Welcome to the first of our new review feature: “Bat Chat with Matt (and Will!).” We’re starting off with a big one, folks (Or is it? We’ll get to that), the end of the “Joker War” story. As Gotham burns and the Bat-family tries to hold it together, Batman and Joker face down in a climactic battle. It’s “Batman” #100 from James Tynion IV, Jorge Jimenez and Tomeu Morey with backup art by Carlo Pagulayan, Danny Miki, Morey and Guillem March.
Matt Lazorwitz: I think I’ve come to enjoy “Joker War” more with each issue, which I admit is damning with faint praise, since I started out actively disliking this story. “Batman” #100 has some quality moments. The opening, with Batgirl reclaiming her Oracle identity and coordinating the Bat-family’s fight against Joker’s army, felt right out of the era of Bat-comics I love, the period of the mid-’90s through early ’00s, which is the period Tynion loves as well. Tynion is at his best when writing big cast books, as his runs on “Detective Comics,” “Justice League Dark” and “The Backstagers” prove, and so this arc has improved for me exponentially with each Bat-family member who joins. We also get a slightly less grim Batman by the end of the main story, which I always prefer, but I’m not holding my breath for that to last too long. But a guy can dream.
Will Nevin: I’m going to be honest: I’m down on this run simply because Tynion feels like a fill-in writer who got pushed into full-time duty. I don’t get the sense that this book is doing anything new or even particularly good, but I suppose I haven’t felt that way about “Batman” since “Cold Days.” We’ve talked about this before, but “Joker War,” to me, is everything wrong about Batman: He works better as a character when he’s solving crimes by using that great big brain of his, and there was none of that in this arc. I want (insert writer/director’s name here that’s not Christopher Nolan because that’s too obvious)’s version of Batman in a story. All I got here was Michael Bay’s.
An Anniversary No One Was Waiting For
WN: Between “Detective Comics” #1,000 and #1,027 and now this, I’m calling a lid on Batbook milestones. As “OMG super special number books” go, this one was mostly inoffensive — a little padding here ‘n’ there and an epilogue that never seems to end — but still. It’s exhausting. *Maybe* if King had stayed on and completed his stated mission, this would have felt like an achievement, but as it stands, this is nothing more than the blessed end to a largely cursed arc. Rarely has such a big number felt so tiny.
ML: While I think I liked this issue, and the back half of this arc, more than you did, Will, I can absolutely agree. This whole arc has, in many ways, felt like a greatest hits album. Tynion has taken aspects from big Bat stories of the past and mixed them together. Bruce Wayne loses his money to a villain? “Batman: Eternal.” Joker creates mass chaos with lots of Joker toxin? Scott Snyder’s “Endgame.” Batman trips balls through the city while talking to someone who isn’t really there? “Batman R.I.P.”
WN: To be fair to me, I *loved* this issue…because it’s the end of “Joker War.” But in all why-so-seriousness, I was sour on it from the beginning specifically because (to add to the stories you listed) it reads like a crockpot stew of “No Man’s Land,” “City of Bane” and (God help me) “White Knight.” There’s only so many times I can read lines like “We have to take back this city!” before my eyes want to roll on over to a book with fresh ideas. And to touch on the one idea that sorta felt fresh, looking back on the promotion for the arc, it feels like “What would happen if Bruce Wayne lost his money?” was supposed to be a central hook. Now we have the answer: It didn’t matter. Still, to Tynion’s credit, the horror elements did feel fresh, albeit perhaps a little out of place.
ML: I am sorry for the “White Knight” flashbacks, my friend. I think that’s a violation of the Geneva Convention.
Punchline Vs. Clownhunter: Poochy Vs. Poochy
WN: Outside of the story beats, the central focus of “Joker War” has been two new characters created by Tynion, Punchline and Clownhunter. And yet even they feel like rehashes of already existing characters, a sense that got only more pronounced with #100. But, hey, now we’ve got Zoomer Harley Quinn and Chippy AF Duke Thomas for future writers to ignore, so that’s something.
ML: Boy, I hadn’t thought about how almost exactly Clownhunter’s origin mimics Duke’s. I’d think Tynion was intentionally building Duke a broken mirror version/archnemesis if Duke had appeared in more than half a dozen panels in a core Bat-book since halfway through King’s run.
Punchline’s speech that she gives via the DC Universe’s version of TikTok or Twitch or whatever honestly feels like Tynion taking a shot across the bow of everyone who saw Todd Phillips’ “Joker” and walked out thinking that guy had some good ideas. She talks about how Joker portrays himself as the one who wants to tear down a broken system because it’s broken, but that he’s really a cold-hearted, maniacal villain. The problem is, it’s immediately undercut by the Joker himself saying that she’s clever, and that all she’s saying is manipulation. So she clearly doesn’t believe it, and Punchline is possibly second only to Joker as an unreliable narrator, so the words that everyone who thought Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker was a tragic hero instead of a violent killer should hear coming out of Punchline seem to entirely invalidate the valid point the words convey.
