This is clearly a filler issue, an inventory story pulled from the slush pile while the main story is being polished by the regular creative team. It so easily could have been a Batman story. Or a Nightwing. Or a Spider-Man. Insert hero, insert villain with a generic agenda, have them fight, but the villain gets away at the end.

In this case the villain is Professor Pyg, a somewhat new baddie who is continually featured for no reason I can understand. Underneath his pig mask, he’s a mad butcher, a homicidal psychopath. But beyond that, what is it that makes him evil, or threatening on the super-villain scale? Not that he needs powers, but he just seems an amalgam of other bat-villains… Hugo Strange, The Joker, the Mad Hatter.

Perhaps in an effort to legitimize the generic plot, it touches on some of Kate Kane’s emotional scars. Pyg uses her fragile psyche against her, which makes me wonder: if it’s so easy for him, how effective is Kate Kane as a crime fighter? But she does have the benefit of an extremely portable Batcave to take with her to Cairo, where the story is set. Yes, Cairo, because an American in a pig mask is oh-so-inconspicuous in the Middle East.

The artwork by Scott Godlewski is suitable for the subject at hand. Combined with John Rauch’s colors, it tells the story effectively without distracting from the narrative. It’s unfortunate Godlewski and Rauch didn’t have a more ambitious story to illustrate. But perhaps it just sets the stage for some really great storytelling next issue.