Bruce Wayne comes face to face with his successor and learns exactly how far the Magistrate police state has infiltrated Gotham while Grifter, Huntress and Luke Fox make a midnight run across the city to escape in Future State: Dark Detective #3, featuring:
“Dark Detective,” written by Mariko Tamaki, drawn by Dan Mora, colored by Jordie Bellaire and lettered by Aditya Bidikar
“Grifters,” written by Matthew Rosenberg, drawn by Carmine Di Giandomenico, colored by Antonio Fabela and lettered by AndWorld Design
Matt Lazorwitz: Solid, solid issue. The main story is moving to a conclusion and is building a world around Bruce Wayne while letting him stay in the focus. The Grifter backup is pretty much pure popcorn comics. It’s like any buddy movie, with three characters sniping at each other and lots of explosions.
Will Nevin: What’s better than one Batman? Two Batmen, amirite? I don’t think that interaction did much for me, but I gotta say: This was probably my favorite Next Batman/Dark Detective to date.
Dark Detective
ML: As you mention above, this issue has the meeting of the two Bats. It’s a perfectly fine scene, but it isn’t particularly interesting, no. They’re both gruff, Bruce gets a little of his own medicine and then they go their separate ways. I feel like this needed to happen, especially since Future State: Gotham will continue the threads of these minis. Otherwise it would be the elephant in the proverbial room, with fans waiting for them to meet, and the longer it was held back, the more anticlimactic the meeting would feel. Hell, I’ve seen headlines from other comics sites with things like “Bruce Wayne FINALLY Meets Future State Batman.” It’s been a month and a half! Has our attention span gotten that short?
WN: Visually, I thought that page was a real banger in its deliberate use of symmetry. But the narrative isn’t quite there to make us invested in either of these Bats. (Not that it can’t or won’t happen — it’s just not there yet.) Bruce basically woke up dead one day, not much trauma to speak of aside from a gut shot. And Fox still has some lingering questions: Why did he pick up the mantle? How is he dealing with that burden? To the extent those things can be explored in “Future State,” I agree with you — this is an Elseworld worth keeping around.
ML: I agree about the art. Dan Mora absolutely kills this issue. I was trying to think if this would have been better if the scene had been staged differently, if they had done it during a fight, and I think that would have been too busy. That symmetry made for a really cool page that could have easily been too busy or too bland.
WN: I think the tone and the substance worked well on the page. A fight would have been too messy. But a gruff-off? Perfect.
A big thematic thrust in Dark Dick #2 — and a theme we see strongly continued here — is this idea that the Magistrate represents a threat to the privacy rights of Gotham residents. While I’m not sure of the specific goal (if the Magistrate is worried only about masks, shouldn’t that be the thrust of its surveillance?), Bruce seems concerned by the extent to which this Big Brother can snoop on quite literally everyone all at the same time. Usually, though, isn’t Batman on the other side of that privacy debate? I’ve got the side plot in The Dark Knight that doesn’t lead to anything but Lucius Fox smiling — what do you have in the way of classic examples of Batman taking snooping too far?
ML: The biggest example specifically uses the take that Batman is paranoid as hell about superhuman overreach. After Bruce found a hole in his memories, he realized that someone had done something to him, and eventually recovered a memory the Justice League had wiped from his mind. This was in Brad Meltzer’s much maligned Identity Crisis. From there, Batman built an AI to basically gather data and keep tabs on all superhumans, good or evil, to be ready in case they went rogue. Brother MK-1, or Brother Eye as the satellite AI called itself, being an AI in any science fiction property ever, gained sentience and went rogue. It was co-opted by Maxwell Lord and Checkmate to help them wipe out the superhuman community. This was The OMAC Project, which was one of the feeder miniseries into the Infinite Crisis event.
A smaller scale one, but on my mind as the new season recently started, was that in the Batwoman TV series, Bruce had Julia Pennyworth, Alfred’s daughter, basically shadow Kate Kane and become friends with her when Kate travelled to London after being discharged from military school to make sure Kate was OK. Instead of, you know, calling his cousin and saying, “Hey, Kate, that whole being discharged for being gay thing is a really shitty deal. How are you holding up?” Because, regardless of the continuity, Batman doesn’t do emotions.
