BatChat Isn’t Mad at This Week’s Bat Books, It’s Just Disappointed

After being blasted by Failsafe, Batman wakes up in a world very different from the Gotham he knows. Batman #132 is written by Chip Zdarsky, penciled by Mike Hawthorne, inked by Adriano Di Benedetto, colored by Tomeu Morey and lettered by Clayton Cowles. In the backup, Tim Drake is sure that Batman is alive and is trying to find evidence while keeping Gotham safe in a story written by Zdarsky, drawn by Miguel Mendosa, colored by Roman Stevens and lettered by Cowles.

Helen Wayne, the infant princess of Gotham, has been found dead, and Slam Bradley is in it up to his neck. Between the cops and the Waynes, Slam is between a rock and a hard place. Gotham City: Year One #5 is written by Tom King, penciled by Phil Hester, inked by Eric Gapstur, colored by Jordie Bellaire and lettered by Clayton Cowles. 

Joker Deux is fleeing Gotham General Hospital, but the GCPD and Red Hood are trying to capture him (at best). The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #5 is written by Matthew Rosenberg, drawn by Carmine Di Giandomenico, colored by Arif Prianto and lettered by Tom Napolitano. In the backup, Zatanna curses Joker with the worst thing: a child, in a story written by Rosenberg, drawn and colored by Francesco Francavilla and lettered by Napolitano.

Home is Where the Heart Is. But Batman’s Not Home.

Matt: I take back my “This is all in Batman’s head” theory, since it’s pretty obvious we’re playing around with the multiverse thing. 

Will: And what a boring ass universe this is. Everyone is hooked on venom. Police try to throw as many people in Arkham as they can for … reasons. Even Bruce (reportedly) gave it all up to become a social worker. But your fave Dr. Leslie Tompkins appears to have settled down with Alfred, so at least that’s something interesting.

Matt: I usually don’t mind being dropped into a story in the middle, but here, I need more context. I know we’re going to get the issue that explains why the world is the way it is, and at that point I might care more, but I have a feeling this is going in the It’s a Wonderful Life vein, which we saw Tom King do in that Booster Gold arc of his run, and well, damning with faint praise, this is still way better than that grimdark nightmare.

I see that Zdarsky is going for a story of why Batman is important to Gotham. And approaching that from this angle, of a Gotham where Bruce never became Batman is … something. It’s just not anything new.

Will: We’ve talked many, many Elseworlds stories on the pod (‘bout time to do some more, if you ask me), and I think the ones we’ve liked most take big, wild swings at the character, like what happens if Batman fights Dracula or maybe Bruce Wayne grows up in a world where the American Revolution never happened and he’s a techno-priest in the Anglican Church. (For real, that story exists.) This is just Gotham on a bad day. It’s not bad, sure, but it’s not engaging either.

Matt: I like Zdarsky’s take on Batman, though. I like that he makes him just a bit more fragile, a bit more human. 

Will: Hold on there, slick. His Batman is more human? He says in this issue that he “survived a fall from the moon” … which is a callback I simply would not do. Your point, though, stands. I just really hated goofy bits and still do, goddamnit.

Matt: There’s a moment where he’s looking at Jewel, the local who rescued him, and he likens aspects of her to Jason and Dick. There’s a whole narrative bit of him thinking about Selina, and how this isn’t his Selina and that he loves his Selina. And as he, beaten and bruised, stops a cop from beating up an innocent? That is pure Batman. And the moment when he sees Alfred? OOF! 

Will: I liked how he repeated that neither this Alfred nor Selina are his, almost like a mantra. That — despite my sarcasm — was a good moment. Here’s my question, though: Were you able to glean why a fight broke out during that scene with Selina? One minute they were talking, and the next thing you know, you’ve got Venom’d Punchline (as if there was a less interesting version of the character) smashing stuff up. Also, can we call this the Contrived Universe? Awfully convenient there’s “no internet here” so Bruce can create his fake Metropolis billionaire persona.

Matt: Well, we know from last issue that Red Mask assigned Selina to bring in Bruce. And when she wasn’t able to seduce him, she just decided to whip him. And with Punchline jumping right in, I don’t think it takes much of a leap to determine Red Mask is Joker.

Will: Again, I am begging DC with all of my being for recap pages. And, yeah, Red Mask is some known person in our prime universe — but I think my money is still on Bruce.

Matt: Another sound bet. 

I did enjoy the Tim Drake backup. Simple little superhero story; we got to see him interact with Mr. Terrific, another character I love, and we got a scene with him and Bernard. I’ve been liking the Tim Drake: Robin series, but so much of what’s going on there sees Tim wrestling with what to tell Bernard and not. This sweet little domestic scene warmed my cold heart.

Will: That’s my bit, Matt — you’re the nice one. I liked how the story lingered on the incredibly frightening prospect of interdimensional travel. What if you don’t come back to your universe? You don’t know what shit is out there. These people should be afraid of that.

Matt: Again, we’re hard on this main story because we know Zdarsky can do better. There is so much weight to that idea, and it’s something I wish we could see explored in other books, especially with the restoration of infinite Earths.

Will: The day we’re not hard on Batman is the day we should hang it up, brother.