And while I respect the idea of Batman being willing to give Clownhunter a second chance and send him to Leslie Thompkins for help, instead of just dragging him off to jail, because Batman should realize how broken those aspects of the justice system are, the specific reasoning he gave jumped out at me as … flawed. “Oh, your neighbors like you so they won’t testify against you.” Dude is wielding a baseball bat with a batarang in it, the actual murder weapon, which probably leaves some distinct wounds; wouldn’t take the world’s greatest detective to tie that to the dead clowns. Also, Bats admits he disassembled all Clownhunter’s guns and explosives; can’t imagine an underage kid had those legally. I want Batman to believe in redemption, so having this weird legal veneer around why he’s not bringing in Clownhunter cheapens that.
WN: I didn’t take Punchline’s big climactic speech to be genuine in the least, and if I was supposed to, I think that’s a real failure in the writing. As to Clownhunter, how are you supposed to repackage the guy when 1) He’s got his mission statement right there in the name and 2) Presumably the Joker stuff is going to fall off, right? He’s a fun gimmick — maybe the only thing I wholeheartedly enjoyed in “Joker War” — but it doesn’t seem to have much of a pulse beyond the aforementioned mission statement and his hilarious lettering. I really don’t need either his reformation story or his “Batman has to put him down” story.
ML: Oh, I think I might have misspoken there: I don’t think Punchline is being genuine. I think Tynion is making a good point about people who see the Joker as a hero, and doing so in a way that specifically references the reaction to “Joker,” and I don’t know why he invalidates that point by including it from the most disingenuous character in the book. Have Harley say something like that, or … anyone else. We need to remind people the Joker is a villain, consarnit!
Dawn in Gotham City?
ML: So, the main story of this issue ends with Batman looking out at Gotham at the beginning of a new day. And while he has come to a realization about himself and is sure he can be a better man (something I have discussed elsewhere he has done over and over for the last 35 years), both he and the Joker, in one of the back-ups, seem sure the city has been changed intrinsically by the events of this story. And I’m not buying it. How is this different from “No Man’s Land” or “City of Bane,” the latter of which the city hadn’t even recovered from before Joker tore it up again?
WN: A big theme in this issue is making editorial decisions and then backing away from them. Harley sets up Batman to finally make the choice not to save Joker’s life, which he does — a thing that should have consequences, damnit! — but that’s waived off on the next page. Punchline (to go back to that moment) seems reformed, but she’s not. Clownhunter nears the end of his story, but we get a big ol’ “to be continued” right after that. (This is, of course, only a precursor to eventually bringing Alfred back. Somehow.) So, to answer your question, I don’t buy this as any big change or a new status quo. Heck, we didn’t even get the shiny new suit we were promised. Gotham, much like war, never changes.
ML: Oh, ye gods, I cannot agree more, especially when it comes to Joker. I love a good Joker story. A really good Joker story, where he and Batman are played off each other perfectly, is a joy to behold. But we haven’t gotten one of those in a while. I was hoping the end of this would put Joker on a shelf for a while. I wasn’t expecting the end of “Arkham City”/beginning of “Arkham Knight” or anything, with Batman holding a body and putting it into a crematorium and us watching it burn, but if there was a way to have Batman and Gotham legitimately believe Joker is dead, it would allow for something akin to a new status quo. Instead, we basically got a set-up for 2021’s event, “Joker War 2: Venomous Boogaloo.”
WN: Every Bat-writer is convinced they have a “last” Joker story to tell, aren’t they?
ML: Seems like.
I’m hoping that Tynion is going to take this opportunity, even if it isn’t the brave new world, to reintroduce the concept of the non-superheroic world around Batman. With the mayor outed as corrupt and Bullock quitting as commissioner, I think it’s high time to invest in that. I mean, aside from Jim Gordon and Harvey Bullock, can you name any cop in the GCPD since Rebirth? Any member of Gotham’s political or moneyed class? Any street crook who Batman leans on for information? Anyone who works at Arkham other than Jermiah Arkham? There was a time, in that Moench/Dixon/Grant era and into the Rucka/Brubaker/Grayson era, where there were a dozen named police officers who appeared on a regular to semi-regular basis. Where you knew who the mayor of Gotham was, and he or she had a personality. Hell, you knew the name of the coroner and the woman who flipped on the Bat-Signal to grant Gordon plausible deniability. That old thing about Gotham being a character stops being true when all the characters in Gotham are vigilantes and villains, and we don’t have anyone who is just a citizen of Gotham.
WN: Again, that takes me back to a core criticism of this run: There’s no substance to it. Action and flash, sure. But there’s not a heart nor a central idea outside of the teamwork stuff (which, let’s be honest, Tynion has already done and done better in ‘Tec) which King, despite all of his issues/baggage, certainly had.
Bat-miscellany
- Oracle’s lettering (dark green on light green) was a pain to read. Not “Batman Who Laughs red on black” levels of misery, no, but still uncomfortable and a bad idea.
- People have been saying it all over the internet, but I just have to add my voice to the chorus: When are we getting an “Oracle and the Batgirls” title? Because I want it.
- Editorial should have caught the line “It didn’t stop a few clowns from flying a batplane through their window” before it made it to print as an awkward reference (unintentional, perhaps) to 9/11.
Matt Lazorwitz read his first comic at the age of five. It was Who's Who in the DC Universe #2, featuring characters whose names begin with B, which explains so much about his Batman obsession. He writes about comics he loves, and co-hosts the creator interview podcast WMQ&A with Dan Grote.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
