It was Joker all along in this week’s BatChat (Plus: ’89, BatScoob)

Batman receives startling revelations about how long Joker has known about Zur-En-Arrh and who has been manipulating the rivalry between Batman and Joker for years. With this knowledge, Batman is more committed than ever to escaping Zur’s prison and stopping the rogue robot before it can further destroy his reputation and his family. “Dark Prisons” continues in Batman #146, written by Chip Zdarsky, drawn by Jorge Jimenez, colored by Tomeu Morey and lettered by Clayton Cowles.

Imprisoned in Arkham Asylum under an assumed name, Bruce Wayne has a therapy session with Dr. Jonathan Crane before meeting some familiar faces in the asylum. Harleen Quinzel has a chance to secure her primetime TV spot if she just breaks a few little medical privacy laws. Batman ‘89: Echoes #2 is written by Sam Hamm, drawn by Joe Quinones, colored by Leonardo Ito and lettered by Carlos M. Mangual.

People in Gotham are randomly turning into Grotesques (Not gargoyles. Gargoyles have water spouts in their mouths). Batman and Mystery Inc. investigate this strange occurrence in The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #4, written by Sholly Fisch, drawn by Megan Huang, colored by Franco Riesco and lettered by Saida Temofonte.

Will Nevin: OK, so we got the alternate version of Batman #428 in which Jason Todd lives, only to find himself in a coma. And now we’re getting a whole assed miniseries? I’m ready for the new pocket DC universe where Jason never died and instead grew up to be a well-adjusted, super happy sidekick.

Matt Lazorwitz: While I doubt Jason would be so lucky as to wind up happy and well-adjusted, I am also excited to see where that miniseries goes. There’s a lot of potential for what the world would be like, what those stories would be like. They won’t do it here, obviously, but I kinda would be curious to see how certain tentpole Bat stories would go down with Jason instead of Tim. “Knightfall” with Jason would be fascinating. Maybe a civil war in the Bat family, with Jason siding with Azrael’s more edgy approach upon Bruce’s return, with a Batman & Nightwing vs. AzBats & Robin kicker?

Will: Sounds like a great WrestleMania main event, Matt.

Whose Game Is This? 

Matt: So it all comes down to the Joker. Everything in this run, from the first issue, has now been revealed to be the work of Joker playing Batman. And of course the mysterious Dr. Captio manipulating the manipulator. You have a word you use often when it comes to these kinds of stories: contrived. And this feels like the definition of contrived superhero storytelling. I have a couple specific comments about Joker and his use, and Captio, but I want you to weigh in before I get to that.

Will: I don’t know if “contrived” was the first word that popped into my head, but it’ll do just as fine as anything I came up with. (“Boring” was probably the thing that jumped into the ol’ noggin first.) But this has to be Joker’s longest, most complicated plot ever, right? We’ve got stuff dating to at least Scott Snyder’s run, but the problem — as it has been with most of this story — is that none of it works to generate any sense of stakes or meaning. I mean, when we’ve got a robot talking Superman into believing it is Bruce Wayne reborn, I just feel that we’ve lost the thread a bit. Actually, more than a bit. This arc is the Die Another Day of Batman stories.

Matt: Oh, longer than that! According to Captio, everything Joker has done since at least The Killing Joke has been to get Batman to unleash Zur. I don’t like the idea that Joker has spent a decade of comic book time trying to work on one scheme, and everything he’s done has just been a part of it. It removes the mutability of Joker, and instead makes him obsessed over this one thing. I can see the argument that it makes him a better foil for Batman, that he is just as obsessed, but I prefer to view him as the agent of chaos, and this isn’t that. I keep almost backing over this argument, because a good Joker is never about pure chaos, but more the destruction of order, but I’m splitting hairs.

