The “Batman, Wanted” arc concludes, as Batman’s allies rush his unconscious body to the docks to get him out of the city before the Orghams finish what they started. With some unlikely help, they can do it, but what will this mean for Gotham? The lead story of Detective Comics #1,080 is written by Ram V, drawn by Jason Shawn Alexander and Mike Perkins, colored by Dave Stewart and lettered by Ariana Maher. In the backup, Damian Wayne remembers the tales his mother told him as they come back to haunt the young Robin in a story written by Dan Watters, drawn by Christopher Mitten, colored by Triona Farrell and lettered by Steve Wands.
We catch up on Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the anthology series, with issues #6-8. These include stories by various creators, including a lead Batman story by Guillem March, a Wild Dog serial from Kyle Starks and Fernando Pasarin, and various Batman: Black and White shorts.
And as the holidays wind down, we end the season with Batman teaming up with that ultimate holiday hero in the four-issue miniseries Batman/Santa Claus: Silent Knight, written by Jeff Parker; drawn by Michele Bandini, Trevor Hairsine, Steven Segovia and Danny Kim; colored by Alex Sinclair; and lettered by Pat Brosseau.
Matt Lazorwitz: Last BatChat of 2023. We’ve certainly read a lot of Batman comics this year.
Will Nevin: Many of them were good! Most were OK! More of the former in 2024, please.
’Tec
Matt: The intermezzo of “Gotham Nocturne” wraps up this issue. And things aren’t exactly looking great for Batman. Which is an odd choice of words, admittedly, because this book looks great, as have all parts of this run.
Will: What, you don’t want to be possessed by a demon and set adrift in the ocean with only a former lover and occasional supervillain to help you? Nah, sounds like everything is going just fine for Batman.
Matt: And even better for Gotham, as the Orgham reality engine is slowly writing Batman out of the fabric of Gotham, with only a few people left fighting to maintain his memory. That’s going to be a fun city!
I know we both, and you especially, have commented on how tired we are of stories about the fate of Gotham hanging in the balance. But this? This feels different. We’ve commented on that before as well, but as we reach this point in the story, I’m really trying to figure out the why of that. What makes this more engaging than “Joker War” or “Fear State”? And I think that comes down to craft and patience for me. Ram V has been building this from his first issue on the book. It’s been a slow build, and we have seen the motivations of the villains. Joker is just about chaos, but that doesn’t have to be this particular old saw. Simon Saint was a straw man, this parody of the Elon Musk-type billionaire. We have spent time slowly getting to know Arzen Orgham, and now our ultimate foe, Dariah Orgham (and that was a hell of a sequence here), and that has made me appreciate the stakes here more.
Will: This is a Gotham conquered not with muscles and bombs and guns but with rewriting reality itself. That sort of high-concept thinking is what sets this story apart from those rote, perfunctory pieces you mentioned. Reading those felt like a slog. This has never not been fun and beautiful.
Matt: And I also think it helps that this feels epic. That we have a wide, diverse cast of characters who are coming and going over the course of the run, appearing as needed, then going away only to come back later. And it’s reveling in the history of the character. This issue, we have Renee Montoya take up the mantle of the Question again. There was that one backup in issue #1,076, yes, but now this is part of the main narrative, and is playing off a beat that happened, and could have just been forgotten. Everything here, in both the main narrative and the backups, feels intentional and planned out. Heck, the backup here ties back into a flashback from over a year ago that could have also been just something that was there to fill in back story but is now affecting character.
Will: Hooboy, seeing the Question and knowing she’s about to get on a righteous path (albeit one without a satisfactory ending, maybe) is exciting. I can’t wait to read more of that.
Matt: All the cliffhangers here have my interest. Batman and Barbatos, with Dr. Hurt and Flamingo in pursuit, is going to be fascinating, and Dariah Orgham actively taking over in Gotham doesn’t bode well for anyone. This series just continues to keep me breathless.
Read Detective Comics #1,080 here.
Brave & the Bold
Will: There are few people on this planet (proportionally speaking, of course) with enough talent and drive to become successful comic book artists. There are fewer still who can both write and create their own comic works. And almost all of them need some editing.
Matt: Ah, yes, so over these three issues of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Guillem March has stepped in to write a story, since Tom King and Mitch Gerads have completely lost momentum on their retelling of the first Batman/Joker story by taking at least nine issues for that four-part story.
Will: The only thing better than a serialized story is one that takes long-ass gaps in between installments!
Matt: Say whatever else you can, March at least gets all three parts out back to back to back.
Will: But the hook here — the thing that makes the story — gets paid off at the end of the second installment. Everything after that is noise. Again, I think an experienced writer would have a better feel for that and know when they’ve overstuffed the casserole.
Matt: If this were a one-shot, having the big reveal and being able to roll right into a big fight scene works. But the cliffhanger here just leads to a Batman comic we’ve read a hundred times before in the finale, only with a second Batman. The first part of this story was quite good, actually, and as someone who has said he’s not a particularly big fan of March before, that is saying something.
The three parts are three distinct acts here. Part 1: Batman is found with amnesia by a woman and her daughter. They help him heal and he becomes a father figure to the girl and romantically involved with the mother. Part 2: He goes out and starts doing Batman stuff again, only to respond to the Bat Signal and find out, oops, he’s not really Batman, just a high-tech burglar who robbed one of Batman’s weapons caches. Part 3: Big fight, as Scarface has traced “Batman” back to his new family and there’s a fight to save everyone. All the really interesting stuff happens by the end of Part 2.
