I jumped on in the mid-60's, and this qualifies as the first Batman by King that I've read that was halfway decent.

I note that being on the desert on a horse with no name over the previous issues, ending up in a brutal Batman v. Batman throw-down with one Batman emerging, meant absolutely nothing. All those songs, all those Russian storybooks read to us over and over and over...nothing. So what was the purpose in putting the readership through it? To see how low sales had to go before you got fired? (The answer seems to be around 83,000 books...but sales are still dropping...barely hanging in there over 80,000, confirming that it is indeed time to get a better writer on this title and soon.)

We got a painful soliloquy on the downside of being Kite Man in a Batman world, which was silly fun. Considering the volume of spandex running around Gotham on a daily basis, a little silly fun probably happens as a statistical probability. Good on King to finally cast his gaze in that direction.

And I find DC's use of Captain Atom as a de facto Dr. Manhattan intellectually lazy. But that's apparently a DC-wide matter, because the same persona for the good Captain popped up in DCeased.

The art was OK, standard DC stuff.

But all that said, it wasn't an awful issue. And that is a drastic improvement over recent issues. I'm not saying that I would recommend this to anyone, not yet in this world of $4-5 comics (GO READ FREEDOM FIGHTERS INSTEAD), but it's improving...at least for this month.