Can't answer it. Kill Batman? Make him suffer somehow? Prove he could still "beat" him in a strategy game? Well, if it was the latter, there has to be a way to keep score. In Stratego, for example (the strategy game that somewhat resembles the game played by Bruce and Tommy as children), the goal is to capture your opponent's flag. What was the "flag" here? The end result seemed to just be Tommy showing up to try to shoot Batman - that's it? That happens to Batman everyday. There was never any "flag" here. There was no way to demonstrate that Tommy was winning.

This leads directly back to the second point I raised: in a battle of wits, or a game of strategy, you have to be moving your pieces toward a goal. The other villains were being moved about, but there was no goal. Nothing the Joker, or Clay-Face, or Killer Croc, or any of the others did had any apparent bearing on what Tommy wanted to do with Bruce.

In the end, I think the story suffered because there was no sense of purpose, no sense of a battle between Bruce and Tommy over something specific. I think that in an effort to show us Jim Lee drawing all the Batman baddies, they missed an opportunity to really identify and build a new villain for Batman. And so, like Sean Collins, I have to conclude by saying, "Man, that sucks."

Note: The author wastes a fair amount of time blogging about a variety of subjects at Walloworld, where this post originally appeared.