We're Back in the Present with More New Characters in Batman #106

Hey, we’re back in the present this week! The Magistrate is just a glimmer in the eye of a creepy billionaire, the Scarecrow is running amok and there’s … sigh, more Ghost-Maker. Plus, in the backup, a mother and child reunion is only a stabbing away as Damian goes home to Talia in Batman #106 with a lead story written by James Tynion IV, drawn by Jorge Jimenez, colored by Tomeu Morey and lettered by Clayton Cowles, and a backup written by Joshua Williamson, drawn by Gleb Melnikov and lettered by Troy Peteri.

Matt Lazorwitz: Well, it’s nice to be back in a Gotham not controlled by a fascist pseudo-military police force and instead just run by an ineffective government. OK, there are different values of nice here. I think there were some pluses in this issue, a lot of them around the fact that we have a single, competent artist, and some minuses, like Ghost-Maker.

Will Nevin: Given his out-of-costume depiction, I’m getting the idea we’re supposed to think he’s a dingus. Which is better than actually liking the character … but also he could just not be there. But we could fill digital reams with our antipathy toward that man (New policy: not gonna say that name at all). Overall, I think this is a good *almost* reset with a fresh aesthetic that mostly works, a familiar villain and a Magistrate story that — as you predicted last time — is starting to take form.

So, Where Were We?

ML: The principal action piece of this issue is a good old Batmobile chase, which is a nice place to start a reset. It’s familiar, it’s something every Batman fan has seen before, but here Tynion starts to add little twists. The fact that the Batmobile isn’t the top piece of gear with all the newest gadgets is actually refreshing. These are the subtle little things we should see as Batman adjusts to not having unlimited resources. He’s still rich enough to have the badass car; it’s just more real-world badass.

WN: Were/are you a Star Trek: The Next Generation guy?

ML: Absolutely. One of my favorite Trek series.

WN: Then of course you’ll remember that back-half-of-the-series episode in which they realize warp travel is doing irreversible harm to the galaxy (Hello, allegory!) and establish a galactic speed limit.

ML: And the scientist blows himself up at the end to prove his point? Yeah, I love Next Gen, but subtle it rarely was.

WN: For the next, I dunno, half season or so, they’d make references to the speed limit, how maybe Starfleet had given them special permission to ignore it because their mission was super important. Then, the writers totally ignored it because it was too hard to reason away at every turn. (I think Voyager had a similar thing with photon torpedoes and how many the ship carried, but that was never my show.) ANYWAY, that’s the vibe I got here: “Remember Batman’s supposed to be broke? We promise he’s still broke … until he’s not anymore.” This Batman is not the one of Dark Detective; this is a guy with slightly less resources and, aside from not living in the Manor, doesn’t seem to be making any real sacrifices.

ML: True, but I don’t think we want Batman to be Peter Parker, do we? I mean, there is a happy medium between uber-wealthy and pulling his pockets out and hearing a sad trombone sound.

WN: Sad trombone *and* a moth.

ML: You read my mind with the moth thing. I was literally about to go back and add that in, but you beat me to it.

WN: It me, thinker guy. Look, I’m not gonna disagree with your assessment, doctor, but I’ll say this: If Bruce is indeed going to be broke, let it be an impediment he has to overcome. Let him think his way out of it, improvise. Not simply ponder how he has a few less dollars and has to spring for the super fast car instead of the self-driving super fast car.

ML: Yes, on that we can agree.

Looking at the other pieces of this book that work with established continuity and characters, what are your thoughts on the new Scarecrow design? This is a character who has had a pretty standardized design in comics for pretty much his entire career, but has had plenty of visual reinterpretations in other media, and this one screams Arkham Asylum/Arkham Knight.

WN: Scarecrow is one of those characters that can look real hokey if you’re not careful, but I thought Jimenez did a nice job. Ultimately, it’s about letting the shadows and darkness define the design, because otherwise, he’s just a scrawny weirdo in a floppy hat.

ML: Yes, and he is one of the few characters whose whole power set absolutely justifies the gas mask. He works with it, and so does the Wesley Dodds Sandman, but that’s about it. How many times can Batman turn his fear toxin on him before he realizes, “Huh, I should probably build in a full-on gas mask instead of some little filter.”

And finally on this point, we get some nice establishing of where most of the rest of the cast are, with little scenes with Harley and Oracle (with Huntress and Batgirl’s cameo thrown into her scene). If this is the cast of this book when it comes to Batman and his supporting cast, I’ll take it.

New is Always Better?

ML: So far, Tynion’s Batman has been a series defined by new characters: The Designer, Punchline, Clownhunter, GM. And here we get four more: Simon Saint, Master Wyze, Miracle Molly and Edmund Potter, Gotham’s answer to Mr. Furley. I’m not counting Mayor Nakano as one of Tynion’s new characters as he was created in Detective Comics, but he is certainly a new addition to the cast. That’s a lot of new characters in a world already full of characters.

WN: Matt, I like my coffee black, my bourbon neat, my steak rare and my Batman writers to play with the toys they already have. There is *zero* need for this Tynion wing of the Rogues Gallery, and we especially don’t need more secondary villains. And we double especially don’t need them when they’re paper-thin characters. I don’t like it. *stomps feet*

ML: I agree on that point generally. I think every longrunning Bat writer gets one or two new concepts or characters to add to the canon. Scott Snyder had the Court of Owls, which worked, and Duke Thomas, who would work if people started treating him like the fully realized character Snyder created and the We Are Robin creators forwarded. Tom King had Gotham Girl, who didn’t work because she never became more than the paper character she was introduced as.

