'Batman: Year 100'Impulse buy one day at the bookstore, but totally glad I picked it up. A nice chaser to the Frank Miller 'Dark Knight' stuff I read a few weeks prior and just as dark, intense and thought-provoking in it's view of the future. I'd seen Paul Pope's art before in other capacities and his ragged style fits the character and the story extremely well.
The series is set in a high-anxiety 2039, where totalitarianism has rendered America to a bleak police state where individual liberties have been all but eradicated and replaced w/ a constant sense of impending doom. Roving police squads, Blade Runner-esque floating vehicles and electronically-enhanced watchdogs are commonplace amongst the Gotham skyline. Amidst a clash between the Gotham Police and Federal agents, the 'superhero' that 'Big Brother' failed to track, returns to strike fear into the heart of a corrupt government hiding a dark plan bigger than just encroaching on individual privacy.
I'll leave it at that ambiguous summarization, as to not ruin it for anybody who looking to check it out. An engaging story w/ a healthy dose of mystery is only eclipsed by Pope's amazing artwork that bring this future grittier-than-hell society to life. Even better, is his take on the Batman that he described to Wired magazine as: 'someone with the body of David Beckham, the brain of Nikola Tesla and the wealth of Howard Hughes, who is pretending to be Nosferatu'. Nice.
The story originall ran as a 4-part mini-series back in 2006 and the TPB was actually released in 2007. Could be due to a DC looking to captialize on a summer-blockbuster-induced uptick in sales of Batman books, but I noticed this one making a major appearance on the shelves of both the shops and bigger book resellers. So, you should have no trouble tracking it down...and you should track it down.
'Batman: Year 100'
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