Will: It sure does. We spend so much time with a Batman who can’t remember anything in that first part, all to learn that he’s not really who he thinks he is? That’s a fun twist. One I genuinely didn’t see coming. But by the end of the third chapter, it feels more like a Scarface story than anything else, especially when March becomes tied up with what he can do with our favorite (only?) puppet villain. One of the hardest parts of being a writer is figuring out what you can bring to a story and how to make that really shine — and March muddied all of his good stuff up.
Matt: Also, as I’ve stated in other discussions, March loves drawing sexy ladies. And so Catwoman has a prominent part in this story, which just feels like a hat on a hat. And it’s especially strange that Magdalena figures out that real Batman isn’t the same Batman she’s been shacking up with because she kisses him and it feels wrong, but Selina doesn’t figure out the inverse by kissing the faux Batman. I thought at the time that would be a big hint, but she didn’t react, and it felt especially odd to then use that beat the next issue.
Will: Some of the voices weren’t quite right either, and Gordon felt especially off. The broad outlines of a good story were here, but the execution just wasn’t there. But, you know what? Kyle Starks is as good as ever.
Matt: Oh, is he ever. Wild Dog is another of those characters, like Peacemaker, who fits the Starks mold, and while they both sound like Starks characters, there’s enough difference in their voices that they’re not the same character.
Will: Peacemaker is a (usually) lovable idiot. Wild Dog is a wiseass. That was the distinction to me. Also, Peacemaker has at least met the Justice League. I don’t think Wild Dog is quite at that level.
Matt: No, no he’s not.
This book is settling into a nice content groove, with a Batman lead, two stories of other heroes in the DC Universe and a Batman: Black and White at the back. None of these Black and Whites were particularly memorable, but not bad either. I’ll continue to hang on and wait for the one that pops up and blows me away, because they usually happen. Just a matter of waiting.
Will: I thought the one in #8 was pretty rough — story wasn’t the easiest to follow and (like many of the Black and Whites) it didn’t do much to take advantage of the format.
Matt: I agree on that, absolutely. None of the ones in this group of issues felt like they needed to be Black and White; they just were shorts that happened to be in black and white.
Read Batman: The Brave & the Bold #8 here.
Santa
Matt: I thought I had reached the point where I’d never care about meeting another one of the people who trained Batman. But when it turns out that one of them was Santa Claus? OK, you have my attention.
Will: We know that he went to the ends of the Earth and even space (Offworld is now canon; deal with it, losers), so why wouldn’t he go to the North Pole? While this was maybe not the most essential of reads and was ultimately hurt by inconsistent art, this was a fun book.
Matt: Which is what you want from a Batman-meets-Santa Claus story. It worked to tread a fine line of never being goofy, while also not going so far into darkness that it wasn’t accessible. I don’t think it qualifies as all ages, like Bat/Scoob, but I think I could hand this to a 10-year-old with no problem.
Will: Yeah, I’d agree with that assessment — there’s some violence, sure, but it doesn’t get too rough (at least from what I remember). And generally, this thing is cute! I loved the gag with Santa telling our heroes their addresses. And Clark being especially excited to meet Santa? Oh, yeah, that tracks.
Matt: That page was a delight. He seemed maybe not hurt, but a little disappointed at least that Bruce never told him he knew Santa. Jeff Parker does a good job capturing all the character voices here, but especially Damian. He’s the Damian of the current Batman & Robin, still a little smarter than thou, but not the brat of earlier. And the very end, where Santa offers the child who never had a childhood the chance to tag along on his rounds? Precious.
Will: And the other heroes get to have Christmas dinner while time stands still for the rest of the world? Perfect. Still, poor Damian never got the spy satellite to track all his enemies. No wonder he’s a brat.
Matt: The take on Santa Claus here seems similar to the one from Klaus, Grant Morrison and Dan Mora’s BOOM Studios series that takes a lot of the pagan influences and works them back into the Santa Claus myth. And while that’s far from the only place to do that, bringing Morrisonian influences into your Batman comic does have some precedent.
I agree with what you said earlier about the art. I wish that one artist could have done this series, or at least if you needed multiples, you could have one artist per issue. And Michele Bandini, who did at least some of the art for the first three issues, just not doing anything in issue #4 hurt it big time. Issue #4 felt especially rushed in the art department, frankly.
Will: We have no idea when this thing was greenlit, but they knew when they wanted to release it. Why not have your artist working on this for a whole year or more? Lives and schedules and plans can get blown to hell in all sorts of ways, but it seems like if this thing isn’t coming together the way you want it to, you can always hold it for a year. Puzzling, Matt.
Matt: I could say something cynical about their corporate masters not caring about quality as long as they make certain quotas, but, well. I guess I just said it. This was a fun book, and I think it will make a good trade as a gift for someone next Christmas.
Will: What a merry little place to leave it, Matt.
Read Batman/Santa Claus: Silent Knight #4 here.
Bat-miscellany
- This week’s BatChat podcast features our annual New Year’s Elseworlds episode, with three Elseworlds tales set near the turn of the 20th century.
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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.