Will: And how many Joker plots failed in that decade? But their failure was all part of the larger plan, right? Sure. Uh huh. *eye roll*

Matt: The other thing that really bugs me about that whole thing is the fact that this run started in issue #126, and we don’t even get a hint of Joker until #139. And then no Captio until later. I don’t mind a twist, but I want the twist to feel earned, and unless a reread with this foreknowledge lets me see hints I didn’t see the first time, it’s just there because Zdarksy wanted to write Joker, something I can’t blame him for. I can almost deal with that, but Captio is one of those characters that I feel nothing for. He appeared in a couple issues of The Knight and then comes up here as the great manipulator playing this chess game with Batman and Joker as pieces. You know who did something similar? Dr. Hurt. You know who I was excited to see when he came back recently in Detective because of the slow burn to introduce him and the fact that he felt like a character more than just a plot device in previous stories? Dr. Hurt. This guy is no Dr. Hurt, no matter how hard he wants to be.

Will: Well, Matt, I guess when you create some new toys (as Zdarsky did with Captio), you want to play with them, right? Do you think this is supposed to be a contrasting book with ‘Tec? Like, we’ve got a mandate from editorial that one book is (literally) operatic while this one should be more action-oriented? I’m still trying to make this run make sense in my head. 

Matt: I think that is definitely a possibility. Over the years, those kinds of mandates have existed. Out of “No Man’s Land” it was Batman is the superhero comic, ‘Tec is the detective book and Gotham Knights is the Bat family book. If Zdarsky was told this is supposed to be the Batman as superhero comic, with big action and wild plots, then he’s definitely doing what he was assigned. 

I feel like this entire review has focused on the first six pages of a 30-page comic, and bear in mind that regardless of what the cover says, there is no backup here. There are a couple good character beats for Damian, as we see him throwing in with Zur-as-Bruce, which I’m not sure I get after the betrayal during “Gotham War,” and him getting suspicious as he learns more. And I still don’t know if Vandal Savage works in this book. He keeps popping up in the middle of other plots and shoving his way into them. We have all this stuff going on with FailZur (That’s the name for him!), and now we also have to worry about Savage as police commissioner? Maybe that’s setup for the arc after this, which I would be content with, but if it’s going to be an element in “Dark Prisons,” it just feels like too much.

Will: I refuse to recognize a thing called “FailZur.” No. None of that.

Buy Batman #146 here.

A Batman/SCTV Crossover

Matt: The first issue of Batman ‘89: Echoes came out on Nov. 28, 2023. I know we’re covering this a couple weeks late, but still, it was four months in between issues, which makes keeping track of what is going on here tricky. And that is especially so with the way this book is constructed. We talked about this both when we reviewed the first series here and on the podcast, that these are paced oddly for a comics series. That first series read much better as a trade, and I thought that might have had to do with the delays, but reading this, and how little happens in this issue, I think it’s in the actual structure. 

Will: How can nothing happen while at the same time everything is super complex and busy? Bruce Wayne, one of the world’s most famous men, is hiding out in Arkham, having assumed the identity of Firefly. Harley Quinn and Jonathan Crane are squabbling Arkham doctors. Barbara is convinced Bruce has taken up the mantle again, which would break a promise to her he made two years ago. The strength of the first volume was its near singular focus on a clever reinterpretation of Harvey Dent. This book’s got nothing to hang its cowl on so far.

Matt: Not every comic has to be an action comic. Heck, not even every superhero comic has to have action in it, even if that is the foundation they’re built on. But we’re two issues into a Batman comic and we haven’t really seen anyone in costume. This whole thing continues to feel like movie pacing: you can start out slow, and have a slow first 45 minutes if the back 45 moves at a fast clip. But you’re watching that 90 minutes in one sitting, probably. This is 90 minutes broken up into six different 15-minute episodes, and getting to the ones that move the plot along is hard when you have three that are just setup.

Will: And the setup is easier to deal with when you have some sense of where the story is going, but there’s just not enough of that here. Yeah, I know there’s some plot with Crane taking up the mantle of Hugo Strange, but I don’t care — or at least I haven’t been given a reason to care. And Harley is going to break bad because … she’s mad at getting bumped from TV? Woof.

Matt: And once again, Quinones is leaning really heavily into “casting” this issue with period-appropriate celebrities. We not only have Jeff Goldblum and Madonna as Crane and Quinn, But the Arkham inmates distracted me with Martin Short as the Riddler, Eugene Levy as Philco and Steven Wright as the other guy.