WN: I know Brother Eye was at least referenced in Injustice, but I’ll be damned if I can remember anything specific about it. And Matt, you know that Bruce’s emotions died with Thomas and MARTHAAAAAAA.
ML: But yes, you are right. (Will’s note: That deserved to be no-sold.) Batman has been a hero who never had any problem breaking privacy laws, as well as many other laws, to do what he views as right. For this story, though, it is important for him to realize the ill of this, since this is Batman fighting a fascist state, and in the world we’re still living in, no one wants a hero who is also a fascist. Well, no one I want to have a conversation with, anyway.
Your point about it being unclear what the Magistrate’s goal is, since it’s supposed to be only about masks, is part of the social point the creators behind this story are trying to make. It’s that quote that is attributed to Ben Franklin, about those willing to sacrifice some liberty for security deserve neither. This story is about the creeping rise of fascism; you give a fascist state an inch, and they’re going to take a mile. Say they can surveil for masks, and they’ll surveil everyone to keep themselves in, and take even more, power.
Grifters
WN: Remind me, this is the not-Next Batman Fox brother, right? There’s just been a heap of Fox family drama between this story and all the main book stuff. But let me ask you this, a question I usually ask creators: What are fans supposed to get out of this story? Because aside from the action — which, admittedly, is rendered pretty stylishly — I didn’t get much out of this.
ML: Yes, this is Luke Fox, younger Fox brother and former superhero, Batwing. He was seen sniping with his brother over their comatose sister in issue #1 of TNB, and denying to his other sister that he is Batman in issue #3.
As for what fans are supposed to get out of this, I’m not entirely sure there’s much here other than that action. I read this like I would sit back and watch a Fast and the Furious movie (OK, confession time: I have never seen any of the Fast and the Furious movies except for the spin-off, Hobbes & Shaw, because that had Idris Elba. I’d watch anything with Idris Elba). This is a big action piece with characters being snarky with each other and running from the bad guys. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but it’s empty calories.
There’s also something here about Luke Fox, but I’ll want your feelings on empty calorie comics before I go into that one aspect.
WN: I very much had the feeling that I was reading a Michael Bay comic: lots of explosions and quips to go with only a scooch of substance. (Side note: Coulda used a fart joke in there to really complete the Bay experience.) And while I wouldn’t want every comic to read like that, I think it’s fine. It looked pretty, and I didn’t feel like it was a total waste of my time. That’s not nothing.
ML: Absolutely. I do wonder about the handling of Luke Fox, as his sudden but inevitable betrayal is way out of character for him. This is a guy who became an engineer and an MMA fighter so he could win Batman’s attention, and in last week’s The Next Batman was saying whoever would wear a mask and stand up to the Magistrate has to be a good man, and here he’s willing to sell out Huntress for his own freedom? Not sure how that tracks.
WN: For all of the airtime the Foxes have gotten in “Future State,” there seems to be little connective tissue or exposition or even substance. Very strange.
ML: I hope, between the upcoming Next Batman: Second Son digital first series and FS: Gotham, some of those inconsistencies get cleaned up.
By the way, I didn’t pick up on the wordplay in the title until I started writing this review. Credit for hiding the twist in plain sight.
WN: It’s always a grift.
Bat-miscellany
- The design for Dark Detective, while it leans too much into the “Hey, look, it’s the future and everything is computers” trope, is a slick look.
- The Rock is the best dumb action movie of all time.
- Looks like we have a new, digital first, volume of Legends of the Dark Knight starting soon. LotDK is the first series I read from issue #1 off the stands until its last issue, and has produced a lot of my favorite Batman stories. I am super psyched for this.
- Will we be covering LotDK? You bet your Bat ass we will.
Matt Lazorwitz read his first comic at the age of 5. 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 podcasts BatChat with Matt & Will and The ComicsXF Interview Podcast.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
