A wounded Bat-Man investigates the forces of crime in Gotham, trying to get closer to the villains who are wreaking havoc on the city. Investigating the chaos is Lois Lane, and where Lois goes, are Clark Kent and a certain red-cape wearing hero far behind? The Bat-Man: Second Knight #2 is written by Dan Jurgens, drawn by Mike Perkins, colored by Mike Spicer and lettered by Simon Bowland.
Will Nevin: So are we *really* going to do Gotham Mayor Poison Ivy?
Matt Lazorwitz: Looks like it. While it seems outlandish, it’s no more so than Commissioner Vandal Savage, and G. Willow Wilson’s Poison Ivy has been a consistently strong book, and this actually feels like a logical extension of some of what has been going on there, so I’m willing to give it a chance, especially since it’s putting the spotlight on that book. And this feels like the final break before the status quo is reestablished. I am personally more looking forward to Ivy and the first polycule of Gotham: Harley Quinn and Janet from HR.
Will: Well, you know where I stand, Matt: I absolutely *love* Savage as commissioner. Really makes me feel like I’m reading a grounded world that takes itself the tiniest bit seriously. But we’ll deal with that stuff next year. Today, I want the good stuff: some grounded-ass late 1930s Bat-Man.
Enter the Man of Steel
Will: When Lois Lane shows up in your Batman comic, Superman can’t be too far behind her, can he? Yet I still didn’t expect an appearance in this issue. Maybe I’m just that damned dense.
Matt: I thought we’d see him in issue #3 even before I saw the cover and he was on it, but I figured he would show up there. The end of last issue, though? I think I was dense, too. Lois Lane in peril? This is absolutely a job for Superman.
He’s pretty much Clark Kent/Superman as you expect him to be. This book isn’t really changing the established characters, as we’ve seen in some Elseworlds. It’s just setting them in a different time, which is fine. The established characters in the new setting allow for the plot and the story to grow without adding the extra wrinkle of trying to figure out how different these characters are from what we expect.
Will: Unexpected or not, this version of Superman — as you said, the one you’d expect him to be, maybe a touch more influenced by the serials — is really at home in this universe, even as we once again come to the classic Batman/Superman disagreement over methods and tactics. That scene at the military base? That was just some fun shit.
Matt: And well illustrated! Perkins is absolutely killing this series. That scene, the flashbacks to the trench warfare at Flanders Field, the scene at City Hall? This is an intense book, and the art is gritty and realistic and works really well.
Will: You mentioned the flashback, and that (in conjunction with the aforementioned row at the base) was one of my favorite scenes. I love how this book, set in the dawn of World War II, is absolutely haunted by the (first) Great War. I’m no historian, but that seems incredibly authentic to me. And as we said last time out, Scarecrow’s inclusion makes all too much sense with the chemical warfare horrors the world had gone through.
Matt: Crane is at his most evil here — this guy who was cast out because people were against the use of his chemical weapons, so he wants to show proof of concept. For Hitler. And the fact that he doesn’t even buy into Nazi ideology, he just wants someone who will pay him to make more gas makes him … maybe not worse, but certainly no less evil than someone who is a hardcore Nazi.
Will: A guy willing to burn Gotham to the ground just to prove himself to Hilter? Yeah, that’s a real piece of shit, and a far cry from the guy moping around because, as we’ve seen in other iterations of the character, people were mean to him when he was a kid. I wasn’t entirely clear where Scarecrow was using his gas at the end of the issue — synagogue? police station? — but that was some incredibly deep stuff between Maxie and Rabbi Cohen.
Matt: With them talking about the mayor, I assumed it was City Hall, and while it wasn’t clear, the exact location didn’t seem to matter.
