DC has reissued Batman: Contagion in the wake of it's mega-successful No Man's Land collections, and it serves as a good reminder of just WHY the Batman books needed to be shaken up so drastically in the first place...

Contagion revolves around an outbreak of "The Clench", a fictional Ebola offshoot, in Gotham City. Batman and company attempt to contain the spread of the Disease, while trying to track down a trio of survivors of a previous Clench outbreak, with the hope of synthesizing a cure/vaccine from their blood.

The book is very choppy, especially the first chapter, which appears to be heavily trimmed from it's original presentation in Batman: Shadow of the Bat. DC hasn't taken any steps to make their collections new-reader friendly, either, which could be a very big mistake. Longtime readers will know Oracle, Azrael, Nightwing, The Huntress, etc.; A new reader browsing this in a store would no doubt put the book right back on the shelf. The story has a few compelling moments, but for the most part it seems unnecessarily padded. Did we really need the Native American tracker? What did Biis contribute to the story? The writing is average at best; Most of the stories in Contagion were written by people who had long since overstayed their welcome on the Bat-books, such as Doug Moench & Alan Grant; The art ranges from okay to sub-par; Kelley Jones' chapter seems especially ugly thanks to poor color reproduction which mars his intricate pencils. The ultimate revelation of who is behind the spread of The Clench is sure to be a head-scratcher to new readers, since no background at all is offered to explain who these people are and what their motives are. DC really needs to get on the ball with their trade-paperback program; Preaching to the Choir is nice, but they need to try for new converts. Junk like Contagion is NOT the way to expand their readership......

In this history you can see a different Batman, one that found something he cant't fight. There was a virus and he can not trap it or take it to the justice. You can see a different Batman, not necesesary a dark one but a human,a man. I enjoyed it a lot!

I cannot believe why some people do not like "Contagion". Like Knightfall, Knightquest, KnightsEnd, Prodigal, and Cataclysm & No Man's Land, "Contagion" is an awesome book. It has Poison Ivy (drool), Batman, Robin, Nightwing, Huntress, Azrael, Catwoman, Oracle, Commissioner Gordon, the Penguin, and many other supporting characters like Alfred and Ariana.

I like this book because it give me a lot of information about World War 2 and it also helped me with my reading project. I think other people will like this book because it has a lot about what happened in World War 2 and how the whole thing got started and what happened to Germany and other European countries. The book talks about how Hitler came to power in Germany and later most of Europe.The book also talks about The Great Depression and how bad it had hurt Germany and other European countries.