Welcome back to Bat Chat with Matt (and Will!). As Batman and his new rival, Ghost-Maker, fight it out, we learn more about the past between the two, and Harley confronts Clownhunter. It’s “Batman” #103 from James Tynion IV, Guillem March, Carlo Pagulayan, Danny Miki and David Baron.
Matt Lazorwitz: So … yeah. I have some problems with this one. I’m trying to hang on to my happy-go-lucky, I-like-stuff attitude, but this issue had some problems. Those problems come down to pacing, weird continuity stuff and making its hot new character the least interesting new character I’ve read in a long time. And I’ve read every appearance of Punchline.
Will Nevin: This wasn’t a slog like some of the dankest parts of “Joker War,” but this wasn’t great either. “Irritating” might be a good word for it. Like, 89% of this issue irritated the hell out of me, from Ghost-Maker (the old Dana Carvey as H.W. Bush bit here: “Still. Gaining. Acceptance.”) to insipid metacommentary that goes absolutely nowhere aside from my craw. I wish it was better. I, like you, want good Batman, damnit.
Ghost-Maker Wants You to Take Your Batarang and Go Home
WN: Here’s a helpful hint for James Tynion and the rest of DC editorial: Pointing out that your new character has a dumbass name does not make it any less of a dumbass name and does not win you any points with readers. Jesus, who thought any of that was a good idea?
ML: On top of that, this guy talks like a petulant child. He sounds no different in the scenes where he’s in his 30s than he does in his teens. He’s that guy who can’t get over that anyone is better than him at anything, and his response to Batman pointing out that Batman is better is to drop what is supposed to be a pithy one-liner and is instead just … flat.
WN: At first glance, Ghost-Maker was a generic character in terms of his design, motivations and where he fits into Bruce’s story. After a handful of issues, he’s not grown beyond that at all: We know nothing more about him, and there’s no characterization to the guy aside from he does what he does because he thinks Batman is bad at his job. Not only is that a downer of a character, it’s also flat, which is a point I see you have already made. So I’ll just second that. Here’s a question for you: Is there any salvaging this guy? How do we pull him out of the ditch?
ML: I was thinking of asking you the same thing! It seems like these flashbacks are slowly building to an origin story, to tell us something about who this guy is.
WN: But that suggests I should care about this goober until we get to the Big Reveal, and that seems like a huge ask.
ML: Yeah, that’s the problem. He’s such a nothing of a character that it would take a huge reveal, and I’m not talking a continuity reveal, one of those clever comic book reveals, but an actual moment of, “Holy crap, there’s something underneath this,” to make me care. This guy is, to use a comparison to another Anti-Batman character, the anti-Prometheus: That was a great character created by Grant Morrison who was mishandled constantly after he was created (with a couple exceptions), while this guy would be a character who first appeared hugely flawed and somehow turned into something beyond the sum of his parts.
WN: If Ghost-Maker turns into some kind of interesting character, I’ll eat my Bat hat. Really, I don’t know how it can be done. Joe Chill’s kid? Alternate universe Damian? Those would be some interesting things to explore, but he’s already so goddamned bland and dumb. It’d be like trying to convince me to eat plain oatmeal that’s been soaking in the finest, cleanest water and cooked with expert care. At the end o’ the day, it’s still plain oatmeal.
Surprise: Batman is Good at What He Does
ML: So Ghost-Maker’s big point here is that Batman sucks, and he does this whole monologue about all the ways he does. He points out all the things he was able to do from his plane: passing on evidence about crooked judges to the papers, giving the GCPD intel on a non-costumed serial killer and giving the FBI intel on a gun-running operation from Santa Prisca. And Batman then tells him he knew about all of it, and had plans to deal with all of this. It’s a neat moment, but it’s pretty obvious it’s coming.
WN: Not only was that obvious AF, but I felt like Rick Dalton screaming at the book: That’s the stuff I want to see, you buttholes! I want Batman and the Batfam solving murders and shutting down arms deals. I want simple street-level stuff, not more costumes and nonsense. Any one of those cases would have made for a more interesting issue than this one.
