Batman: Gotham Knights - Gilded City #4 - DC Comics

BATMAN: GOTHAM KNIGHTS - GILDED CITY No. 4, March 2023

Initially somewhat entertaining with its fascinating flashback to the origin of Vandal Savage, and the immortal cave man’s journey through the subsequent ages, Evan Narcisse’s storyline for Issue Four of “Batman: Gotham Knights – Gilded City” still probably disappointed many readers with its frustratingly frequent time jumps and spluttering pace. In fact, just as soon as “Vandar Adg of the Blood Tribe” has illogically agreed to give the mysterious Runaway four nights grace to retrieve the Cro-Magnon's stolen meteorological shard before his army of zealots puts Nineteenth Century Gotham City to the torch, this publication’s audience are mercilessly whisked all across the metropolis’ continuum, as well as taking a sudden, surprising present-day sojourn to Santa Prisca.

Similarly as head scratching as the increasingly frequent flashbacks to Bruce Wayne’s home municipal in 1847 A.D. is Batman’s battle against the manic victims of the Golden Iris Virus, who suddenly descend “upon a car dealership with explosive results.” This action-packed sequence certainly contains some dynamic moments, such as the Dark Knight swooping down to rescue two people who have unwittingly destroyed “millions of dollars in luxury automobiles.” However, it may well strike a fair few bibliophiles as being implausibly odd that the best solution the Caped Crusader can come up with concerning the pair of criminally-inclined miscreants is to eject his fire-proof cape between them and the fast-approaching blaze as a temporary shield and then tie the duo together as the deadly flames approach; “I know you’re the boss but this is why we’re a team, Batman.”

Likewise, the Runaway’s romp through the various headquarters of Gotham’s elite is debatably far from convincing despite artist Abel’s very best efforts. The illustrator does a cracking job pencilling the masked vigilante’s battle against Cameron Kane’s numerous security agents, with the flamboyantly attired castigator disarming his opponents with a number of well-thrown hand-darts and spinning plates. Yet, once the acrobatic “brigand from the posters” has failed to locate Savage’s shard the panels depicting his future exploits are penned to awkwardly flow thick and fast, as do the text boxes containing “Later…”, “The next night…”, “The next morning…”, and “Later that night…”

The regular cover art of "BATMAN: GOTHAM KNIGHTS - GILDED CITY #4 by Greg Capullo & Jonathan Glapion