Scans_Daily

The Voice is the Ventriloquist's Scarface - the Tower is Bledin Towers, a Gotham City apartment building.

Scarface's voice is guidance - he's a symbol under which some of " Bleedin' " Towers' residents've rallied, against the City's demolition plans. They've killed one Gotham cop and taken another hostage - Jim Gordon and others're outside while Batman's made his way in.

Issue #5 had Batman finding that the Ventriloquist wasn't from where Scarface was emanating - he was in the Tower, but his tongue was cut.

Someone else was speaking the gangster's words - not the Towers resident who was apparently his second, but that man's abused wife. She'd ended #5 killing her husband because Scarface told her to - and then turning to the hostage cop, who'd been restrained witness to the act.

#6 opened on Scarface's others rushing in: " What the hell happened here?! "

( She told them. )

Like the first three-parter in the maxi-series, We Are The Wounded, it had a sense motif.

That one was tactile - a serial killer with the inability to feel, and the other antagonist of the story being punished with a lingering injury.

This one's audial - taking place in a very acoustic Gotham City apartment building.

It opens after a cop's been thrown out a window - Batman and Jim Gordon discussing the cop's autopsy, marks on his wrists and neck.

( They're outside the building. )

It's the strangeness of Gotham and its perpetrators, and Batman against them.

Issue #1 (of 12) opens the first arc (four planned, probably three issues each) on Batman early in his career going on about the things that happen in Gotham.

Those acts aren't characterized as spectacles in and of themselves, but expressions of their perpetrators.

( Batman's first-person narration reinforces that. )

It ends the arc that started back in July 2022 with issue #1062 and ran for about two years, interrupted only by 2023's line-wide " Knight Terrors " crossover.

Issue #1088 had Batman fighting Dariah Orgham, impetus of the Orgham family's work to take physical and metaphysical control of Gotham City. He'd overpowered her in combat as those on his side had beaten her servants.

She wasn't beaten yet - the power that she wielded afforded her a monster form, which she took on and threw at Batman.

( Batman met her. )