Joker enters the fray in ‘Tec, plus Dark Age and Brave & the Bold in BatChat

Batman is gathering the forces he needs to bring down the Orghams. The Orghams are gathering the forces they feel they need to cement their hold over Gotham and stop Batman. And Catwoman is reaching out to the one person neither side wants to deal with. The lead story of Detective Comics #1,085 is written by Ram V, drawn by Stefano Raffaele, colored by Lee Loughridge and lettered by Ariana Maher. In the backup, before he makes his decision about allying with Batman, Mr. Freeze meets an old friend for a drink in a story written by Alex Paknadel, drawn by Christopher Mitten, colored by Triona Farrell and lettered by Steve Wands.

Batman has begun to fight the war on crime in the Gotham of 1971. And Bruce Wayne has begun to use his money to try to stop the ills the corrupt board of Wayne Enterprises is causing. As he searches for allies, will Superman and the Justice League help turn the tide? Or will he find his allies closer to home? Batman: Dark Age #3 is written by Mark Russell, drawn by Michael Allred, colored by Laura Allred and lettered by Dave Sharpe.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #13 begins a new headline team-up between Nightwing and Deadman written by Tim Seeley, drawn by Kelley Jones, colored by Michelle Madsen and lettered by Rob Leigh, as well as two other team-up serials; Booster Gold & the Jurassic League and Batman & Guy Gardner. 

Matt Lazorwitz: So we’ve talked about this in the Slack and at a pre-podcast recording, but the most recent big Bat news is the final chapter of the Long Halloween saga, Batman: The Long Halloween: The Last Halloween. And I think we both have reservations based on the announcement.

Will Nevin: We covered the last one-shot special in this space, and we were of the opinion that the Long Halloween saga needed to rest. With Tim Sale’s passing, that only feels more appropriate now. But we’re also just fans — we’re on the outside, and we certainly don’t know what he would have wanted or how best to commemorate his work and meaning as just an individual. This could be good. It could perfectly end one of the finest Bat books ever made. But I have doubts.

Chaos and Order

Matt: Let’s start with your concern from the end of last issue: How do you feel Joker worked in this issue?

Will: He’s still just a little tease, an agent of madness in plot potentia. So I’m OK with it for now. Visually, this has to be the closest we’ve ever gotten in canon to Dark Knight Joker, right?

Matt: Raffaele definitely leans into the Heath Ledger of it. The hair isn’t as slicked back, and I don’t think the scars are there, but the vibe is definitely there. This feels like the right way to use Joker. He’s a discordant note in the perfectly planned symphony the Orghams have set up. And we know Bruce would never go to him for help, so it makes sense it falls to Selina to make that choice. 

Will: The Orghams are all about structure and order, so much so that they have a machine that literally rewrites the fabric of reality to give Gotham that elusive stability. Joker will, of course, tear that all to hell, but I do sort of miss that bygone era when he was a guy interested in crime and something a bit more grounded than the elemental force he has become.

Matt: There are stories where that would work, but this story, everyone is sort of archetypal, and that is the archetype Joker has come to embrace. This story doesn’t need a guy who wants to rob the post office because he wasn’t included in a set of stamps of the world’s funniest comedians. It needs that guy who wouldn’t know what to do with the car when he caught it.

Beyond the Joker, which only took up three pages, we have a truly creepy new Batman costume, and it works for where Bruce is now. He isn’t the hero Gotham deserves (to keep up with the Dark Knight analogy), he’s the hero it needs. The costume has a makeshift look to it, which makes sense for a Batman who has been stripped of most of his resources and only has the stuff left in those “break in case of emergency” sub-Batcaves he set up after “Knightfall.”

Will: We stan a hobo Batman. Putting (Jim) Gordon in the chair is a fresh take — interested to see where that goes.

Matt: Batman is getting his new team together, and so we circle back to two characters from earlier in the run: Mr. Freeze and the Maestro, which again feels like something with the musical themes of the story, motifs from the first movement of the symphony returning at the end. Bruce is choosing to work with villains, which feels like a statement about where he is: He knows he’s going to have to fight dirty.

Will: Speaking of Freeze, the Alex Paknadel backup was absolutely … chilling. (I hate me for that.) What a good little fucked up story.

Matt: Yes! The backups continue to wow me. Freeze going to one of the people he saw as pure in Gotham, seeing them corrupted, and making both the decision he needed to for Batman and giving her the harsh justice he believes she is due? Fucked up in the best way.

Will: Did Magda trust Freeze and drink what amounted to bleach and Drano thinking it would preserve her? Or was she looking for a way out? I think you can believe what you want, which is one of my favorite feelings to have when leaving a story.

Matt: One more note on the main story before we move on to our next book. Batman’s talk with Gordon, about how he is feeling now? Perfectly sums up what Ram V has been doing with the character throughout this run and a place I would love to see other writers keep him in. Pardon me as I quote:

“She brought me to my maker. I looked into his face and saw that I had outgrown him. That my endeavors were about something bigger than my past. That the victories matter only to the mask. That the man within had found peace in his eternal struggle. I don’t need saving from my demons. They are a part of me now. They make me who I am. They give me strength.”

Not only do we get a Batman who has embraced the eternal struggle against crime for its own merit and not to avenge his parents, we get a repudiation of Tom King’s Batman who is constantly tormented by the traumas of his past, rather than using them as a fuel to do better. It’s an excellent take.

Buy Detective Comics #1,085 here.

