Chip Zdarsky’s run on Batman comes to its conclusion as Batman tries to stop the escape of a Russian agent while Jim Gordon and the Riddler fight it out and Commander Star leads a people’s revolt in the streets of Gotham. Batman #157 is written by Chip Zdarsky, drawn by Jorge Jimenez and Tony S. Daniel, colored by Tomeu Morey and lettered by Clayton Cowles.
Will Nevin: With “H2SH: 2 Hush 2 Handle” right around the ol’ corner, we’ve reached the end of Chip Zdarsky’s run on Batman, and I’ve gotta say: His finale is a good encapsulation of everything we’ve seen, for better and for worse — mostly for meh.
Matt Lazorwitz: We’ll definitely dive into the details of how we feel about the Zdarsky run in a bit, but I feel like this run took its time when it could have been more compact, and then compressed what could and should have been longer.
From Russia Without Love
Matt: The Batman part of the main action here ends with a scene reminiscent of the very first issue of this series. There, Batman rode a plane down out of the Gotham skies that had been fired on by the Kult of Kobra. Here we see Batman doing something similar with a Russian plane with a secret government agent who took control of the Court of Owls. That’s a lot of comic book nonsense surrounding some real world geopolitics that remind us that history might not repeat, but it sure does rhyme, huh? Both in comics and in the real world.
Will: The bit about ruining Gotham for the propaganda felt like a shiv between the ribs after the last couple of weeks. And as far as the comic book nonsense goes, I was reminded also of the moment in the run where Batman crash landed from space. Craziness!
Matt: And crashing planes seemed poorly timed, but absolutely coincidental, too.
I think this is going to be the theme of this review in general, but this whole arc seemed so very rushed. The overarching Failsafe/Zur-En-Arrh arc started in issue #125 and ended in #148, with an epilogue in #149. There were diversions within, but pretty much everything for two years fed into that arc.
Zdarsky said in an interview that he came up with this last arc after he was asked to do one more arc to bide time between the end of that arc and H2SH. It really felt like he conceived of something with way too much story for six issues, because everything here feels like it could have used another six months to breathe. More time to see Gotham’s people grow dissatisfied with the rich, more of Commander Star building his cult of personality, more of the Owls playing their hand, more of Riddler developing his company. The Russian agent thing comes out of left field, even though Leonid Kull is a clearly Russian name. Not everything needs to be foreshadowed, but it feels like Batman has to sort of brush aside the Owls connection at the end, when it didn’t feel like it served the story any.
Will: Matt, if you loved how weird and choppy the end of this run felt, I’ve got some good news for you. “H2SH” is 12 issues…spread out over two years. So we’ve got the first six that will start next month, and then we’ll get some poor someone(s) to do some thankless fill-ins, and then we’ll be once again rescued from our perfectly fine books by Jim Lee and Jeph Loeb. Sure would have been nice if editorial could have told them no at any point. I can’t even begin to think about how long it will be before we get to a normal run on Batman.
Matt: Oh. Joy.
On top of all the plane stuff, we get a streetfight between Batman and the ultimate jobber, KGBeast. This guy is always put out there as the deadliest, and yet he always goes down like a punk. And the whole Commander Star thing is so underbaked. The idea of someone using a star-wearing vigilante to build up populist sentiment against the wealthy is a solid idea, but it just fizzles because it barely got any lead-in, and then Batman beats him and the mob just quietly slinks off. Isn’t that convenient?
Will: And we’re not all that removed from Peacekeeper-01, which only adds to the underdone-ness of it all. You’re absolutely right that there were some good ideas here, and some things were certainly out of Big Daddy Z’s hands. But that doesn’t do much to save this issue. Like, it’s oversized, but do you feel we got anything out of the extra length? Batman got to say he hates guns when he blew off the wings of a plane so it could crash land. We got extra punchy pages. And…?
Matt: We’ll get to it at the end, but we get some thematic stuff that I liked but, again, felt like it should have been baked much more deeply into the run, or at least the arc, itself. But that’s for a bit later.
Gotham Is Burning
Matt: If Batman is off fighting the Russians like a good Cold War-era hero, where does that leave everyone else? Well, Gordon is tussling with the Riddler in the wreckage of NygmaTech HQ, and Bullock is dealing with the vindictive Commissioner Vandal Savage. A public servant using his office to take out personal grievances? Isn’t that a strange and not at all realistic idea?
Will: I would prefer to be taken out of this reality and put into another one more to my liking, Matt — maybe one in which my anus is constantly bleeding for some unknown reason but everyone else is generally happy and the U.S. government isn’t on fire.
You want to talk about something underbaked, let’s talk about the feud between Gordon and Riddler. There is — zero — heat on those pages. None. Those two just don’t have the rizz.
Matt: Not together, that’s for sure! And they’re both great characters, so I don’t know why they wouldn’t, except we get no reason why Riddler has a sudden mad-on for Gordon. If it’s just to get at Batman, that’s fine, but that isn’t made clear. If it’s his own version of One Bad Day, to prove there’s no such thing as a good man, also fine, but we needed to explore that, too.
And the whole Bullock plot here is frustrating. In next week’s episode of the podcast (stay tuned!), we talk about stories where characters act a certain way simply because the story needs them to, and not because it makes sense either from a character standpoint or for simple human logic. And that is what we get with Bullock here. He conveniently rejoined the GCPD in issue one of this arc JUST to stand up to Savage and get fired in this one. It was just so the story could have his moment where he stands up to Savage. Which is exactly the same beat at the end of “Joker War,” where he quits as GCPD commissioner because the mayor is in Joker’s pocket and is not letting him step in and stop the clowns on the street. Again, it sure does rhyme.
