After devoting the past year to an ambitious retelling of Batman’s first year on the job, one can hardly blame Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo for needing a bit of a break. Batman #34 is the first of two standalone issues to feature a guest creative team. In this case, Gerry Duggan scripts a story plotted by Snyder, while Black Science’s Matteo Scalera takes a brief detour to the DC Universe to illustrate the issue. They result at first seems like a perfectly decent but unremarkable filler issue. But upon further inspection, this issue isn’t so divorced from Snyder’s larger body of work as it may seem at first.

One of the goals with this issue is merely to return the focus to the present and reacquaint Batman readers with current events in the Caped Crusaders life. The story appears to be taking place concurrently with Batman Eternal, as Bruce references the return of Carmine Falcone, Gordon’s incarceration, and Selina Kyle’s new position in the Gotham underworld. But ultimately, this is a standalone tale as Batman confronts a new killer targeting patients of Dr. Leslie Thompkins’ clinic. Most of the Eternal references seem superfluous and even distracting.

…