ML: And I think we’re back to the real problem with Batman since … the end of “Batman R.I.P.” There’s this constant barrage of bigger and badder villains, wilder and louder stories. The best Batman stories tend to be quieter, even if they have larger than life villains. “Cold Days” is a quiet story. There’s a great two-part Clayface story in the middle of Scott Snyder’s run. “Black Mirror,” Scott Snyder’s Dick Grayson-as-Batman story in “Detective Comics.” These mostly aren’t world-breaking stories. What they are are intimate stories about a detective solving a case. Let Batman be a detective!
I just had a thought: Would this whole Ghost-Maker thing have worked better, or at least felt less forced, if it was in issues … #107-110, say, and we had five months of one-offs to build a status quo further, establish Batman in Gotham, and build some of these threads that Ghost-Maker pulls? If Batman had seen a bunch of the clowns from “Joker War” getting off scot free, or we had seen Santa Priscan arms popping up in the streets? Is the general meh-ness of Ghost-Maker compounded by the fact that we haven’t had time to cleanse our palettes?
WN: This is a problem I see all the time in wrestling: We go from event to event, feud to feud, without laying any of the proper groundwork. To go back to Tom King’s run, I thought that Gotham Girl was never properly established as a character; she — like Ghost-Maker — existed only to serve a purpose in a single story, and I suspect we’ll never see her again. So yeah, if there had been *some* foreshadowing, some attempt at a setup — especially for a character we’re supposed to believe has dogged Bruce from the earliest moments of his war on crime — it would have been better.
Harley’s Monologue
ML: The one bit of this issue we both unequivocally can give a thumb’s up to is a monologue from Harley Quinn. Harley is talking to some poison ivy she’s potted, hoping the villain of the same name can hear it. And it’s a great example of what Tynion can do with a character who has some life to them. It’s thoughtful, it’s funny and it’s a little sad. It’s everything you want from Harley.
WN: The tone was perfect: slightly weird, entirely earnest, a little morose and totally genuine. It was the only thing unequivocally enjoyable in the whole issue, and I wish we had more of it. Instead, she popped in to break up the Ghost-Maker nonsense and popped out just as fast, or, rather, she got dragged into said nonsense.
ML: Still, this gives me hope. It seems like, with her title currently canceled, Tynion is adding Harley to the cast of this book, and he writes her so well. I think there’s definitely setup for an Ivy arc here; he’s seeding something, which started out as an unintentional pun and I decided to lean into it.
WN: Excellent pun work.
ML: Why thank you. Harley is a great example of the anti-Ghost-Maker. She’s a character who grew organically, who appeared as a second banana, but because of fan response and clever writing, she became a major character. And that’s the problem with all of these new characters: They’re starting out at the end point and trying to backfill the reason we should care.
WN: That’s a big 10-4 there, Bat bud. Nothing can work if we’re simply told to feel a thing; it has to come from a place of real emotion. Harley feels real because we understand what she’s been through, and we know the character’s evolution. Ghost-Maker feels fake because he’s an invention of the last few months without any investment of our time or emotions. I think we’re almost talking too much about the fine-grain problems here when it’s that core issue that’s the real problem: He is not connecting in any substantive way, and this arc won’t work until he does.
Bat-miscellany
- Clownhunter and Harley was more fun than I thought it was going to be.
- The old school Bat-nerd in me gets excited every time I see Cassandra Cain back in her old Batgirl duds.
- Harley may be a good(ish) person, but she still fights dirty. Nice touch there.
- Another nice touch was the shoutout to Bruce Timm. Bless you, Bat writers, for constantly figuring out new ways to name-drop creators.
- The double shipping is killing the art in this book. I wish they would shift to either monthly or that 18 issues a year/every three weeks thing Marvel does, so they can keep a consistent artist over multiple issues, or better yet one artist per issue.
- I’m trying to figure out if Clownhunter calling his baseball bat with a Batarang embedded in it his “Batbat” is a slightly funny/slightly cringeworthy turn on the traditional Batman thing, or just completely cringeworthy.
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.
