Batman: Gates of Gotham by Scott Snyder/Kyle Higgins

A new adversary, The Architect, is targeting historical properties in Gotham City and it’s up to Batman, Red Robin, Robin and Black Bat to bring him to justice.

That one sentence summary would seemingly apply to 99% of Batman stories but hey, that’s OK, it’s Batman after all.  With Gates of Gotham, writer Scott Snyder, alongside Kyle Higgins, returns to the Caped Crusader to pen a follow-up to his successful Black Mirror story arc from the prior year.  This time around, while we still have Dick Grayson (formerly Robin/Nightwing) under the cowl as Batman, he’s joined by the extended Bat-Family to assist capturing The Architect.

I really enjoyed the layout of the story as Snyder and Higgins jump back through time to tell the history of Gotham’s “founding fathers”.  I’m not sure if this is a story that has been told before, but it was interesting learning about the history of some of Gotham’s most revered architecture – for a fictional city, its history is extremely well-developed.

There’s a short one-issue story tacked onto the end about the Paris branch of Bruce Wayne’s Batman Incorporated but I didn’t care too much for it.  I’m not a fan of these “extras” slapped onto the end of a book, they always feel like padding.

While Gates of Gotham isn’t quite as good as Black Mirror, it’s some solid work on the part of Snyder and Higgins that likely helped solidified Snyder as the next writer of the then forthcoming Batman “New 52” reboot.