Loved this even more on reread, and I can totally see myself coming back to this book a bunch of times in the future. I think most Batman fans have a definitive version in their mind and Ennis' is a jarring change that doesn't come off as very heroic.

Other comics Ennis has written include War Story (with various artists) for DC; The Pro for Image Comics; The Authority for Wildstorm; Just a Pilgrim for Black Bull Press, and 303, Chronicles of Wormwood (a six issue mini-series about the Antichrist), and a western comic book, Streets of Glory for Avatar Press.The story is set within Gotham City with Batman following the tracks left behind by a cruel and unforgiving freight train of a monster who happens to only be hunting down the villainous powerhouses of the criminal underworld, such as Penguin, Riddler, Poison Ivy, and so on.

Instead of largely comical tone of these issues, he decided to make a much more serious series, re-launched under Marvel's MAX imprint. The rogues in the story are mostly played for laughs or shocks, but those moments mainly work for me because of how dry the humor is during the interactions. Despite being lower profile than Preacher, Hitman ran for 60 issues (plus specials) from 1996 to 2001, veering wildly from violent action to humour to an examination of male friendship under fire. He combines a bold, graphic style that uses heavy black silhouettes with an obsessive attention to detail that really suits the mania of the story. All throughout this miniseries, then, six issues in total, what we are being given is a Batman who not only recognizes the dread he instils, but one who also acknowledges (and, perhaps, revels in) his status as a man who has reached the peak of what the human body and the human mind can attain.

Ennis' landmark work to date is the 66-issue epic Preacher, which he co-created with artist Steve Dillon. There also isn't a lot of panel-panel storytelling, just snapshots of a person standing or a building; everything is very static. This is one of those stories that starts with a pretty okay first issue but just gets better and more absurd by the end.

Then again, he does conjure the sort of fever-dream mania/dream logic that defines a lot of the movies I love. Liam Sharp also has a note at the beginning, saying he would draw this book in completely his own style, as Dillon would have wanted him to. Reptilian is all painted artwork and extremely dark - literally - throughout, so that it’s often hard to discern what’s going on amidst the murkiness.It's intriguing and has it's own style but it is visually very dark, to where you can't always make out what is happening in the panel. Batman is depicted as cruel and harsh in his manner of dealing out justice, while conversely Killer Croc (one of the few Batman villains Ennis likes) gets a tragic backstory and helps defeat the monster.

But now something far more frightening than a mere man stalks the shadows—and it’s after Gotham’s villains. When you step back after reading it, it's a fairly basic Batman tale with the core idea of revamping the origin of Killer Croc. Kresba je něco mezi Bisleym a McKeanem, pár panelů je naprosto skvělých, ale vlastně furt nevím, zda se mi líbí. A little experiment, then, both in its genre and its artistic rendition, Reptilian comes off as a story that is sure to entertain and give us another point of view on the Batman mythos, the demonstration that the grotesque can be the source of an unending series of laughter.

The gist is some weird, new creature is rampaging through Batman’s rogues gallery, and now Batman has to figure out what it is and what exactly it wants. It used to be Batman, but something far more frightening than a mere man stalks the shadows—and it's after Gotham's villains. Usually if I think of Garth Ennis writing Batman, it's as the butt of the joke in Hitman, so I was surprised when I saw he was contributing a Batman miniseries to DC's 'prestige, mature readers' (read: thick covers; slightly gorier) Black Label imprint.