A Darker Shade of Noir

Matt: Gotham City: Year One is officially the pitch-blackest noir I have read in a very long time. We now have most of the answers to whodunnit, and next issue we’ll find out the last couple whys. A noir exists in a world where no character is a white knight; true heroes die in Act One, if they exist at all. And the shades of gray have gotten progressively darker until now, when no one seems to be anything but a villain or a dupe.

Will: And both parents would be in on the plot to kidnap their own daughter.

Matt: Not just in on it, but at cross purposes! I went back and read my predictions from the last column about who I thought was behind all this, and I was eerily right in some places and so far off base in others. 

Will: Ma Wayne’s involvement here looks particularly dark in how she may have directed the illicit burial of her daughter to implicate her husband’s mistress. Again, not much sunshine here. The last time we chatted, I think I was a bit higher on this series than you were, and we might be meeting in the middle after this issue. All of the flashbacks and plots and plots within flashbacks really slowed this one down.

Matt: I think I would have forgiven the use of black and white for the flashbacks from most other comics, but it just reads as another Tom King bit of formalism. It’s gotten hard for me to look at any of his tricks now without rolling my eyes. And that might have been a decision by Jordie Bellaire, but it reeks of King playing with form while forgetting function.This entire issue is basically an info dump until the very end, when we get Slam doing some roughneck stuff to get the last bit of info he needs.

Will: Not a lot of detecting going on, was there? He made assumptions, played hunches, sure, but there weren’t any bits where he followed evidence. A few scenes of that could have broken up the monotony of this issue.

Matt: But hey, we got a tarot reading. Nothing like a tarot reading of an unwilling character to do … next to nothing.

Will: What a slow, weird, “I guess it was some kind of lie detector test” bit.

Matt: “The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help.” I guess Queenie wasn’t a robot. 

I am trying to figure out how to stick this landing. We’re going to have to figure out why Bruce is talking to elder Slam, and then exactly how Bruce is related to these people. I think the possibility you brought up, that Slam is his grandfather, is a possibility, although that would get us into White Knight, “Bruce isn’t really a Wayne” territory that I would sooner avoid.

Will: I think you’re right in that we don’t have much left to do in the series with those two issues and the final confrontation at the manor to go. I’m still sticking to my Pee Paw Bradley theory — he’s got a very Bruce-like look about him in this series.

Stuck in Neutral

Matt: We are five issues into this volume of Joker, and I am officially unsure of what it is trying to do or be.

Will: I have officially given up — just pulling down my pants and sliding on the ice of the backups, which continue to be one of the weirdest things going. But you’re right in that this series seems to be uniquely aimless; there’s no depth or development or drama, and that’s without the unfair comparison of the first volume. 

Matt: I don’t know what I can say about this book that I haven’t in the past four months. The Joker as a central character doesn’t work for me. Especially when there’s two of him. I don’t sympathize or empathize with either one. And Jason has been back from the dead for so long now. Why, all of a sudden, has he decided it’s time to go after Joker again? I thought we would get a good character scene between him and Spoiler, the two screw-ups of the Bat family (that’s how they think of themselves, anyway). But instead it gets interrupted by a fire and then Spoiler just disappears.

Will: It’s like this series can’t linger on anything interesting for too long. Even the payoff in this issue was pretty lame. Clayface? Come on.

Matt: I don’t like writing an entire one of these where we’re down on all three books, but I found very little to like here. It just feels like a placeholder. Like we’re filling space until issue 12, when this all gets wrapped up so it fits in two nice trades. At the end of this issue, Joker is after Joker Deux and Jason is after any Joker he can get. That is the same status quo as the beginning. We didn’t learn anything new about either Joker, and Jason seems to continue to revert to something akin to what he was far back in his timeline.

There are people who probably read this book for the over-the-top chaos. For the violence and for Joker doing Joker things. But we don’t even get much of that this issue!

Will: ‘Member in the beginning of the series when Joker was supposedly taking his brand national? That didn’t go anywhere.

Matt: That’s the kind of thing we should have seen hints of across the entire line. Not a crossover, but a mention of crime being down in <insert city name here> because everyone is afraid Joker will show up and kill them. It would help make a cohesive universe, but I feel like DC is less and less concerned with that. The two most recent events, Dark Crisis and Lazarus Planet, are so compartmentalized, I don’t feel like they have affected much of anything. A little hint that something going on in what I assume is a strong-selling and high-profile book is taking place in the same world as other books would be nice.

Will: Let me offer you a beacon of sunshine in a dreary discussion: Next time out, we could cover *only* the backup. How fun would that be? Joker might go to the moon and fall in love with an alien only to get his pecker bitten off or something crazy like that.

Matt: The backups remain a delight. A gross delight (Jokers popping out of zits on the face of a giant Joker is not something I ever thought I’d see), but a delight nonetheless. I keep trying to figure out if there is going to be more to these, but at this point, and after Rosenberg’s response to idiot right-wing trolls, I think they’re just a trifle. And I will take that.

Will: As will I, sir. As will I.

Bat-miscellany

• In this week’s BatChat podcast, it’s three stories of Hugo Strange and his Monster Men.
• Please, for the love of God, Tom King, stop naming every location after a previous Batman creator. It stopped being cute so very long ago.

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.

Will Nevin

Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.