Review: Batman Nightwalker

Batman: Nightwalker
Rating: 4/5 
Buy or Borrow: Buy
Source: Copy courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review! 

Returning home from his lavish eighteenth birthday party, Bruce Wayne stops a criminal's getaway - disobeying the police and crashing his car during the chase. 

Sentenced to community service in Gotham City's Arkham Asylum, he encounters some of the the city's most dangerous and mentally disturbed criminals. Among these, Bruce meets the intriguing Madeleine who has ties to the Nightwalker gang that is terrorizing Gotham City.

She's a mystery Bruce has to unravel but can he trust her? The Nightwalkers target the rich, and Bruce's name is next on their list.

First thing's first, I loved the art style for this graphic novel adaptation! The art is just gorgeous, the character designs are wonderfully drawn and I really liked the aesthetic of them, but I loved the colour palette for this entire graphic novel the most. It's all black, white and grey with yellow being the only colour but it's only used for certain things...to accent things you could say and I really loved that choice! I also particularly liked the way the expressions were drawn on character's faces and the emotion that you could see in their eyes where brought across so well with the art, like the snide looks Bruce got in one particular panel. 

The beginning of this is intriguing, and there's action from the start including a nice and tense car chase. After that it's not long before we're presented with a mystery in the form of the Nightwalkers and then we're getting up close and personal with Arkham Asylum. Bruce is adjusting to life as a billionaire now that he's 18 and like Madeline says...he sees everything in black and white. Good and bad. He's also a little bit too nosy for his own good in this case! 

Madeline is suitably mysterious, she seems to relate to Bruce and you can empathise with her past. But you can't really trust her and I was constantly torn between wanting to trust her...but not quite being able to bring myself to. You could never really be sure if she was telling the truth or if she was lying and she's very manipulative but she certainly kept you on your toes.

As someone who's read the original book, I have to say this was nicely paced and we move through the story wonderfully from point to point with action, tension and suspicion throughout before everything wraps up perfectly. The key plot points and most important scenes have been picked out to be brought to life in the graphic novel, with the characters expressions getting across a lot of the emotion as well as adding to the tone and atmosphere of the scenes. None of the plot or feeling behind it is lost with this adaptation, and you can see the beginnings of Bruce becoming Batman with his need to solve mysteries and crimes. By the end of the volume Bruce has been set on his path to truly becoming Batman. We also get cameos from Alfred, Lucius, Harvey Dent and James Gordon as well.