Among imagined books I might one day want to read, a “director’s cut” of Ram V’s “Gotham Nocturne” just made the list. The finale, Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 5: Gotham Nocturne Act III, is Ram V’s best “act” yet, lyrical and moving and, indeed, arriving in the end at some original takes on the Dark Knight. Hampering that, as has been the case all along, are backup stories at the end of most chapters that range from absolutely essential to completely unnecessary, and they greatly, greatly affect the progress and reading experience of the book.

“Gotham Nocturne” is cohesive in the big picture but clearly where it started and where it ends are not the same place in the small details, again as mostly relates to the backup stories. One imagines Ram V going back through with a scalpel, keeping this but finely excising that, until “Gotham Nocturne” arrives at its true final shape. The whole thing is lovely, a triumph for Ram V, but to an extent it’s just the first draft of the statue, still waiting for further carving to reveal what’s truly underneath.

[Review contains spoilers]

This Detective epic has as often dealt with the past as the present, and past, present, and future combine in the three-part “Elegy of Sand” at the beginning of Act III. Talia al Ghul brings the almost-dead Batman to Aras, the desert from the legend of the Grim Soldier, for something akin to A Christmas Carol, shown visions of his life as it could have been. Batman sees the potential Gotham he “saved,” using the Wayne wealth to root out all need from Gotham, and the potential Gotham he “doomed,” eliminating crime as an authoritarian Bat-god, each contrasted with the status quo of “punching goons in the dark and tinkering with your toys.”

“Gotham Nocturne” has mulled the question of whether Batman makes a difference in his essentially endless quest to save Gotham. He’s accused of preserving the status quo on a basic level just so as to have a way to define himself, and on a higher level because accepting either of the other options would mean fully embracing the (apparently everpresent) Bat-demon Barbatos. In this way, Ram V pre-establishes that nothing but the status quo is viable (because, what else would comics be?). At the same time, we arrive again at the Scott Snyder-esque humanist Batman — that “people shouldn’t have to look” to Bat-rulers or Bat-gods “for hope and salvation … they should only have to look around,” and also that Batman is defined by the struggling and trying, not by the winning.

None of that is particularly original, though presented through Ram V’s compelling prose. But I thought Ram V approached something more nuanced in the four-part “Crescendo” that follows, where the evil Orghams have instigated a class war in Gotham, transforming Gotham’s regular citizens into monsters and then protecting the most wealthy from them, and then fabricating an attack by the poor on the rich.

In this, Ram V equates “saving” Gotham — making it a city of light, eliminating its “shadows” — with gentrifying it, replacing a juvenile center for instance with high-rise apartments. Batman, Jim Gordon notes, doesn’t discriminate as to whom he saves; to make Gotham “convenient” and “unblemished” is to suggest the blemished don’t belong there. This is a new one for me and resonates well with the times (now even more than when I wrote this review months ago, unfortunately!); the reason that Batman must neither fully save or fully abandon Gotham is to do so would displace the very people who need to call a city like Gotham home.

In these ways, Act III is beautiful; it is also strikingly unusual. Some of this is stylistic: Ram V intercuts the vision parts of “Elegy,” drawn by Riccardo Federici in his fantastical style, with street-level scenes of the Question Renee Montoya as drawn by Stefano Raffaele — but even though it’s the same “story,” the Question bits get their own title and title box. In essence, here at the end, the main story and backups have begun to consume one another, occupying the same space (with an additional separate backup to boot!); it’s strange and it’s messy, but that seems to be the point.

Other aspects don’t blend quite as well. In the midst of Dr. Hurt leading Batman through his visions, Dan Watters and Jorge Fornés contribute a three-part Dr. Hurt backup story that is terrifying but ultimately has no meaning for the story (even as, through parts 1 and 2, the audience keeps thinking maybe it will). Alex Paknadel’s Mr. Freeze story nonsensically has the villain out to dinner in full regalia and has no meaning to the plot besides being “just” a Freeze story; equally his Two-Face story is a long eight pages and an entire show trial for no reason. Who doesn’t want a jokey story by Dan Watters and Francesco Francavilla that turns on Nightwing hitting Azrael (in full Azrabats getup) in the head with “Bonk!” sound effects, but I’m unsure how necessary this all is going into the two-part “Finale.”

That’s to say nothing of threads and backups past. Apparently Simon Spurrier’s story from Detective Comics: Gotham Nocturne: Act II was the last appearance of the character Sorrow, whom Gotham Nocturne: Overture suggested was so much a part of all of this. It’s an ignominious exit, given Dr. Annabel Mead treating him as an annoyance, plus we never learn anything more about why Sorrow was imprisoned under Arkham Asylum, about Mead’s sudden youth, nor about the so-called “Earworm.” Of course Spurrier could take all of that with him to another title, but “Gotham Nocturne” is so self-contained that hardly feels right. And even as Ram V leaves these threads by the wayside (no final reckoning with the resurrected Arzen Orgham, either), he brings in the Joker and former Joker’s Daughter Duela Dent(!), overcrowding a book already full to the seams.

With Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 5: Gotham Nocturne Act III and the volumes that preceded it, Ram V is yet another who can’t loose the bars around Batman’s sister title. “Gotham Nocture” is, again, epic, gorgeous, a sweeping Batman tale warts and all (the “opera” idea withered somewhere along the way, but that’s OK), but to read Chip Zdarsky’s Batman and Absolute Power, you’d hardly have known it was there. Maybe that’s all right; maybe, keeping with the themes, Detective Comics is where beautiful things go to thrive in the shadows — but that’s probably not what writer and publisher are hoping for, though they don’t quite seem able to do different.

[Includes original and variant covers, character sketches and designs, pencils]