We stopped doing Best of the Week posts right around the time that Batman: Eternal started hitting the shelves. In hindsight, that was probably for the best, as I’d probably be talking about it every week (in some capacity), and I would have lost steam at this point.

Batman: Eternal is one of DC’s best books right now. While it remains mired in an aesthetic that doesn’t suit me personally, the storytelling has been incredible, and resembles something close to my platonic ideal for a weekly comic series. Over the past 35 issues, the writing team (and the ever-rotating series of artists) have taken the monthly serial and optimized for a swifter pace of release. What you get isn’t a typical monthly comic - it’s a story that lets plots bubble for issues at a time without having to wait six months for payoff. It lets different plots come to a boil at different moments, ramping pressure as each week offers progression and payoff. As a result, you get something like this issue, where a perceived victory mingles with some of the book’s slower moving plots in order to produce a bit of a nightmare for the titular character. So far, Batman’s been winning, but it’s cost him each time, and the price is starting to strip everything away from him. It’s gotten to the point where I am deliriously happy to read the Batman stories to come after this book concludes, as I’m sure the paradigm will have shifted. With the amount that’s happened in here, things can’t help but be different - and even though we all know things will go back to an equilibrium at some point in the future, for now (and the very near future), we’ll be getting some pretty strange and wonderful tales.

This is great. This is what superhero comics should be doing, experimenting with the form and building something interesting. A great job by the whole team, who has earned their Crazy Like A Fox award.

They know why.