The tension has been boiling for years, and now it has exploded. Damian Wayne has come to kill his father, and he’s brought some friends along. And Batman has his own ally at hand … the seemingly resurrected Alfred Pennyworth. Batman vs. Robin #1 is written by Mark Waid, drawn by Mahmud Asrar, colored by Jordie Bellaire and lettered by Steve Wands.
Jace Fox and the Question dig into Detective Keenan, the crooked cop who may have killed Anarky, while Tiff Fox makes a fateful decision in I Am Batman #13, written by John Ridley, drawn by Christian Duce, colored by Rex Lokus and lettered by Troy Peteri.
Batman: Urban Legends #19 gives the Signal some closure, furthers Alfred’s adventure, watches what happens when Two-Face flips his coin and has a couple creepy mysteries.
Matt Lazorwitz: We are on the eve of the most holy day of the year: Batman Day. Tomorrow, go to your local participating comic shop, everyone, and bask in the Batman goddess. There is a free comic that is an excerpt from Batman’s Mystery Casebook. That will be worth the trip on its own.
Will Nevin: A totally real and definitely not artificial holiday designed to move merch. How will you be celebrating, Matt? I’m gonna watch Mask of the Phantasm for our September bonus episode.
Matt: A better way to celebrate, I cannot think of.
HE’S BACK!!!!!
Matt: My hopes. My hopes, they have been raised. This could be the real thing. It could also be an event thing, where whatever was done to facilitate the return must end to stop the big threat, but for now? Alfred is back!
Will: Other stuff happened in this issue, right? Probably. But Alfred Pennyworth is alive. Somehow! Matt, I tell you, I thought first he was going to be some illusion. Then, I reckoned Damian was going to kill him. I was absolutely sure Mark Waid was going to give us the thing we’ve wanted for so long only to take it away. This issue had me TENSE AS FUCK.
Matt: But no, Alfred is alive, and wonderful as ever. He is the voice of compassion. Even as Damian attacks Bruce with the help of Jakeem Thunder and Tim freakin’ Hunter, Alfred reaches out. Alfred wants to help Damian. It’s exactly why we need Alfred.
Will: Putting aside the enormity of one Mr. Pennyworth (the origin of Batman’s butler) for a moment, there’s not much else I cared for here. Damian is not just itching for a fight; he’s trying to kill Batman with a ruthlessness we haven’t seen since he beat up your boy Tim Drake. And yes, there’s some mystery in what’s driving him to do that, but it’s not enough to emotionally invest a reader. In short, I think this is too much of Waid leaning into his Irredeemable/”Tower of Babel” impulses to throw in the most violent, unsettling ideas possible into his superhero books — and that goes double for the viscerally unpleasant Zatanna depiction.
Matt: Oof, yes. Somewhere Paul Dini is seething.
If we held back on that last-page reveal, maybe this would be more of a mystery and leave us with something to puzzle out, but if you read the first arc of the recent World’s Finest, you know that Nezha can work a serious whammy on people, so it’s obvious he’s somehow affecting Damian.
I think I might have enjoyed this a bit more than you, but not by much.
Will: There’s just not a whole lot to it — Alfred comes back, Bruce reacts in exactly the way you’d expect and then Killbot Damian shows up to wreck house. I can get into some of that. But not all of it.
Matt: Mahmud Asrar does draw the heck out of it. He’s an artist who draws really expressive faces, which is clutch for the scene between Bruce and Alfred at the beginning. You see all the emotions they’re both feeling, and they are deeply felt. And the look on Damian’s face when the control slips when he thinks about Alfred and first sees him. And the final moment in the Batboat between Alfred and Bruce? I won’t deny getting a bit choked up.
Also, Jakeem Thunder rides a dinosaur through the Batcave. Points for that.
Will: If you can ride a dinosaur, ride a dinosaur.
Matt: I am not against this series, and it’s nowhere near the drop-it-from-the-column place. I want to see what happens when Talia joins in the antics, and I need to know more about the mystery of Alfred’s return. But this issue just sort of sets things up. Now that those pieces are in place, let’s see what Waid can do.
Batman vs. a Dirty Cop Is Always a Good Story
Matt: I was so happy with the direction this book was going in. And while it’s not as bad as some of the earlier issues, I feel like we took a step back here, with all the plots again.
Will: You know, for whatever reason, I didn’t mind this one so much — Ridley didn’t rely on his transition crutch on *every* page, and I liked the idea that our crooked detective could be so open and notoriously crooked that he’d just admit to murder. That’s a level of evil you rarely see out of costume.
Matt: And it makes sense for a cop this bent; he truly not only believes he is in the right, but also that he is untouchable because he is the police. And that he sees that in everyone else. The scene with him talking to Montoya at the diner is … not chilling exactly, but just an example of mundane, banal evil. This is a guy who just assumes everyone has to feel the way he does.
Will: Racists do tend to do that, don’t they? I’ll say this for the book, and maybe this gets at your criticism: My general liking of that evil-out-in-the-open concept aside, it didn’t seem like the plot advanced all that much. And the gang stuff — even as it included a critique of privilege — seemed pretty mundane.
Matt: And homophobic. Don’t forget Keenan is a homophobe, too. A real turd sandwich, this guy.
