Welcome, dear readers, to another week of comics and commentary at Comics! The Blog! We kick things off, as always, by handing out awards for the Best of the Week – beginning with two Award postings, followed closely by the past week’s Best.

I’ll be honest, this was a hard one. There were a ton of great comics out last week, and I could have written about any of them, like Captain Marvel #1 or the Stray Bullets triple feature (Issue #41, Killers 1, the Uber Alles collection). But then I opened Batman #29 and Batman was flying a blimp, from which he jumped onto an airborne platform where he fought a monster made of bones, and I think I actually punched the air out of happiness. Because here’s the thing: Batman #29 is the two-thirds mark of a year-long retelling of Batman’s origin and while that, on paper, should be something that fills me with neither excitement nor confidence, the reality is that Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Danny Miki and FCO Plascencia are telling a taut, exciting story that manages to be both familiar and something new.

It’s impossible to understate that part. Snyder has been open in interviews about his worries regarding Zero Year and the weight on his chest of being a Batman fan and having to do the first canonical origin revamp since Frank goddamn Miller. There is an almost impossible balance to strike between not messing up one of the most iconic origin stories of all time by adding too much extraneous extra baggage and basically just doing Year One 2: This Time It’s The Same. And as much as I like Snyder, I was worried going into this whole thing. I wasn’t sure he and Capullo could do it, and I am very happy to be proven wrong. Zero Year still hits those notes that you expect in a Batman origin (Zorro, pearls, worldwide training, inauspicious start) but adds these new dimensions and wrinkles, from Bruce’s troubled relationship with Commissioner Gordon to the Riddler’s master plan, gussied up in some gaudy neon pink for contrast. This book looks different from any other Batman origin, and that undercurrent of this is something new and surprising lends weight to things like the climax of this book, where Bruce actually fails, Gotham is boned and now everyone has to find a new way to pick up the pieces.

Again, that much newness would seem weird if it wasn’t pulled off well, and one big reason for Issue #29‘s success in particular is the balance of that insane blimp-based climax (because of course Bruce had a Batblimp before a Batplane, that makes a weird amount of sense, actually) with a more grounded take on the new version of Thomas and Martha Wayne’s death. The previous issues have been building up to it by including a new subplot of Bruce playing hooky, and while they seemed slightly out-of-place on the first read of those issues, here it all snaps into place. And better yet, it presents this warm, loving scene between Bruce and his parents, with naturalistic dialogue from Snyder, a softer touch to facial expressions from Capullo that is smartly juxtaposed with the harshness of Batman and Dr. Death’s points and gritted teeth, and FCO Plascencia‘s muted, sepia colours. It feels like an old family memory, and that grounded emotional reality tethers the blimp fight (!!!) to real stakes later. Gotham is important because that’s where families live, not because it’s where Batman just happens to be. By remembering what makes us care about these stories, Batman‘s team is making Zero Year a storyline I’m happy to have been wrong about.