One of the reasons I dropped out of the comic book reviewing game for so long is that I became frankly exhausted by the perpetual cycle of crossover events dominating the Big Two publishers. The Batman franchise has certainly been no stranger to those crossovers in recent years - Joker War, Knight Terrors, Gotham War - with the third storyline in particular being a frustrating mess I'd just as soon delete from my memory banks. I can't say I particularly relished the prospect of the Bat-line being overtaken by another two-month crossover, but Bad Seeds ultimately makes a decent case for itself in its opening chapter.

With Bad Seeds, DC has a couple of cards in its favor this time around. This is an event comic centered around Matt Fraction's Batman and G. Willow Wilson's Poison Ivy, two of the best ongoing books on the stands right now. It's also a story that springs pretty naturally out of the pages of the latter book. The idea being that Pamela Isley has reached the dramatic endpoint in her short tenure as mayor of Gotham City. Faced with an armed insurrection by Commissioner Vandal Savage and his officers, Ivy ushers in a contingency plan that threatens to transform the city back into a primal jungle. Naturally, the extended Bat-family has issues with that.

As mentioned, Bad Seeds is geared toward Fraction's Batman and Wilson's Poison Ivy books (though pretty much every Batman-adjacent series will be tying into the event), so it's only fitting that the two writers collaborate on this opening chapter.

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