Miracle Molly helps Batman discover another facet of Scarecrow’s master plan, Peacekeeper-01 is taken by Scarecrow to set up his endgame and Simon Saint picks a new target in Batman #115, with a lead story written by James Tynion IV, drawn by Bengal and Jorge Jimenez, colored by Tomeu Morey and lettered by Clayton Cowles. And in the backup, the Batgirls face Seer in a story written by Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad, drawn by Jorge Corona, colored by Sarah Stern and lettered by Becca Carey.
See the history of Sean Mahoney, his family and how he became the Magistrate’s supercop in Batman Secret Files: Peacekeeper-01 #1, written by Ed Brisson with a plot by James Tynion IV and Brisson, drawn by Joshua Hixson, colored by Roman Stevens and lettered by Travis Lanham.
It’s two stories in Legends of the Dark Knight #6. In the first, Solomon Grundy is hunting mobsters in a tale written by Becky Cloonan, drawn by Dike Ruan, colored by Dan McCaig and lettered by Ariana Maher. And in the second story, Batman and Killer Croc team up in a flooded Gotham, written by Matthew Rosenberg, drawn by Cian Tormey, colored by Matthew Hollingsworth and lettered by Aditya Bidikar.
Matt Lazorwitz: So, let’s start with some of the bigger Bat news of the week, shall we? The second trailer for The Batman dropped at DC FanDome over the weekend. What kind of thoughts do you have on it? For me, it doesn’t look bad, but we already had a grim young Batman movie in Batman Begins. I’d like something a little different from the next Batman series, something a little lighter. Not Batman ’66 lighter, but something that has an exciting, action air to it and less portentousness.
Will Nevin: I’ll settle for a movie that doesn’t rehash the Wayne murders again. So no pearls, please. Otherwise, anything aside from Zack Snyder’s particular grimdark brand is fine for me — yeah, Battinson reads as a little emo, but let’s see what they can do.
Batman
Matt: So we’re now two issues away from the end of “Fear State.”
Will: Really? That’s great.
Matt: And the seams are showing a bit, especially when it comes to the art. Double shipping is a pain for artists, and with two issues left, now Jorge Jimenez misses two-thirds of an issue. That is rough, and definitely throws off the feel of this issue, especially since Bengal is an artist who is not in the same school as Jimenez.
Will: Boy and howdy, this was an ugly book when Bengal had to carry the load. I mean, just take a look at this panel:
If that was in a fan comic, we’d politely smile and tell ‘em to keep at it. But this? Embarrassing. I am continually amazed at what DC will let out the door.
Matt: At least Jimenez sticks with the Scarecrow/Peacekeeper-01 pages. That Scarecrow design has been used sparingly around the other Bat titles, but it has proven to be very tied to the artist style, and so I can’t imagine what Bengal’s cartoony art would do to that horror design. Those pages are gorgeous as ever and are especially creepy, but there is some extreme cognitive dissonance here.
Will: I know in some books publishers will disclose which artist worked on which page. Here? You could absolutely tell. Unpleasant to look at, Brother Matt. Again, not what I’d want on one of my signature titles, but who am I to tell an IP farm what to do with its time, resources and general give a damn-ness.
Matt: Yeah, it’s the middle of an event, people are in, so why not just jam some lower-level art in the middle when they know people are hooked?
Nonetheless, we do have plot to discuss in here, too. And we have another layer to Scarecrow’s plan, involving Master Wyze’s memory wiping machine. This feels like a hat on a hat. He already has his own fear tech, the Hatter tech and now this. I would have loved a hint that this was part of Scarecrow’s plan to begin with. Just a hint that he needed some other component to complete his plan. There has not been much mention of the Hatter tech, and now we have this? It really feels like Tynion is adding more and more without dealing with what has been established.
Will: And not to jump ahead (but to jump ahead a little), it seems strange that there’s a connection between PK-01 and Hatter. What if Tynion is slow playing or running a feint here? What if Hatter is really the secret hand behind the secret hand? That probably wouldn’t make sense, and I don’t think that’s likely, but it would at least explain why Jervis has been downplayed to this point. And speaking of the Hatter, one of his friends popped up this week! Brother Matt, regale me with tales of Dormouse and how the character has been used to date in the DC universe. Did they just show up in something else we read for BatChat (audio edition), or am I confused?
Matt: The Wonderland Gang is fairly generic. Hatter sort of swaps different people into many of these roles, so this is a handy retcon. There have been various Dormouses and other Wonderland characters. March Harriet (the March Hare), the Walrus and the Carpenter, and the Tweedles all have very distinct henchfolk who have taken those roles, but Dormouse has never had a distinct identity, so this is handy to add an identity to one of these folk who doesn’t have any real history. It also explains how Wyze has this level of mind-altering tech without completely making a new genius who is doing mind-altering tech. And since he’s not getting a Secret Files, this is the most we’ll be learning about Master Wyze, I think.
And I do agree, this is a lot of Hatter over two issues. But we did see him in the sewers of Gotham being chased by Azrael over in Arkham City: The Order of the World, so I have a feeling like he is just a red herring (like communism).
Will: A callback. I dig it.
Matt: Tynion also continues to use Miracle Molly as a person who is questioning the nature of all of this trauma and the patterns of the Gotham superhero/villain dyad, which I dig. And Simon Saint continues to slip further off the deep end, which has finally reached diminishing returns for me. His own people are starting to doubt him, and he’s getting the loyal ones killed. This was always going to end poorly for Saint, but now it’s looking more and more like he’s not going to skate, Lex Luthor-style, but instead wind up in a nice cozy cell in Arkham Tower or whatever is replacing the Asylum.