That is definitely part of it. I don’t mind a mostly actionless issue, especially when it’s a mystery and we’re getting an investigation, but the whole thing with Keenan could have been wrapped up in two pages and we could have gotten some momentum. And if we had removed the asides with Hadiyah and with Chubb and Mueller, we also could have forwarded either of the main plots. Those scenes are both important, but they could have been saved for the next arc, or the next breather issue between arcs, I think. Maybe I’m wrong and they’ll come to bear this arc, but it doesn’t seem that way.
Will: Maybe some of that stuff had to be in there — in Ridley’s mind — to get us where he wanted us to be: on the cusp of a New York City Robin.
Matt: I do like the slow dawning of Tiff’s realization that she has to do more. It’s natural for someone in their early teens. I would like to spend more time with Tam, though. All we ever see her do is stand there and give sage advice to Tiff. Tam was a supporting cast member in the pre-New 52 Red Robin series, so I am probably biased by her connection to Tim Drake, but more than that, she doesn’t feel like a character so much as a plot device and mouthpiece. Give her some frustrations with her PT, or her trying to get back to a job or school with everything that has happened to her. There’s an arc right there.
Will: It’s not fair to read this book in relation to Gotham Central, but you could squint and see how you might have some of the same themes, only this time more critical of police and their practices. Even just reading the one arc that we’ve done for the podcast, you can see a real difference: The characters of Gotham Central are developed with emotions and motivations, whereas most of the characters here outside of Jace are flat. Keenan is great as a foil, but we haven’t seen nearly enough attention paid to almost anyone else.
Matt: How much of this series is setting up the new Montoya miniseries GCPD: The Blue Wall? It feels like Ridley brought Montoya to New York just to show her how bad things can be, so she can go back to Gotham and try to make it right. There will be a book to read alongside Gotham Central and see how it stacks up.
Will: Talk about setting someone up for failure, jeez! We know for sure then that Montoya will ultimately turn down the offer to become NYPD commissioner, which does make this feel like an unnecessary bit.
Matt: In the end, I guess she came to investigate the death of Anarky more than seriously take the job, but it feels a bit bait-and-switch-y if you follow solicitations and know that this is exactly where it’s going, true.
Happy Endings, Creepy Puppets and Reptile Vore
Matt: So, Will, one of our few disagreements, and this is a fairly genial one as these things go, is that I like the format of an anthology with the continuing features, while you prefer them self-contained. This month’s Urban Legends has three self-contained stories, one that’s the conclusion of a two-parter and one that seems to be a bit longer. How does that format feel to you?
Will: I feel like this one is generally better? It’s easy picking up something that’s not the sixth installment of an eight-part story. And all of these stories are solid aside from a few quibbles, my primary one being that the Duke Thomas story ties up entirely too nicely. His mom was suffering from Joker toxin for ages … and then she’s just cured? Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Matt: See, I’m just glad that’s done. She’s been Jokerfied since “Endgame.” This needed to come to some conclusion eventually, and I like that some member of the Bat family got a happy ending in a parent-related story. And that story has a nice contrast of Duke’s love for his mother and his quest to help her vs. Dr. March’s obsessive and unwanted attention toward Francine Langstrom, his daughter. That was my quibble: That’s there and not really discussed. It would have been more interesting to see Duke confront March rather than Metamorpho for that reason.
Will: If it was the addition of the Man-Bat formula that made curing her possible — after all other attempts had failed — I think that needed to have been underlined in the story a bit more. But you’re right that this ends in a good place.
Matt: We also get two particularly creepy one-shots in here. Zac Thompson’s story is moody, and sold on the art by Hayden Sherman. The Killer Croc story is creepy, but mostly because Brandon Easton gives us a villain who is … yucky. I’m not going to yuck most people’s yum, but a dude who is seemingly sexually drawn to Killer Croc and reptiles, and is willing to go as far as crocodile vore? Yuck.
Will: Some folks are born to be monster fuckers, Matt. I SUPPORT THEM. But carving up other animals to get your skin suit? Seems a little off-brand there, my monster fucker man. The Two-Face … two-pager … seemed like it should have been more or cut out entirely, the irony of it only being two pages notwithstanding.
Matt: That was a cool idea that could have been built into a larger Two-Face story. I think it’s an example of form over function. A two-page Two-Face story is a bit twee if you ask me. I like that idea that there is a part of him that lives only in the moment of Schrodinger’s coin flip, where it could be good heads or bad heads, though. That’s some smart philosophizing.
Will: And the idea that was reflected so well in the Batman ‘89 miniseries: Play out all the results of his various flips, and there really *is* an infinite universe of outcomes. Another highlight for me was, as you pointed out, the Thompson/Sherman story. A nice, tight horror piece with a fun twist.
Matt: Oh, yes. The Ventriloquist is a character who lends himself to horror way better than he is often portrayed. All those spider-web cracks in his persona, each facet made manifest in a different puppet? There is something really creepy there.
And next issue looks like we’re getting Alfred versus an elder god. I am down for that.
Will: After the drought we’ve gone through, I’ll take Alfred in whatever story I can get him. But that does sound badass.
Bat-miscellany
- It’s the 30th anniversary of the first appearance of Harley Quinn, so what better way to celebrate than to listen to the new episode of the BatChat podcast featuring three stories starring Harley?
- After reading that Croc story, I think I need to read last week’s DC all-ages My Buddy, Killer Croc. It would be nice to see a story that gives Croc a happy ending. And I figure if it’ll happen anywhere, it will be in an all-ages book.
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.
