Hello and HAPPY HOLIDAYS from the World of Bats, the Batman Book Club!
Okay, now I know what you’re thinking – uh…what? Is that Wonder Woman? Did you have too much spiked eggnog last night? First of all…no comment. Second off, that’s right! This week to celebrate the release of Wonder Woman 1984 on HBO Max/theaters, we’re going to be covering the Wonder Woman and Batman team up “Gods of Gotham,” plotted and drawn by Phil Jimenez, and scripted by J.M. DeMatteis.
Gods of Gotham’ part 1! Wonder Woman travels to Gotham to help Batman defeat the Joker, Scarecrow and Poison Ivy—only they’re possessed by even more sinister forces.
This week’s reading selection will go from 2020-12-25T06:00:00Z → 2021-01-01T06:00:00Z, but if you are from the future times and want to come back and share your thoughts, please do!
So yeah, looking forward to discussing this one with all of y’all!
For questions or concerns, contact @BatJamags or @Jay_Kay.
I feel like I’ve read this story in the past, but I couldn’t find any previous discussion threads dedicated to it. Maybe it’s a story that I started and then abandoned. I certainly find myself struggling through it right now. What’s the point of using the Batman rogues gallery if you’re just going to turn them into the Wonder Woman rogues gallery?
That’s fair – I will say that the Batman rogues do leak out at a certain point, but I think they were focusing more on the Bat-Family/Wonder Family team-ups more.
Very happy to have read this arc again. Let me say the blindingly obvious “the art is gorgeous.” Detailed, beautiful, you can feel the motion, faces are individualized and expressive, coloring works perfectly. There is nothing more you could want from the art side of things. I also think Jimenez did a very good job with plotting. Enough down times during the four issue slug fest to allow the reader to reset, then the action gets cranked up again in a very satisfying narrative. Now, my one complaint. I see this is scripted by DeMetteis, but I think this applies to Jimenez’s entire run. It is just so wordy. Everyone has long discourses in the middle of battle, every thought is not only expressed but expressed in lengthy dense dialogue. As an example, Huntress and Artemis discuss the meaning of faith for seemingly ever. There’s nothing particularly bad about this, but this nothing particularly enlightening about it either and it goes on for a very long time. But, overall lot’s of good fun bringing the Bat and Wonder families together to fight some childish Greek gods.
I definitely see what you mean about the wordiness – I think Jimenez is very influenced by George Perez not just in his art and storytelling style, but in writing as well. It works very well in that it feels very much like a continuation of Perez’s amazing run of WW, but it also has some of those decades old style that comes with it. Like yeah, the stuff with Artemis and Huntress kind of drags on, but that writing has some great moments, like WW’s impassioned speech to drag Batman out of being possessed by Deimos.
