Final thoughts... War Games

Got my War Games pt 3 Trade paperback in the mail, and finally figured out what exactly has me bothered by the book.

It's not simply the "cranky, loner Batman" effect, which has been getting depressingly regular of late. It's not even the fact that it was over written, over complicated, and confusing.

The entire story gives me the impression that it was written to achieve a goal, rather then letting the story dictate the effects.

Does that make sense? It just gives me the impression that one day, the DC types (not sure who cooked up the idea) said, "We need to come up with a way to make Batman more of a loner, with the Police against him, and the Gotham gangs united."

It wasn't... "hey, how about we play around with Spoiler accidently setting off a major gang war," it was "how do we get this result?"

At least to my mind, that ends up with a more artificial sort of story. Now, many stories are written at least with the conclusion in mind. I'm sure JK Rowling has a really good idea how Book 7 will end.

Yet, in many ways, War Games was not a story that was written for a conclusion, but instead one that was built to set up "more to come." Now, by their nature, comics will rarely come to a true conclusion. You can't have a "happily ever after" ending, and then say "come back next issue" very easily. However, this story seemed to be a bit too extreme.