inevitable encounter between Ballistic and the Batman occurs. They actually manage to break a lot of the hero-meets-hero clichés, and their interaction is made more interesting by the fact that Ballistic has encountered the Jean-Paul Valley version of Batman and is a bit thrown off by the reactions when, unknown to him, it's Bruce Wayne under the cowl.

The revelation of what was in the bag proves uninteresting, but I did find Ballistic's personality and his interaction with the Batman to be interesting.

Rating: 5.5/10