The truth of The Network and their deep connections to Gotham and the Joker begin to be revealed, as Jim Gordon once again comes face to face with Joker in The Joker #9, written by James Tynion IV, drawn by Stefano Raffaele, colored by Romulo Fajardo Jr. and lettered by Tom Napolitano.
Some new ghost is scaring the last few restaurant owners near the Gotham docks while a new development is being built. And since this is Scooby-Doo, you know you can’t trust real estate developers in The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #8, written by Ivan Cohen, drawn by Dario Brizuela, colored by Franco Riesco and lettered by Saida Temofonte.
It’s the early days of Dick Grayson’s time with Batman, and things aren’t settled into the rhythm of the Dynamic Duo. Dick is impatient, Bruce is unsure and Alfred wants what’s best for them both in Robin and Batman #1, written by Jeff Lemire, drawn and colored by Dustin Nguyen and lettered by Steve Wands.
Matt Lazorwitz: So this week was originally going to include the new digital issue of The Joker Presents: A Puzzlebox, but we decided to stick to two chapters at a time there, both for the sake of adding a new book to the rotation, and because that would have been three Joker stories in one week, which, no matter how much I love Joker, would have been a lot of Joker.
Will Nevin: No matter what an incel on Twitter might say, you never want to go full Joker.
In other news this week, we got us a Patreon! Back us and the pod for cool shit.
Mad as Hell and Not Gonna Take It Anymore
Matt: Five issues left, and Tynion is starting to answer some of the questions he’s been asking from the beginning of this run. I am going to miss the hell out of this series.
Will: Abso-damn-lutely. I won’t miss his Batman *at all* but this? Actually good comics!
Matt: Tynion once again uses continuity in the best way here. He calls out “Killing Joke,” “Death in the Family,” “No Man’s Land” and even the original “Venom” story from Legends of the Dark Knight, ties them together seamlessly and doesn’t leave a reader needing to go back and read all those stories to see how they tie together. And this secret cabal, The Network? These are some seriously evil dudes who are doing it for the money and the power. And with all the villains in Gotham who seem to be doing it for the chaos, I like seeing someone motivated by avarice.
Will: We certainly have gone beyond Jim Gordon: Manhunter, haven’t we? We got intricate plots and Talons and clones and all sorts of comic book-y weirdness in this issue alone. And while I’m not at all disappointed, I still sort of pine for a stripped down police procedural with Gordon at the center on his last great hunt. Alas.
Matt: I can see where you’re coming from, Brother Will, and I appreciate it, but for me, I can deal with whatever the plot throws at me, since the character shines through. This is still Jim Gordon’s story, the story of a good man put in a position where he has the opportunity to stop real evil in a way that is against his moral code, and who is struggling with it. Tynion has Gordon’s voice down perfectly. And it looks like the stuff with the Owls is going to play into Jim’s other lingering guilt, the stuff with James Jr. I would love to see that get an appropriate coda, since it started out so promising in “The Black Mirror” and has gotten so jumbled in every other use of the character. To see Jim finally get one chance to say goodbye to his son and make that peace is something I hope he gets.
Will: Here’s a question for you: What do you think happens to Gordon after this series? Does he get put on the shelf for a bit?
Matt: I hope so. Gordon is too major a character to go away for good, but this feels like a last ride that will entitle him to take a peaceful retirement until an event big enough to pull him back comes up. I don’t want it to just be another Tuesday in Gotham that makes him saddle up again; I want it to feel consequential.
Will: Head on up to Maine and work on those memoirs, Jim. You’ve earned it.
Matt: I’m glad (I think that’s the word for it anyway) to see our cannibals of Hooper County back. It’s been a few issues since they showed up, and they bring a very dark type of humor to this book that is very appropriate for a comic called The Joker. And how sassy they are about farm-grown human meat is both revolting and hilarious.
Will: Oh, you can totally tell the difference. Trust me.
Food, Fun and Phantoms
Matt: OK, so the first thing that jumped out to me about this issue is that this is our second book in two weeks featuring Dr. Double X, an obscure-as-all-get-out Silver Age villain. Are we looking at the next Kite Man in Simon Ecks?
Will: Hell … yeah? What was the first book he popped into? Puzzlebox?
Matt: Arkham City. He was the guy that the drug dealer was using to get people stoned on a contact high off of his astral form.
Will: Ahhhhhh … yes, he’s … uhhh … quite different here.
Matt: Yup, the difference between a superhero horror book and an all-ages book featuring a talking dog. But, as I’ve often said, the beauty of Batman and his world is that it works in all kinds of genres.