Dark Age Steps in the Right Direction

Matt: I still have a lot of the issues we have had with this series, but I think this was the issue I enjoyed most. 

Will: It’s certainly the issue that made the most sense and had the fewest baffling plot points. But there wasn’t much here that convinced me this was a story that needed to be told. I mean, Superman has to pop in to teach Bruce that 1) killing is bad and 2) criminals need a path to redemption? And that only sets up reformed False Face gang member Dick Grayson? We’re making progress here, for sure. But this is still a real head scratcher. 

Matt: Your point about Superman is well taken. We were talking about this in our recording last night, and we both prefer a Batman and Superman who aren’t adversaries, and they aren’t here. But Bruce remains so cold and closed off from the League (that he is funding), it still feels off.

We’re getting more of the Mark Russell stuff I expect, by slowly teasing out more of the social commentary with the way corporations and organized crime work together, and how corporations, in the long run, are just mobs working within the system. And the idea that Bruce is spending his money to piss off the Wayne board, who plan to get it back when they off him, and spending it to counter their efforts through philanthropy? That’s a fun idea, and if it took a somewhat awkward scene with Superman to get there, I’m OK with it.

Will: The philanthropy angle is a good one, I’ll admit that. But the stuff with the gang seems like it gets in the way of telling a simpler story. To me, this treads some uncomfortable middle ground between parody and satire without really doing a good job of either.

Matt: None of the attempts at humor land for me with this book. We get the same basic joke we got last issue, where Pariah is talking about how the world is going to end, and the Wayne board just sort of glosses over it and keeps talking about making money. It feels like the stand-up who delivers a joke, it doesn’t land, and he says the punchline again to see if people laugh the second time. 

And we’re halfway into the book and we’re still introducing new characters, and we aren’t really getting time with the already large cast. We get Scarecrow introduced here, and the entire Justice League, and we’re getting Dick Grayson next issue. But we’re still not really dealing with Black Mask. And Jim Gordon is getting more page time, but to the detriment of Alfred and Lucius Fox. These are six double-sized issues, and it still feels like there isn’t enough page space for everything on Russell’s mind.

Will: I don’t hate this series, and I especially didn’t hate this issue. But compared to First Knight — which had a clear vision and reason to exist — this feels like a waste.

Buy Batman: Dark Age #3 here.

Deadman and Gardner and Joker. Oh, My.

Matt:.Fun to be back in Brave and the Bold. We have three new serials beginning and one ending, plus the Batman: Black and White story. Seems a good time to come back. 

Will: More importantly, we got hot and fresh Kelley Jones art, bay-bee!

Matt: This is the best his work has looked in a while. It’s always good, but I think him inking himself here really helps. I won’t say it looks crisp, because that is not a word I’d use for Jones’ style, but it definitely looks clean, and I’m always a fan of his weird, skeletal Deadman.

Will: Not every Batman/Bat family story calls for weirdness — the more we read of his original run on the main title with Doug Moench, the more his stuff looks out of place when dealing with the mundane aspects of visual storytelling. And I agree — there was a certain crispness to his work here. Overall, very happy with this.

Matt: His Nightwing is a marked improvement from the way he drew him in that run. He looks less bulgy and slimmer, or as slim as a Jones character will look, which works with Nightwing.

This part of the story is really just setting up the mystery, and not a lot happens after the opening. The mystery of the disappearing woman in the red scarves, whatever is going on with Deadman’s powers and the monster at the end, the Unfallen, I’m sure are going to tie all together, but this issue is just there to put all the pieces out on the table.

Will: Rest of the stories are, as follows, so-so depending on your feelings about Booster Gold (“Time Jerks”), the fourth part of something we haven’t read (“Artemis: The Poison Within”), a pretty interesting team-up between Batman and Guy Gardner to investigate some Roswell-style aliens (“The Invader”) and a Black and White short that was straight nasty garbage (“Perp Walk”).

Matt: As a Booster fan, “Time Jerks” is fun but inconsequential, although the return of the Jurassic League is fun as all hell. Dinosaur Justice League? Yes, please!

I was shocked by how much I enjoyed “The Invader.” Guy Gardner is a character, like Lobo, who tends to rub me the wrong way, but Joshua Hale Fialkov is keeping Gardner’s most obnoxious traits in check, and by throwing them both off balance, we have a chance to see him and Batman have to actually interact and work together, rather than just snipe at each other. And if we can make it through without a single reference to “One Punch!” I will give this an extra gold star.

Will: I really like the idea of grounding a story in traditional UFO lore. Sure, Off-World is fun, and you can really empty out your brain pan coming up with new character designs and far-off landscapes, but there’s something satisfying about gray men and flying saucers.

Matt: And hard agree on “Perp Walk.” One of those stories that feels like it wants to be mature and edgy, when all it really does is reheat the same lame fan takes we have read on the internet a hundred times before.

Will: There is no version of Batman — none, zero, zip, never — who is thankful that Joker “made him better.” They aren’t the equivalent of political rivals or quarterbacks trying to win a starting job. One is a mass murderer, and the other is a vigilante who has given his life in pursuit of a war on crime; Batman does not have to give it up to the Joker under any circumstances. Lean into the homoeroticism all you want (What a new and novel idea there!), but Bruce showing gratitude toward Joker is one of the more asinine things I’ve read in a long, long time. 

Buy Batman: The Brave and the Bold #13 here.

Bat-miscellany

• This week on the BatChat podcast we focus on the Man Who Broke the Bat: Bane.

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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.