Will: His goddamn face melted in one of the first pages of this issue, Matt. I don’t think he’s going to make it to that cell.
Matt: The Batgirls backup was fun, and makes me glad Cloonan and Conrad will be writing the upcoming ongoing; they get the voices of the three leads spot on. Jorge Corona isn’t my favorite artist; the manga-influenced superhero stuff doesn’t usually do it for me, but his kinetic style works with the fluidity of Cassandra Cain especially, and his expressive eyes work with Stephanie Brown’s generally expressive nature and the fact that her costume is all eyes.
Oddly, this takes place earlier in the crossover, probably around issues #113 or #114; it explains how people have known the Seer name for the anti-Oracle in various other books without there ever being a moment where they declared that name. Wish they had swapped this with the Clownhunter backup, which didn’t have any big reveals, so it worked in the timeline better.
Secret Files
Matt: There is a fine line between humanizing a character and trying to make them sympathetic. For villains, it’s easy for a sloppy writer to make that humanization (Is that even a word?) come off as apologizing for their actions or for trying to get you to sort of root for a villain. This issue, fortunately, doesn’t fall into that trap. Peacekeeper-01, Sean Mahoney, is still a very bad man, even if you now understand more about how he became what he is.
Will: I didn’t care for this, Brother Matt, and lemme tell you why: There is nothing essential here to understanding the character. We knew he was a GCPD reject and a particularly bad Arkham guard before his moment of heroism. (Which, given the circumstances, seems like some sort of plan on someone’s part. What if Hatter was behind A-Day?) So what if he comes from three generations of shit cops? Yeah, I coulda figured that one. I generally like Ed Brisson’s work — and man, can he write a good, gritty crime book — but this was way too talky and too forgiving of a real dirtbag character.
Matt: This is by no means up there with the excellent Miracle Molly Secret Files from last month, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t find it too forgiving, though. Mahoney is still a crapbag. I think this gave us some context without making us think, boy he coulda been a good guy only if … He was ready to cover for his dad killing a cop who was gonna rat him out for corruption with no real coaching; that’s a bad look, especially when he was a kid.
Will: Speaking of that — and since I know you love to talk timelines — does it make sense for Mahoney to be around 8-10 years old in the pre-Commissioner Gordon/GCPD full of corruption era?
Matt: The timeline is definitely a little off with that. But Rebirth and all of that has made the timeline so off. If he was, say, 8 in that scene, with Harvey Dent as an assistant district attorney, which he was in Year One, then Gordon comes in right after that, it’s been a decade and a half-ish since then, so he’d be in his mid-20s, MAYBE late 20s, and he looks older than that, but not by much.
What were your feelings on the art here? This felt like someone in the Francesco Francavilla style, but not a direct swipe or anything.
Will: Gave me some real Criminal vibes. Seedy, grimy, flashbacks all executed well. Visually, it was a good read.
Matt: I can see that, and I agree. I know I’ve seen Hixson draw other books, and liked it, and this works with the book. His Hatter looks particularly creepy. And Doctor Joy of Arkham City shows up here, which is a nice bit of cohesion. Maybe this was a book that was better in the details and small moments than as a whole?
Will: I think that’s absolutely a good point to leave this one on. It had its moments, sure, but it’s ultimately skippable.
LotDK
Matt: Hey, it’s two short stories of Batman fighting against or with a couple of his more monstrous foes! These are two stories that I found enjoyable little character pieces for their villains, but weren’t flashy. We talked about this in our recording for BatChat (audio edition) last night, but these are fine stories with rising creators, but not things that are going to get a lot of eyes on the book, especially a digital one.
Will: Legends is always at its best when it can speak to the core of Batman’s character without going through a fuckton of continuity baggage, and we get that in both of these stories that get in and out in a delightfully perfect amount of space. In the Grundy piece, Batman feels for Solomon’s torment and tries to reason with him, while in the Croc story, we see that Batman is not perfect — that he can make mistakes and may overlook the underclasses in Gotham just like anyone else. Great, short little reads.
Matt: That bit in Rosenberg’s Croc story was definitely a highlight. And I love anytime we go into the weird world of Solomon Grundy and his many personas. Someday on the podcast we’ll talk about the arc in Starman where Starman, Batman, Green Lantern and Jason Woodrue go into the innerscape of Solomon Grundy.
Rosenberg and Cloonan are both writers who are on the rise: Rosenberg has Task Force Z and DC Vs. Vampires starting next week, has a new creator-owned book from Image starting next month, and is doing another interstitial issue on Joker. Cloonan and her writing partner, Michael W. Conrad, are writing Wonder Woman, which is a big assignment, and are launching Batgirls after “Fear State.” I wonder how long ago this story was commissioned, because as you said, they’re continuity-light, so they could have been written last year or last month.
Will: Well, I know one thing: They couldn’t have been written any later than June — which is when the digital chapters came out.
Matt: Sigh. A shame. I’m going to state a fairly common old saw here: Certain comics fans complain about continuity, but when a book comes out that isn’t reliant on it, they don’t buy it because it “doesn’t matter.”
Will: I dare one of you motherfuckers to say “Legends of the Dark Knight doesn’t matter” to my face.
We. Will. Scrap.
Bat-miscellany
- Will’s cliche watch: “Time will tell” pops up in Legends of the Dark Knight. Boo.
- In BatChat (audio edition) this week, we’ve got special guest and wonderful editor Dan Grote as we put three all-ages stories up on the big board. On next week’s episode, we get into the spoopy spirit of the season with vampires and werewolves as Batman mixes it up with the damned and the undead.
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.