Of all of these new characters and ideas, I think Simon Saint and the Magistrate are the ones to focus on. Batman doesn’t have a corporate raider nemesis, which is something you’d think he would. Penguin, Black Mask and Great White Shark occasionally go down that route, but they’re mobsters more than anything. If you spent time making Saint a fully realized character, and really establish him as the terrifying logical extension of a Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, there’s meat on those bones.

WN: Ohhhhh, man, I hated Gotham and Gotham Girl — nothing like starting your run off by trying to fake an emotional connection with characters that are about to get shelved forever. I think that’s my real problem with this impulse to create new ones: You get so busy trying to explain who they are (or embarrassingly not doing any of that as King did with the Gothams) that there’s no room to establish some real feelings about them. You don’t care if they live or thrive (when we’re talking about the heroes) and they don’t have any menace to them (for the villains, natch).

‘Member Mr. Bloom? We’re set up for a whole crop of that guy.

ML: Oh, yeah. Fascinating visual, but no there there in the end.

And I’m not saying go back to Joker, Riddler and Mr. Freeze every story. There is a deep bench of characters you can pull from. I’m glad we’re getting Scarecrow as the main villain here: He’s a major Bat antagonist who doesn’t have a ton of major stories. Working him in with Simon Saint makes sense; the new bad with an established bad allows for both to play off each other and get some beats you don’t get with a lone villain.

WN: Had it not been for the editorial blurb at the end of #106 and Infinite Frontier, I would have guessed Scarecrow was Simon Saint. That’s one weird lookin’ dude.

ML: Oh, yeah, good call on that. He definitely has the creepy, gangly thing that Scarecrow is known for.

Robin

ML: OK, can you bear with me being that fan for a little bit. The one who has a nearly photographic memory and absorbs all manner of weird comic book minutiae and picks up on continuity errors that most people wouldn’t? Basically the guy I try not to be when I’m writing these, but sometimes I have to be when something jumps out at me as really glaring.

WN: I was too preoccupied with this backup being a steaming pile of nothing to get angry at anything. Lay it on me, brother.

ML: The opening … lettering (I don’t know what you call a location identifier within comic lettering. It’s not a sound effect or narration) for this story says it is set in “the rogue nation of Markovia.” Markovia became a rogue nation when it was pretty much bought, lock, rock and barrel, by Leviathan at the end of the Leviathan Dawn one-shot that followed Event Leviathan. The thing is, Leviathan at that point was run by former Manhunter Mark Shaw, who stole the organization right out from under Talia al Ghul, and when she refused to be his partner in international terror, he threw her out of his airship, which was flying at the time.

Has Talia ever struck you as the kind of person who would go and seek the friendship and sanctuary of a guy who tried to kill her and isn’t somehow related to her? Especially when she has an established base in Khadym, a country she and her father seem to rule?

WN: Talia seems like the sort of woman who would gut her dumb punk son like a fish. But maybe that’s just my ideal Damian story. (Note for Damian stans: I’m kidding. Mostly.)

ML: OK, I was sort of concerned that I was distracted by what struck me as either hugely out of character behavior or a glaring continuity error to get into the story, but it seems it was as “meh” as I felt it was. We’ve seen Talia and Damian dance this dance before. And adding in another faction within the League out of nowhere is an odd choice. Again, we already have a super secret League within the League, the League of Shadows from the Tynion ‘Tec run. Why do we need this League of Lazarus as well?

WN: At least the branding hints at an interesting concept. Maybe they have some special connection to the Pits?

ML: Maybe. I could get behind that. I know neither of us is the biggest Damian fan, but he deserves more story than another fight with his mother and then some ninjas showing up. It’s just nothing we haven’t seen elsewhere.

WN: It was so deeply, unavoidably nothing. A penumbra of an idea of a theory of half a thing. So we get the follow-up in ‘Tec? Ooooh a short fight scene. Whoop de fuckin’ do.

ML: Yup, and then off into its own book, which we will not be covering here. If we’re not covering Catwoman, which is currently the best it’s been since at least Genevieve Valentine or Will Pfeiffer, if not Ed Brubaker, then we’re not covering a Robin book that might or might not be good.

Bat-miscellany

We’re going to be talking about Infinite Frontier #0 in various other places on the site, so we’re not gonna focus on it here, but judging by hair color and what I would assume is now a pretty solid anti-mask bias after what happens in the issue, I would hazard a guess that CO Sean Mahoney is Peacekeeper-01 with some cybernetic limbs courtesy of Simon Saint.
Sticking with Infinite Frontier and the Man Who Would Be Peacekeeper-01, Batman gets all of the blame and none of the credit, doesn’t he?
The graffiti lettering/branding/whatever you’d call the thing Matt is complaining about in Robin in Batman is … pretty dumb.
Also dumb: Ghost-Maker in street clothes. Looks to be the sort of idiot who wears Affliction tees unironically. Question: How much money can you fit in a wallet on a chain?
Answer: Not enough to make me like Ghost-Maker.
It’s Next Gen’s Season 7, Episode 9 “Force of Nature” that suggests light speed travel is tearing apart the fabric of space. Woulda figured that for earlier in the series run.
That plug at the end of the Robin section above is absolutely that: Read Ram V and Fernando Blanco’s Catwoman. It’s really good.

Matthew Lazorwitz

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.