As with all the issues of this book, this is a loving, winking nod to everything that is great about these two properties. At this point, even the comic is calling out the fact that Batman and Mystery Inc. sure are teaming up a lot. I’m not always in love with meta commentary, but with this book, it feels like it fits.
Will: For what this aims to be, I’m not sure it could be any better — outside of some issues with the consistency in the art, this has been great. And this issue probably had my favorite, most-Mark-Hamill-able Joker moment: “Like poor Al Capone. So good at crime, so bad at paperwork.” You can’t write a funnier line than that.
Matt: And artist Dario Brizuela draws the heck out of it. He draws every character beautifully. There’s a great half page of Batman thinking about his rogues, and busts of them are all behind him in sepia tones, and they all look gorgeous. And he picks and chooses his styles for them. Most are classic Batman: The Animated Series designs, but Two-Face is more in a comic mold and Penguin is New Batman Adventures. It’s in the spirit of the best Batman all-ages stuff, that selects what it feels works best and uses that.
Robin Begins
Will: I’m going to start this off by saying this is on me. This was my idea for us to review the book, and I have to own that decision. This book is by no means bad; it is capably assembled by incredibly talented people. But this first issue was profoundly unpleasant to read.
Matt: This is definitely Batman through the lens of Jeff Lemire, who is the king of sad dad comics. The themes of fathers and sons and broken families are present in most of his best known works, and so it completely makes sense that he would dive into the roots of the relationship between Batman and Robin, and how broken they are, but while interesting from a certain angle, it isn’t going to bring a lot of joy.
Will: I get that for sure, and I love a good sad dad read as much as the next guy without a dad. But to me, this just feels like bad storytelling. Let’s imagine a Lemireverse of sad dad Bat stories, that’s basically what we have now but, like, 45% sadder. His starting point is a miserable, fractured Bruce/Dick relationship. Where does Dick’s arc go from there? More miserable? More fractured? That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not saying everything has to be sunshine and rainbows and happiness — especially in what aims to be a more realistic telling of the making of a child soldier — but there has to be room to grow in this story.
Matt: The child soldier stuff was very uncomfortable for me. I don’t like that take on the Batman and Robin dynamic in general, so it felt wrong to stress that. A Batman who takes in Dick to make him into a weapon is irredeemably broken, and is a situation where any Alfred in the omniverse (with the exception of evil Earth-3 Alfred) would put his foot down and get that kid out of there. I also think this fell on an inauspicious week for us, since we recorded a BatChat podcast with stories set in roughly the same time that paint a much less grim portrait of Batman.
Will: And that episode — in which we talk about three different tellings of Dick Grayson’s origin story — drops for the good people the week of Dec. 9. But you’re absolutely right — it wasn’t the best week to read this particular vision of the Bruce/Dick relationship. I think the thing that really scrambles my eggs is that Bruce is an inveterate asshole to everyone, not just Dick. That only works when we know why Bruce is being shitty. It’s no excuse, but it at least enables us to see that he’s processing some kind of trauma badly. A Bruce who’s an asshole for no reason? That’s some Frank Miller shit right there.
Matt: But I will say that I like the art on this quite a bit. I’ve been a fan of Dustin Nguyen since he did the underrated and sadly forgotten The Authority: Revolution with Ed Brubaker, through all his Detective Comics and Streets of Gotham with Paul Dini, his Li’l Gotham with Derek Fridolfs, and Descender/Ascender at Image with Lemire. Nguyen is that rare comic artist who can draw kids who look like kids, not shrunken adults, and who has great storytelling on the page. So while I didn’t love the story, I had a good time looking at it.
Will: I’ll vote to keep it on the BatChat Island of Reviews because 1) I’m curious to see if they can turn it around, 2) you liked that art (which was admittedly good!) and 3) I can continue to gripe about my poor life choice. Also, we only got two more of ’em. I can make it through that.
Bat-miscellany
- This week, on BatChat Super Platinum Audio Edition, we take a look at three stories in which *checks notes* … Batman … loses? That’s something that happens, apparently. Anyway, he gets his ass kicked and his spirit crushed into itty bitty bits, and we talk about it for an hour. Next week: Will’s Very Own Episode in Which He Picked Books That He Thought the Art Would Be Nice to Mixed Results.
- This week in Wayne Family Adventures on Webtoon: The Damian Wayne/Tim Drake prank war. And I am there for that. — Matt
- Dang it. We should have read that this week. — Will
- Another thing Al Capone was bad at? Not dying from a syphilitic brain disease.
- Favorite background joke in Bat/Scoob this week: restaurant Sholly’s Fish and Chips, a nod to longtime Scooby-Doo Team-Up and alternating Bat/Scoob writer Sholly Fisch. – Matt
- That’s a good joke right there. — Will
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.
