Snyder’s American Vampire artist Rafael Albuquerque draws a badass Batmobile and some of his pages stood out - like the splash page of an unconscious underwater Batman being surrounded by “mermaids” - but for the most part the art wasn’t that amazing.

Some things are best left unsaid, particularly stuff that’s so self-evident to everyone involved who matter.

I know that that’s their relationship but I don’t think I’ve ever heard Alfred overtly state it quite like that and it didn’t feel right. It was also weirdly off-putting how Alfred kept referring to Bruce as his “son”. There’s a failed pirate theme, there’s a lot about fathers and sons (Alfred and his father, Alfred and Bruce, Alfred and Briar, Briar and his son, Briar and Nemesis) though it amounts to a hill o’beans. I wasn’t totally sure what Penguin, Black Mask and Hush wanted with the Genesis Engine (or even cared about what exactly it did) and Batman was just reacting to them like he usually does. Let him be an elite soldier rather than some lesser Batman! And speaking of pale imitations, I really didn’t like the unimaginatively-named Nemesis either who’s basically a Talon from Snyder’s Court of Owls storyline. Alfred isn’t Batman - the effect is like trying to force a square peg into a round hole and it just doesn’t work. I’m fine with Alfred as the Special Ops guy he’s been for years now but his mentor, Briar, showing up and turning him into a ninja assassin felt way too much like Batman’s past. I liked the twist at the end of the first issue where the kid you think is Bruce turns out to be Alfred but everything after that was unconvincing with Snyder really forcing the Batman parallels into this contrived, crap origin. Alfred’s old mentor shows up to do something while Bruce is doing something else with a trio of his rogues - yeah, it’s not a great story.Īnd I say that as a big fan of Alfred - I’d totally read a spinoff series starring the butler, whether it’s his adventures now or old war stories from when he was a younger man in the SAS - but what Snyder does with him here is just stupid. Scott Snyder’s All-Star Batman continues to be an ironically-named series with yet another sub-par entry in The First Ally.

Batman scott snyder vol 3