Will: And it’s not like Bullock’s moment here is particularly loud either. He defies a direct order from Savage, and we learn at the end he got canned because of it. Certainly does not feel like a particularly valuable use of our time or his — and he’s a fictional character who will live forever. We’ll get to the marginally rebooted status quo in a bit, but one disappointing thing to learn is that we’re still stuck with Savage as police commissioner. Maybe we can blame that one on Lee and Loeb, too.
Matt: I am truly shocked that the status quo there is remaining. That seemed like the kind of plot that a writer introduces and then is quickly swept away when someone else takes over. It’s not like Commissioner Savage is a big part of Batman and Robin or Detective Comics. And ending with Jim back at the GCPD absolutely feels like we’re moving to reset the status quo to Commissioner Gordon very very soon.
Will: “H2SH” will either pretend this doesn’t exist or it will be central to some Tommy Elliott/Court of Owls plot. Doesn’t feel like there’s a middle ground.
A Good Man
Matt: With all that action taken care of, we get an epilogue that is all character. Bruce and his “brother,” Bruce and Leslie Thompkins and Batman and Jim Gordon.
Will: Hoo boy, this was a big pile of shit for me. First, I hate “Wil.” Never trust a one-L guy. Gross. Second, the character was a condescending prick. Yes, yes, Bruce Wayne’s public persona is a layabout scumbag, but you can’t talk to him like that because us readers know the real deal. And, also, who gives a fuck about you, buddy? You’re not even his actual brother and were only a useful idiot for a half-fart of a story. Get lost. This also continues to be one of the more embarrassing artistic renderings of Leslie, and narratively, she didn’t have bupkis to do.
Matt: Oh, young Leslie who looks like Bruce’s contemporary is frustrating and wrong; it’s second only to skinny New 52 Amanda Waller in showing exactly what some comic pros think about what fans expect from ALL female characters.
And yes, Wil was a mouthpiece for Zdarsky to make comments about the rich and about what money does to people. And being he is a character who never appeared before and never will again, and is yet another rhyme, this time with Lincoln March and the Court of Owls, so no one is ever going to come back to Bruce’s other maybe-but-not-really brother again, no, what he says doesn’t matter. But the thematic stuff that comes out more with Batman and Jim at the end, the questions about what makes a good man, is something I wish we had more of. It is really central to who Batman is; a Batman who doesn’t think about if what he’s doing is right and if he’s trying to be good is the Batman that bad-faith arguments about a rich guy who beats on the poor is built on.
Will: As with any “new” comic book status quo, this was trying to only achieve the illusion of change. Is Gordon a (more) morally flawed character now because of his affair and what he believes was an intentional decision to shoot Nakano? Will that ever be referenced again? Who’s to say?!?!
Matt: The affair with Koyuki is very frustrating as an example of a moral flaw in Gordon, since the dissolution of his first marriage ended because he had an affair with another woman. I don’t think Zdarsky is intentionally doing this, but this plays into a major false equivalency in monogamous American society, that it’s worse for a man to sleep with another man’s wife than it is for that man to cheat on his own wife with a single woman; you’re “stealing” another man’s property by sleeping with another man’s wife, while you’re just doing what comes naturally when you sleep with another woman who is single. I think Gordon is more enlightened than that, and Zdarsky too, and I feel like the fact that this isn’t the first time Gordon has been involved in an extramarital affair should probably have been mentioned to avoid some of these uglier comparisons.
Will: A little self-reflection on Gordon’s part would have worked nicely to address those issues. One thing I am not looking forward to is Gordon going up against Savage. For all the reasons you pointed out earlier, it’s just too close to reality and only reaffirms what a dumb narrative decision this was from the beginning.
Matt: And at this point, why is Vandal Savage police commissioner? Kull put him in the position, and he’s gone. I doubt the Owls will continue to back him. What reason does a millennia-old immortal caveman have to be commissioner of police? Especially a known supervillain with a penchant for killing underlings. How many union reps do you think are dead and buried out at Wayne Manor because they stood up to Savage cutting overtime pay?
Will: At least we got that Secret Files or whatever it was explaining how it was an Owls plot. There’s some logic for it somewhere, in whatever plot thread that is soon to be dropped. Or maybe expanded?
Matt: We’ll see on that point. The one thing that really struck me about that end, the thing I liked, was Bruce admitting to Jim, as he’s about to swing into the night, that they are both human and both make mistakes. That has been the thing that, theoretically, Bruce has had to learn throughout Zdarsky’s entire run. His hubris created Failsafe, it created Zur and now he realizes that he has to take ownership of his mistakes, and is more tolerant of his friends making them as well. Again, illusion of change and I imagine more runs will be about his neurotic quest for absolute perfection, but at least this ending ties up thematic threads from the entire run.
Will: Ultimately, I’m fairly disappointed with what we got. Maybe it’s because my expectations were too high after reading Newburn and thinking we could get a gritty, grounded take on Batman in Batman. Whatever we got, it was the opposite of that. And maybe that’s editorial’s fault, since we’ll never know the sort of dictates that come down.
Matt: But that’s all there is for this run. And we still have Dark Patterns for what you’re looking for.
Will: Oh, fuck yeah. I can’t be unhappy with the Bat books when there is more of that to read.
Bat-miscellany
- Will wanted to talk about Paul Dini and Alex Ross’ Batman: War On Crime in this week’s BatChat podcast. So we did, as well as two other Dini stories. That means we get our regular dose of Zatanna.
- Looking for more CXF Bat content? Check out this deep dive into Detective Comics #613, “Trash,” by Margot Waldman. I fondly remember this issue, and look forward to covering it on the podcast someday.
Buy Batman #157 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
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.
