Batman - Cataclysm - No Man's Land

So I just got through this as of last night... and started on to the New Gotham stuff.

I have to say the entire 2-3 years worth of issues were awesome with great stories...

But the ending and New Gotham is thus far trash. This is mainly because the story with Luthor is more or less just thrown out and instead of showing continuing construction they just said "and now we're done everything is back to normal"

They go from a city in tatters with less than a million inhabitants...to Every thing is normal now with 14million people in the city.

The writer, at least in the Batman title, Larry Hama, completely dropped the ball and it's annoying that such a great series of issues is capped off so badly with so much lost potential.

yea, sadly the reason Luthor's arc 'mysteriously' disappeared after NML was because at the same time they were using him with the whole B13 storyline and later President Lex over in Superman. ive never been fond that NML's been more or less completely forgotten these days, but then it's been almost 10 years since the end of that storyline. so im pretty sure the editors are hoping no one notices.

What i would like to know is where they found 13 million people insane enough to want to move (back) to a city with people like the Joker, Killer Crock, Bane, and i´ll just stop the list right there.

It´s like they put up a worldwide add. "Are you masochistic and/or have a deatwhish? Move to New Gotham where our specialy preppared psychotics will slowly dissolve you in acid when they get around to it."

Gotham's actually a pretty nice city. Problem is, we're only shown the crappy parts because we follow Batman, who only travels to nice areas on occasion.

As for No Man's Land, while it was abruptly dropped from 'destroyed hellhole' to 'awesome city', the events in the books are still referenced as pivotal moments. Why, just this week Harley Quinn talked about what happened to her and what happened to Ivy during NML (Gotham City Sirens). Plus, some areas of Gotham are still destroyed. It's kind of a cop-out, yes, but it could be said that the main area of New Gotham was quickly rebuilt, with rebuilding going on sort of in the backround over the years. Eventually, support for the projects died out and some areas on the fringes of Gotham still look like the earthquake was ten days, not years, ago.