Damian’s maybe/sorta girlfriend, Flatline the apprentice to Lord Death Man, is in Gotham, and she’s looking for some missing family with Robin’s help. Meanwhile, Batman continues to look into the mystery of Man-Bat and Shush. Batman & Robin #7 is written by Joshua Williamson, drawn by Simone Di Meo, colored by Giovanna Niro and lettered by Steve Wands.
The world is nearing another great conflict. The economy still is fighting to recover from the Great Depression. Anti-semitism is on the rise. There is an insidious slide toward facism, and many Americans are all for it. It’s 1939, although it could be today. And in Gotham City, a new vigilante is on the streets. The Bat-Man is investigating the murders of prominent politicians by monsters, and what he finds is stranger than he imagined. The Bat-Man: First Knight #1, is written by Dan Jurgens, drawn by Mike Perkins, colored by Mike Spicer and lettered by Simon Bowland.
The Joker has gone to London to team up with a mad scientist, Dr. Xabaras. And where Joker goes, Batman is likely to follow. And in unfamiliar territory, Batman has to team up with Xabaras’ nemesis, nightmare investigator Dylan Dog. Batman/Dylan Dog #1 is written by Roberto Recchioni, drawn by Gigi Cavenago and Werther Dell’Edera, colored by Cavenago and Giovanna Niro and lettered by Pat Brosseau.
Matt Lazorwitz: Hey, did you hear the good news? We’re getting a sequel to Batman & Robin & Howard in September!
Will Nevin: Hot damn! I wondered why the OGN was getting serialized all of a sudden. There’s the answer right there. Good for Howard. And Robin and Batman.
BatDad
Matt: Batman & Robin is a title I feel like we’re circling the same points with each month, but not in a bad way necessarily. There’s something to be said for a book that is consistent. Bruce and Damian are growing together as father and son. They continue looking into Man-Bat and Shush, whose plan is big and strange, but never crosses into that “Joker War” territory of yet another exhausting Gotham-in-full-peril story.
Will: We’re not even totally sure who Shush is at this point (more like 65% sure), but the plan feels a bit convoluted at this point. Shush and Man-Bat are aligned … until she gets mad at him and runs off to Batman? Feels like a setup.
Matt: Yeah, it is a lot, and I hope that this Man-Bat plotline wraps up with this arc, and we get the answer to who Shush is. I’m fine with the slow burn, but I want resolution of plot at this point and keep slowly building the character stuff, because as we’ve said before, that’s where this book is at its best.
Will: Get me back to high school, ASAP, Matt. And if we’re gonna do more Man-Bat-inspired body horror, get me an artist who can play into that. What’s the point of having a yuppie die an excruciating death via Langstrom’s gnarly pharmacological claw if I can’t see all the freaky details?
Matt: The best character moment in this issue is once again Bruce showing some self-awareness (a trend I would love to see other writers take up in the future). “I am not one to lecture anyone on diving into the night with a known and dangerous criminal, son,” is a delightful line, and one many versions of Batman would not have delivered, instead just diving into said lecture.
Will: I am loathe to acknowledge Damian Wayne’s feisty attitude … but that could have been a funny moment for Batman to have a little less humility and for Damian to throw it back at him. Like, what if Damian had actually gotten a chuckle out of Dad for mentioning Catwoman there? That would have been fun. But I’m just griping.
Matt: It would have been fun, no doubt, but I like that we see that Bruce is growing as a father. It’s only taken him four sons to start getting it close to right.
Will: And only one of them died and stayed dead for an extended period! That’s a 75% success rate in my book.
Bat-Man Be-Gins
Will: I went into this hoping to like it, and whadya know? It is profoundly my shit. Pre-WWII scrawny ass Bat-Man detective-ing all over Gotham while undead goons are cuttin’ folks’ heads off. Clean off, Matt!
Matt: Oh, I was reading this and I was thinking this is the Bat comic Will has been waiting for! The undead guys feel like a riff on Monster Men to me, and I’d have no problem with them being Hugo Strange’s creatures, but I am also not against being surprised on that front.
Will: I got real Monster Men vibes, too — I was expecting to see Strange as the Blackgate warden. But there’s plenty of time for him to turn up as the prison doc, isn’t there?
Matt: Exactly!
Dan Jurgens, the writer on this, is an old hand, a guy who has been writing since the mid-’80s. He created Booster Gold, he wrote Superman for the better part of a decade. I was expecting pretty basic superhero stuff here, but I got a lot more than that. He is using the setting to draw obvious parallels with our current moment without slapping us in the face with it, and keeping Bat-Man engaging, while also not drowning us in, “Hey look, it’s this universe’s version of <insert Bat character here>!”
