Bryan, Carl (2021-11-25). "Review: Batman: The Imposter #2". Dark Knight News . Retrieved 2022-11-24.

Director and screenwriter Mattson Tomlin ( Project Power, Little Fish) has teamed up with Eisner-winning suspense and horror artist Andrea Sorrentino ( Joker: Killer Smile, Batman: The Smile Killer, Green Arrow) to create a gritty, hard-boiled version of Gotham City, where every punch leaves a broken bone and every action has consequences far, far beyond Batman’s imagination! The story provides an engaging mystery as Wong and Bruce Wayne, as well as Wong and Batman, try to find the imposter committing murders and disgracing the reputation of Batman. Bruce Wayne’s mission as the Batman has only been underway for a year or so, but he can tell he’s making a difference in this city. Unfortunately, he’s made some powerful enemies–and not just among the colorful maniacs called “super-villains.” All the traditional power brokers of Gotham resent the disruption the Batman has brought to town… and it seems one of them has a plan to neutralize him. There’s a second Batman haunting Gotham’s rooftops and alleys–and this one has no qualms about murdering criminals, live and on tape. With the entire might of the Gotham City Police Department and Gotham’s rich and powerful coming down on his head, Batman must find this imposter and somehow clear his name…but how can you prove your innocence from behind a mask? The romance subplot didn’t really add anything and felt contrived while the reveal of the Imposter’s identity was underwhelming. There are also a couple of sloppy narrative beats, like when some robbers say “He’s real?!” when they see Batman, as if we’re meant to believe no-one in Gotham has seen this figure over the past three years despite having such a supposedly seismic effect on crime. And then later on Batman breaks into Wesker’s facility effortlessly but he needs Wong’s help to break into the GCPD? Come on, it’s the same thing. Certainly doing something that was very grounded, and something that was a detective story, that is something I'm very interested in," he said. "But honestly, I think that it might have come from a tweet. You know, the internet goes wild, and one of the memes that was going around is something like 'Bruce Wayne would rather dress up as a bat and beat people up than go to therapy.' And I just thought, that's kind of awesome. Let's send him to therapy! And I hadn't quite seen that in a really head on kind of way before.It's the] idea of [taking] away all of these friends that he has, because that's what it would be like, and then instead put him on a head-on collision with somebody who is legitimately as smart as he is," Tomlin said. "These two people who are both kind of vying for the mantle of World's Greatest Detective just kind of slam into each other. A big part of it was just making a kind of adversary for him that would create interesting complications for later in the story." I love Batman: Earth One for this reason, because it felt so real. It just kind of felt like there’s room for some more of those…[and] the movie is so much Matt Reeves, and there’s ideas that I was having that don’t apply to the movie. So I found myself wondering what would just my version look like? What are some of the things that I would do? Batman: The Imposter is really good Batman. If you've seen The Batman, this graphic novel follows a similar vein: a gritty exploration of early-stage Batman as he struggles to define his role in Gotham City. I’ve worked on Batman as a supporting character in a couple of books, but this was the very first time I had the chance to work on a Batman title, and it was amazing,” added artist Andrea Sorrentino. “I’ve been a huge fan of Batman ever since I was a kid and saw Tim Burton’s Batman movie in 1989, so having the chance to work with Mattson and Jordie on this take on the Caped Crusader was like an early Christmas present!”

Keeping Batman on his heels for The Imposter also meant projecting a lot of strength onto the Leslie Thompkins character. A pillar of various Batman stories and a frequent ally of the Wayne family, Thompkins is a Gotham City hero in her own right, and it was important to Tomlin to place her front and center in this tale as someone who wouldn't be a Bruce Wayne enabler, but a Bruce Wayne interrogator. Meanwhile, a man named Mr. Wesker is not happy about Batman being in Gotham City and wants Detective Wong to arrest him. Detective Wong learns that someone dressed as Batman has been killing innocent people and Gotham City Police Department decides to arrest the Batman killer. Bruce Wayne meets up with Leslie Thompkins and tells her that he isn't the killer, and confronted The Loman Family and Penguin about it, but they also denied hiring someone to be the killer. Bruce Wayne and Detective Wong deduce that the imposter is targeting criminals in the upper class and may have a personal vendetta against the victims. Detective Wong meets up with Bruce Wayne to talk about the Batman. [1] It’s not that it’s superhuman, it’s that it is a coping mechanism. So then leaning into certain realities of that…I don’t think that we talk enough about the mental health of Bruce Wayne. On the one hand, it’s visually cool and exciting to dress up as a bat and go beat people up and at the same time, that’s deranged. The point that so many creators and fans bring up about how Bruce Wayne should be in Arkham along with all of the villains, I don’t necessarily disagree with that. So it just kind of felt like, lean into that a little bit more, let’s be a little bit more honest about what’s going on with this guy. But Blair Wong and Leslie Thompkins aren't the only characters creating complications in Bruce Wayne's crimefighting life. There's also the title imposter, who appears in the first issue and sends ripples through Gotham City, from the underworld to the police department, with their attempts to imitate Batman. For Tomlin, creating an imposter Caped Crusader was motivated in part by his decision to steer away from direct confrontations with bigger villain names in his comics writing debut, but it was also part of the grounded nature of the story. If Batman really was going on, dressing up in a costume, and actually having an impact on his city, it makes sense that someone else might try to set up a twisted mirror image of that.Tomlinson is the writer of the upcoming batman movie of 2022 (as of this time) and it seems like this story takes place there and its amazingly done and he sets up a lot of easter eggs and the main story is an imposter going around murdering people and how does Bruce react to it or stop them and I love the way he handles it with Leslie and this new detective Claire wong and also showing how similar they are and pushing the romance angle and then the revelations and all the drama that comes from it and finally the big reveal and its handled so well and leads to great ending which makes you think a lot of things! This was dark and gritty and contemplative - - and I loved it. Writer Tomlin makes some subtle changes to the Gotham landscape in a story of the early years of Bruce Wayne as Batman. Alfred is gone (he bailed out early due to an uncooperative young Bruce) and Bruce Wayne/Batman is a true loner, except for his psycho-therapist, Dr. Leslie Tompkins, to whom he's revealed his secret identity. Tompkins is a strong and important character, as well as Detective Blair Wong. Jim Gordon is already out of the picture, a disgraced former police officer.

This is such an intense book, but do you think there’s ever a point in this character’s career where Batman becomes well adjusted? Where he’s able to make peace with some of these more troublesome elements of himself, but is still able to continue his career? Because all through The Imposter, Leslie Tompkins is making appeals to Bruce Wayne as a “force of nature.” I don’t know that I’ve seen that before. Is there a point where these two elements can resolve but Batman can continue to be Batman? Or does Batman only exist if those two things are in conflict?The series is set in an Alternate Continuity where Bruce Wayne has been active as Batman for around three years. While he's been making a difference, he's also made some powerful enemies. All the traditional power brokers of Gotham resent the disruption the Batman has brought to town…and it seems one of them has a plan to neutralize him. There’s a second Batman haunting Gotham’s rooftops and alleys — and this one has no qualms about murdering criminals, live and on tape. With the entire might of the Gotham City Police Department and Gotham’s rich and powerful coming down on his head, Batman must find this imposter and somehow clear his name…but how can you prove your innocence from behind a mask?