Will: Once again, if anyone is listening to me, this is a legally questionable approach to making comics! The First Amendment does have some protection against appropriation (that would be the unauthorized use of someone’s name or likeness in a commercial or trade purpose), but that defense is stretched pretty thin when all you’ve got is, “Shit, man, I thought it would be cool to have Madonna as Harley Quinn.” That’s the depth of the creative thought being expressed here — and it’s not what I’d want to be arguing in court.

Matt: All things taken, I feel like this might wind up making a decent trade if some of these ideas that are set up come to a good conclusion, but a quarterly comic with this little action isn’t going to work. 

Oh, and just to be a grouch, we get a cover with Harley Quinn and Batgirl, and neither appear anywhere in this book in any form like that. I guess a cover of people sitting around and talking wasn’t going to sell this book.

Will: Someone call the burn ward at Gotham West Mercy and get ‘em to prepare a bed. Damn!

Buy Batman ’89: Echoes #2 here.

Just Grotesque

Matt: This issue might be the most Sholly Fisch issue I have ever read, and I don’t say that in a bad way. It has a solid mystery at its core with a logical ending. It teaches a lesson: the difference between a gargoyle and a grotesque, although that might have gotten beaten into the ground a bit. And we get some cute comedy bits. This is, as far as I remember, the first time we’ve had Megan Huang on art for this book. What did you think about her interpretation of the characters?

Will: It was … a little rough. Ultimately fine, but rough. I think we tend to be spoiled by the consistently excellent art on this book, so when someone new pops up, it’s pretty noticeable. And you’re right, the gargoyle/grotesque bit did get beaten into the ground, but it did one of those things where it came back around to being funny. 

Matt: Huang is a fine artist, and if she comes back she might do better, but we are very used to consistent models between Dario Brizuela and Scott Jeralds, who have done most of the issues of the past couple volumes. I can’t place which version of the Scooby Gang this reminds me of, but it just feels like it’s channeling a different animated incarnation from Scooby-Doo Where Are You?

I liked seeing Harvey Bullock pop up in the opening here, and Mayor Nakano on the last page. One of the things that I really dig about this book is how deep it mines the history, and the fun of seeing characters you wouldn’t normally see in these all-ages books appearing.

Will: I popped for Nakano as well — it’s nice to have this grounded in the Gotham we usually see, even if the mayor never gets to do anything as cool as unveil statues of the Scooby Gang in Batman or Detective Comics.

Matt: I really enjoyed the solution to this mystery, and how it finds a way to tread that line we often talk about here about how the supernatural doesn’t work if you’re playing Scooby-Doo along the classic line. Clayface, depending on origins, is a metahuman or a product of science, so he isn’t a magic monster, and Fisch has Karlo’s voice down cold. He is absolutely the hammy actor that this version of Clayface should be, who can’t resist monologuing at the heroes. It’s a fun reveal.

Will: I’m gonna tell on myself, Matt. I kinda thought this was finally going to be supernatural. They got me.

Matt: Y’know, we might have to do some non-BatChat retro reviews of the old school Scooby-Doo Team-Up book, where there were non-Batman related characters teaming up with Mystery Inc. Could be fun to read the stories where they (the characters, not the creators) bend over backward to explain to themselves how Deadman and the Spectre aren’t ghosts. I recall that being fun stuff.

Will: *stares blankly in amazement*

Buy The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #4 here.

Bat-miscellany

• In this week’s BatChat podcast, Patreon supporter John Wickham comes back to talk about three more first times Batman met Superman. 
• Lost in a lot of coverage of other things this week was the passing of artist Mark “M.D.” Bright. Best known probably for co-creating Quantum and Woody at Valiant with Christopher Priest, drawing “Armor Wars” at Marvel and being the original artist on Milestone’s Icon series, Bright did a handful of Batman stories over the years, including the two-parter leading into “A Death in the Family” where Jason Todd (allegedly) pushed a guy off a balcony and a two-part Elseworlds where a proto-Damian named Tallant creates a League of Batmen to fight his grandfather in the not-too-distant future. We send our condolences to his friends, family and fans.
  • Fun additional M.D. Bright and Batman fact: He drew the Hal Jordan half of the Secret Origins issue that also featured the Neil Gaiman/Mark Buckingham story that began the process of redefining Poison Ivy as more than the sexpot seductress she was in her earliest appearances through the mid-late ‘80s.

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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.