One of the reasons I dropped out of the comic book reviewing game for so long is that I became frankly exhausted by the perpetual cycle of crossover events dominating the Big Two publishers. The Batman franchise has certainly been no stranger to those crossovers in recent years – Joker War, Knight Terrors, Gotham War – with the third storyline in particular being a frustrating mess I’d just as soon delete from my memory banks. I can’t say I particularly relished the prospect of the Bat-line being overtaken by another two-month crossover, but Bad Seeds ultimately makes a decent case for itself in its opening chapter.
With Bad Seeds, DC has a couple of cards in its favor this time around. This is an event comic centered around Matt Fraction’s Batman and G. Willow Wilson’s Poison Ivy, two of the best ongoing books on the stands right now. It’s also a story that springs pretty naturally out of the pages of the latter book. The idea being that Pamela Isley has reached the dramatic endpoint in her short tenure as mayor of Gotham City. Faced with an armed insurrection by Commissioner Vandal Savage and his officers, Ivy ushers in a contingency plan that threatens to transform the city back into a primal jungle. Naturally, the extended Bat-family has issues with that.
As mentioned, Bad Seeds is geared toward Fraction’s Batman and Wilson’s Poison Ivy books (though pretty much every Batman-adjacent series will be tying into the event), so it’s only fitting that the two writers collaborate on this opening chapter. The duo manage to craft a largely cohesive and stylistically coherent script. By the end, we have a clear sense of the scope and stakes of this crossover. Most impressive is how efficient Bad Seeds: Sunset #1 is at establishing the massive cast of characters and their respective roles within the story. There are a lot of moving parts here, but the issue never feels overly bogged down because of it.
That being said, while Sunset #1 juggles the large ensemble cast deftly enough, it doesn’t necessarily make a strong case for why readers need to branch out and follow those many tie-in books. These characters look to be playing the same part they always do in these Bat-crossovers, dealing with the general chaos unfolding across the city while Batman battles his way to the root of the conflict.
The various scenes involving Batman’s friends and sidekicks are fine, but they’re very much secondary to the twin core story threads involving Ivy and Batman themselves. The Ivy scenes are where much of the dramatic weight of the book stems from, as we see a woman walled in by circumstance and struggling to figure out how to outmaneuver her enemies. As for Batman, the book taps into one of the elements that has made Fraction’s run such a treat – the deep compassion Bruce shows to both his enemies and the people he’s sworn to protect. His run has and continues to evoke Batman: The Animated Series in that way.
Helping to maintain cohesion between Wilson and Fraction’s writing is the fact that the entire issue is rendered by Giuseppe Camuncoli and Cliff Rathburn (with the former handling layouts and the latter the finished artwork). The result doesn’t entirely measure up to Camuncoli’s solo work, as there’s a certain sinister angularity to his figures that’s smoothed over by Rathburn’s finishes. Still, the book is cleanly rendered and plenty dynamic, and the artists play their part in ensuring that Bad Seeds: Sunset is an approachable, entertaining gateway into a much bigger story.
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