Changes

I'd like to make a quick aside in order to make a point here. Kingdom Come is one of the most visually stunning works of graphic fiction ever produced. Alex Ross' art is, hands down, the best and most photo-realistic ever seen on the funny pages. There can be no dispute here. Go look it up and you will see why. Alex Ross is, perhaps, the greatest artist in comic book history but he is far from the greatest comic book artist.

Breyfogle could do that. Some of his covers can leave you slack-jawed and breathless but this wasn't his only skill. What set Norm apart from his peers was his sense of dynamism. His art moved smoothly from photo-realistic (or as much as was possible with the constraints of the printing at the time) to utterly surreal. Batman could be a man, broken, torn and bleeding or he could be a mythical shadow. One moment we had a solid object with weight and presence, the next we simply had a slash of lines, an absence of detail that sucked you in like a black hole... Batman could be Bruce Wayne, an orphan seeking to make things right, or he could be PTSD embodied, seeking to spread his own suffering to others... or he was just an idea, a myth, a concept. None of these things were in Grant's script. When others drew for him the tales were good but lacked the magnificence and depth that Breyfogle brought.