Batman #32 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

Man, can Greg Capullo draw a dime or what?  The quarter and dime that a young Bruce throws into the homeless guy's hat look like photos, not drawings.  It's amazing that Capullo goes from drawing such simple objects on one page to the crazy Riddler tank that Batman confronts on the next page, all with the same amount of attention and skill.

It's good, too, because it gives us something pretty to ponder while we move through the techno-babble that fuels this issue.  Snyder forces us to just accept that Batman magically figures out the pattern of signals necessary to locate the Riddler, despite failing in his previous effort (when he also had Lucius' help).  We also never get an answer to the question that one of the soldiers poses, why they're waiting to activate the signal blocker that can take out the Riddler's toys.  Batman seems to imply that it's because the blocker only gets to be used once, but I'm not sure why they would need it after disabling his toys.  If I had to guess, I'd say that it's because they want to confirm that they've got the Riddler trapped before they activate it, but wouldn't it not matter if they had him if he no longer had control over the city anyway?

But, as I said, we're pretty clearly not supposed to ask questions.  We're just supposed to accept the fact that Bruce finally manages to achieve his goal.  Snyder actually makes this issue all about Bruce's failure, first on the weather balloon and then in the elevator shaft, to stop the Riddler.  He learns the importance of failure and persevering through it, a lesson applied on the large scale when it comes to fighting crime in a city where it never stops.  It's a good point, but I'll admit that it was lost on me the first time I read the issue.

We end with Bruce finding the Riddler and him springing his final game, which seems to be a disco dance-off?  The final caption reminds us that next issue is the last one for Zero Year, and, without that reminder, I might be inclined to just skip to the first issue of the new era.  Instead, I can appreciate the fact that this issue is probably the first one where I've felt that we've dragged on this story too long, a remarkable feat for such a long saga.  But, I'm still not sure where Snyder is going.  We need to end this story with some sort of explanation of why Riddler went through all this effort to send Gotham into the Dark Ages.  This Riddler is a more lethal version of the previous DCU one, and we need some sort of explanation of his motivations.  If we don't get that, I'm afraid that I'm going to be as disappointed as I was with "Court of the Owls" and "Death of the Family."

** (two of five stars)