I like a lot of what this book is trying to play with, but I’m not all the way there on the execution. Though in the end, Batman believed that what Blackfire preached was a hoax, he wanted to make sure nothing supernatural was real.

Michael: I do feel that after a while, the book loses focus and becomes ridiculously large scale in a manner I had no idea was coming. During the fight, Batman comes to realize that Blackfire wants to be killed so that he will be seen as a martyr and the Underworlders will continue his cause. But then we get to a point where the National Guard comes in, and they are unable to stop homeless people who behave like a bunch of wild, out-of-control animals rather than actual people.

But we see the GCPD fail, the National Guard fail, and Batman fail, to defeat simplistic tactics by homeless people with guns and knives. He identified people that had ripples of “leadership” or clearly weren’t afraid to question authority, so he gave them something to hold on to. For historical context, it's one year after Year One, one year before Jason Todd gets voted to death, and the same year as The Killing Joke. Outside some brief hallucinations of the Joker and Two-Face, none of Batman's Rogues Gallery make any sort of appearance, the story focusing exclusively on Deacon Blackfire and his cult.

I understand the stakes are dire in this story, but there are multiple times where the book takes on an “ends justify the means” approach which in my mind is very un-Batman like.Here, for example, we get to meet the Miagani tribe – the Native Americans who inhabited the region before the European settlers.