This book was AMAZING! It was written before the movie franchise was given a reboot, but this could easily be a sequel to "The Dark Knight", that's how the whole vibe of the book is. It's a page turner that is though to put down once you start reading.
This is not your typical Batman story. It's way darker than Saturday morning cartoons, any of the movies and most of the graphic novels, even those by Frank Miller. This is Batman stripped down to his most basic weapons, intelligence and anger. He uses his guile far more than any gadget to get the bad guys, and boy are they bad. This story deals with child pornographers. Batman declares war on them. Needless to say, you should pitty the pornographers.
BATMAN: THE ULTIMATE EVIL offers a surreal mix of hypersuperficiality and gritty realism. Here, the Caped Crusader battles, not super-villains, but all too real child molesters and purveyors of kiddie porn. Vachss's hard-bitten prose well suits the Dark Knight. While the comic book conventions employed tend to draw away from the underlying seriousness of the subject, this is a highly visible vehicle with which to convey this message.