Will: Including an extended scene with a rabbi was such an interesting choice. If Cohen doesn’t show up again, it will certainly feel like a moment that went on too long, but I doubt that’s what’s happening here. This Bruce doesn’t have an Alfred (can’t keep a butler during the Great Depression, after all), so he’ll need allies — a rabbi, with America on the precipice of World War II, is fascinating from a storytelling perspective.
Matt: That was easily my favorite scene in this book. The reminder that it can happen here too from the mouth of someone who is seeing it is powerful. I also got a kick out of Julie Madison popping up as an actress, which was her Golden Age employment. Every bit of her dialogue dripped of that mid-Atlantic accent patter of a ’40s screwball comedy. I could hear Katharine Hepburn or Myrna Loy’s voice delivering those lines.
Will: That was a fun scene — another one that stuck out to me was Gordon narrating and giving his opinion of Bruce — that the trust fund nitwit was an act and there was a more serious man underneath — while Bruce is changing into costume. That was a moment with some real skill and a light touch. Like you said, Jurgens is a pro’s pro.
Matt: And speaking of pros, Mike Perkins’ art here is gorgeous. It feels thoroughly researched, capturing the clothing, the cars and the general look of 1939, but is at no point so photorealistic as to lead to questions about the use of AI or tracing rather than photo reference.
Will: There’s *one* panel in which Bruce gets a little too close to Henry Fonda, but, again, I’m quibbling. If this was originally conceived as an ongoing series, what a shame to only get this one chapter (that, yes, will continue to unfold).
Buy The Bat-Man: First Knight #1 here.
Dylan Who?
Matt: So, I’d wager many, if not most, of you, our dear readers, have zero idea who Dylan Dog is. He is an Italian comic book character, a John Constantine/Cal McDonald/Hellboy type paranormal investigator with a particularly blue collar bend. While over 400 issues of his adventures have been published in Italy, very little has made its way to the states, and what little there is was published by Dark Horse more than a decade ago.
Will: I had exactly zero clue who or what Dylan Dog was, but by the end of this super-sized issue, I was getting into it. It’s Constantine with a little bit of Deadpool in there — not everyone can pull off a butler named Groucho, you know.
Matt: Super-sized for the price of a regular comic. If you want the most bang for your comic buck this week, this is definitely the book for you. And all three issues are going to be this size and this price! That’s what you get with a translation of foreign material: It costs DC less, and for once they’re passing the savings onto us.
Will: I tend to be hard on the translated comics because I’m a dick, but I thought it mostly worked here — not having a lot of exposition helps. Groucho and Joker are probably the hardest voices to pull off, and they were mostly successful, even if the former seemed a bit more fluid and natural than the latter.
Matt: Joker is a very hard character to get right. Go too far one way, and he sounds like any other “insane” character. Go too far the other, and his dialogue is incomprehensible gibberish. Nowhere here did I lose his thread, but he maintained a bit of a sense of humor in his presentation. It’s not perfect, but we’ve read a heck of a lot worse.
Have I told you my theory as to why this is getting published in the States now, even though it came out in Italy in 2019?
Will: I think? But refresh me.
Matt: One of the two artists here, Werther Dell’Edera, is the regular artist and co-creator with James Tynion IV of Something Is Killing the Children, a series that started around the same time this was released, but has slowly built a following to be an indie success at BOOM Studios. I think DC finally realized they had something by the creator of a hit title that they could just publish with no hassle, and Bob’s your uncle, we finally get a book that I have been hoping to read since it was first announced.
Publishing stuff aside, I feel like this does a good job of introducing Dylan’s world, and setting up the series’ stakes. Setting it in Dylan’s London helps with that; bringing him to Gotham would have probably lost him in a lot of the usual madness of Gotham’s streets.
Also, apropos of very little: Groucho Marx would have made a very fun Riddler in a ’40s era Batman film.
Will: And just like Cesar Romero, he would not have shaved the mustache.
Bat-miscellany
- The BatChat podcast this week is a very special episode. This week, we read three stories that Matt remembered really hating the first time he read them. And after reading them again? Both Matt and Will hated them. It gets loud.
- “Strange Fruit,” the somber 1939 Billie Holiday song about the lynching of Black Americans referenced in Bat-Man, was written by a Jewish activist from the Bronx.
- If the name Dylan Dog seems familiar but you can’t place it, it might be because Brandon Routh starred in a US film adaptation that came out in the early 2010s that did get some TV advertising, but about five people actually saw it. And honestly, it is to those comics what Keanu Reeves’ Constantine is to Hellblazer comics, so …
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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.