The stuff with Maxie and Rabbi Cohen was one of the most impactful things I’ve read in a comic in a long time. Maxie, or Moshe, turning his own fear and hatred onto the rabbi because of how society has made him hate Jews, and himself, is just one of the harshest things I’ve seen. The wrong parts of society today talk about “self-hating Jews,” and “if you vote this way/don’t think this way and you’re Jewish, you clearly are an antisemitic Jew,” but this shows you how prejudice, racism, etc., can affect people in truly terrible ways.
Will: And that’s what I want from a Batman comic or any other comic or piece of media, for that matter. I want to feel like the investment of my time to sit down with something was worthwhile. And yes, entertainment and/or escapism is valid, sure. But you can use Batman — as we’ve seen so far in the Fraction run — to speak to current issues in society, and that is what really makes a comic sing to me.
Matt: I think we’ve talked about this before, but for me it’s all about balance. For every Fraction Batman or Second Knight, I want a Bat/Scoob or DC K.O. I think if every comic was as deeply rooted in the real world, we would lose some of the joy of over-the-top superheroics.
The other big character beat in this issue is the beginning of the fracturing of Bruce’s relationship with Julie Madison. Julie admits that it was fun and kind of exciting to be dating Bat-Man to start. But now she’s seeing what can happen to him, and it scares her. It’s like being the wife of a cop or firefighter, only this guy is doing more extreme feats. She didn’t count on it, and now that is coming home. It’s a logical, realistic reaction to something like that.
Will: As is Bruce’s promise to stop after the Scarecrow crisis is over, a thing that everyone but Julie knows is not going to happen. Matt, I sense heartbreak looming.
Matt: Oh, for sure. Batman can rarely, if ever, get a happy ending, and Julie Madison sadly never gets the chance to live out her life with Bruce Wayne. I see her going back to Hollywood and leaving Bruce behind because there’s always one more mission, one more quest, one more crook.
Will: And that’s what we like in a Batman, one in a never-ending war on crime. He doesn’t have to be miserable, but the defining characteristic of a guy who never stops fighting is … well, he don’t quit. But back to Supes for a second. Wasn’t he just fun? I hope they don’t spend all of the next issue at cross purposes.
Matt: I think we’ll get some back and forth, but it will probably be verbal sparring. Jurgens has written both of these characters enough, and since Batman doesn’t have any Kryptonite it’s not like he can fight Superman. I think that Superman will pretty quickly hear about the gas attack and they’ll head off together to stop it.
Oh! We talked about it last time, so I want to circle back to another point: Scarecrow specifically tells the Executioner to not remove his mask this issue. We talked about whether that character will be an anonymous character or if it will be someone we know. I don’t think that helps any, so I’m still up in the air on who that might be.
Will: We know there will be a split eventually, and it might even come over the Executioner’s decision to unmask. If I had to guess, it’s probably going to be someone who would make sense in the context of this story. But who that would be, I have no idea.
Matt: We haven’t seen any characters from either volume who haven’t also been on page with the Executioner, so it can’t be anyone from these books. Unless it’s pulled off really well, I just hope it’s not the introduction/origin of, say, this world’s Joker or something. I am very curious to see what some of the other rogues look like here, but I don’t need them introduced.
Actually, as I was typing that, it just kind of occurred to me the one character who might work for me here who is established: Joe Chill. He’s been hiding and afraid all this time, he killed one of Gotham’s do-gooders before by accident and he saw what happened, and now he’s snapped and is making a concerted effort to do it again. If it has to be someone we know, I think he’s the one I would go with.
Will: That’s a solid-ass theory right there. And it would give us some storytelling options: If Batman remembers Chill and his poker face isn’t what it should be, does Scarecrow pick up on that and exploit it?
Matt: We just have to wait and find out. One more issue to go.
Bat-miscellany
- We take a trip into the Batcave with the stories that feature the first appearances of the most famous Batcave trophies: the T-Rex, the Joker card and the Penny.
- This is the last BatChat column for a couple weeks, so have a happy holiday and we’ll be back with the new issue of the Fraction Batman in the new year.
Buy The Bat-Man: Second Knight #2 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.
