#ah shit...

For starters, cover art is fucking rad. Evan Cagle has just been consistently knocking these things out of the park every issue. Really sets the mood, maybe even sets expectations a little too high. On the inside though Rafael Albuquerque is no slouch. Really the aesthetics for this run has just been stellar all around. Even love the new title logo.

Anyway scene opens on an opera house, inside is a very on the nose production in which a grieving masked figure bent over the body of a collapsed woman is haunted by a bat-like demon. The dark haired boy(man?) demands to know where this unseen demon is as we got a shot of an empty seat, reserved for one Bruce Wayne. Theres a line about pearls around a neck, just in case we somehow werent picking up on the parallels.

The textography implies this is sung, and again pointing to this being an opera rather than just a spoke word stage play. The aesthetic is all very deliberately reminiscent of Phantom of the Opera. Also of passing note: the production is titled "L'Auriga" as in Italian for The Auriga, as in the constellation Auriga, "The Charioteer." He is depicted most often with a goat or kids in his arms, which given the cliche associations with satanism seem poignant here.

Elsewhere Batman beats up some gangsters doing generic crime at the docks, one of the Maroni capos is there and a sound over a loud speaker causes him to hulk out in grody dark magic fashion. Batman is a little off his game, Talia show up to finish the thing off, and she says Bruce isnt ready for the shit about to hit the fan, its older than either of them, its not human, and he's off his game... She elaborates no further and scoots off into the night.

Bruce tries to figure out why he's old and Dick pokes fun at him. He needs to see a man about a cube. (Oh the cube was being smuggled by the Maroni crew, which is where he got it and why its tied to the monster, I hadn't really made that clear... I'm not doing a very good job summarizing...)

Cool transition tho, we see the cubes source, the Orgham palace in "Svatrstal" which is as far as i can tell a meaningless assemblage of generic slavic sounds. The castle itself however is called "Coronis" after the mythic greek princess and lover of Apollo. (The more direct associations with the sun will come into play later. By proxy it might be that The Charioteer allusion could also be a reference to Apollo, via his chariot that drives the sun across the sky, making the subject of the play, Erichtonius, king of Athens.)

(Incidentally Coronis is also the name of a Spanish zarzuela by Sebastian Duron. It is about the nymph Coronas, Triton, Neptune, and Apollo, so there's that....)

But in any case we meet Arzen Orgham and his mother, in thematically appropriate sun-like headdress. She tasks her son with going to Gotham with a confusingly styled land deed(its a scroll, like with full on umbilicus, but it's apparently a legally viable document written in english?) We also get name drops of what will be his main goons, Shavhod, Neang, and Gael.

In spite of a lot of Greek mythology being flung around(Coronis, Auriga, the labyrinth) and implicit Italian to the opera themes, the core influence seems to be more Eastern European, and given the Dracula derived aesthetics it's not unexpected, but it all feels very weirdly. Also that this is apparently fully active nobility??? Like they're still rich and have modernized finances and resources (as opposed to like, an ancient dragons hoard of nonliquid but clearly "valuable" riches) so like do they govern this country????? This weird gap in information will become more of an issue with later developments...

Anyway... Gael has been the Orgham's vangaurd in Gotham, so while the young heir and his entourage are enroute, Gael slaughters the rest of the Maroni contacts he'd arranges the botched hand off of the magic cube with. He is noticeably more, uh, "ethnic"(?) looking than the other goons. Given the overall gist of the Orghams, that would seem to suggest something vaguely Mongolian adjacent? I mean, I guess it might be more obvious to assume he's meant to look Romani, but given the rest of the themes at play shouldn't they all be Romani anyway?