Batman Is Not in Human Target #9, but He Does Make for Good SEO

Christopher Chance has only a few days left to solve his own murder. His investigation has been bumpy to say the least, but will the murder of Guy Gardner finally catch up to the Human Target and end his search before the poison ends his life? Once Batman learns of his ex-teammate’s disappearance, can anything stop the Dark Knight from uncovering the truth? Haha, just kidding, Batman’s not in this one. Wait for death with The Human Target #9, written by Tom King, drawn by Greg Smallwood and lettered by Clayton Cowles.

Dan Grote: Do you like what I’ve done with the place, Armaan? Matt let me raid his storage locker. I’ve got bats hanging everywhere, a replica of the giant penny and the coup de grace, a Mondo poster of The Mark of Zorro. I just want him to feel at home, y’know?

Armaan Babu: It’s … very nice, Dan, but who do you mean? Who is it you want to feel at home? Are you inviting someone else to talk The Human Target with us?

Dan: Each year, Batman rises out of the comics criticism column that he thinks is the most sincere. He’s gotta pick this one. He’s got to. I don’t see how a comics criticism column can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there’s not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.

Armaan: Dan, I hate to tell you this, but Batman’s not coming. Not for our nonsense. He’s got important BatChats to worry about. We’re on our own — so let’s dive in!

Waiting for Batman

Dan: We spent six issues talking about how we didn’t want Batman to show up until the very end. Then we spent two issues talking about how we wish Batman would hurry up and get here. Finally, we get a cover that places Christopher Chance firmly in the shadow of the Bat, and Batman is … nowhere to be found. Instead we get an issue of Chance breaking down, expecting the Bat around every corner, suspecting his girlfriend of being in cahoots with the Bat. Generally just not being the cool, competent customer we’ve come to know him as. And I loved it.

Armaan: I’m not going to give it a love, but damn, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to enjoy this comic, so I’m grateful for that much, at least! When you showed me the cover for this issue, I was assuming it was going to do the same thing King did with Batman over in Strange Adventures; mainly, use him as a prop to show just how ultra-awesome-extra-special-cool Christopher Chance really is. But no, we get Batman here as a genuine terror. Chance’s own intelligence doesn’t help him at all — in fact, it makes things worse! 

As we’ve seen time and time again, Chance is not afraid of being hit. But he’s terrified of not knowing where a hit’s coming from. Which is probably why Batman gets to him so much — Batman is both hyper-competent and unconventional. He’s a detective and a superhero. He works in the shadows … and with hyper-colorful sidekicks and uses an array of tools that come with bat- prefixes affixed all william-nilliam. He’s a man of ultimate logic who operates in the absurd. Knowing he exists, and is after you, would be enough to drive anyone crazy.

Dan: Exactly. Batman works better here as a threat, a force we don’t see but know well to be afraid of. Chance spends the entire issue looking over his shoulder like a common Gotham criminal. And in the end, Batman doesn’t come. Batman doesn’t care. The universe is random, and for a man who constantly seeks control as Chance does, who manipulates the odds so he comes out on top, that’s the worst thing.

It’s not a perfect issue. King still does his repetition shtick in a couple places, especially toward the end. But this is restrained King. Well-behaved King. I see what he’s doing here, and it feels purposeful.

But also, Chance should not be driving immediately after having a medical emergency.

Armaan: Look, Chance is the very worst mix of macho, terrified and almost dead with nothing to lose. He’s going to make some mistakes. 

It’s interesting that you say that Chance spends the entire issue like a common Gotham criminal. It makes you think about how the rest of the superhero community sees Batman, doesn’t it? They don’t just see the theatrics that the criminals do — when Batman’s on your “side,” you get to see how he works, and that’s got to be even scarier. This series has touched a lot on the idea of superheroes who keep each other in line. Hal watches over Guy, and has so much influence that simply having a man disguised as him sends Guy running off with his tail between his legs. Rocket Red mentions that the JLI keep each other in line. Superheroes watch each other — how many morally gray superheroes like Chance has Batman kept from crossing the hero-villain line?

Dan: I mean I’m pretty sure it happens every other storyline with Jason Todd.

Armaan: I think the most interesting thing here about Batman’s lack of presence is the reassurance it brings. Batman isn’t just seen as a good detective, it’s taken for granted that he’s infallible. Chance does a lot of guesswork this issue in his paranoia, but he is unshakeable in his belief that Batman is never wrong. Meaning that if Batman isn’t after you for a crime he absolutely would take interest in? It means you’re not guilty. It means Guy is alive.

Which is fascinating to me, because there is zero evidence otherwise that that’s the case. Anyone else, and it’s the flimsiest conclusive leap in the world, but here, it’s rock solid.

Because it’s Batman.

A Song of Ice and Chance

Armaan: We skipped past it, but this issue opens with a truly phenomenal art sequence by Smallwood as Ice works to save Chance’s life. This has to be one of the most gorgeous sequences in the book so far. What did you think, Dan?

Dan: We gave this book a raft of shit last time around for its insistence on formalism, but here it’s a feature. As Smallwood’s paneling shrinks from three to six to nine, time slows. We stop reading a comic and start watching the cold open of a movie. The camera captures the rush of emotions on Ice’s face, transitioning from concern to panic to grief to, finally, in two panels on the fourth page, the realization she can fix things. It’s beautiful, and another reminder that no matter how Tom King Tom King gets, Smallwood makes it all look so goddamn good.

One of the big reveals this issue is that Chance apparently never told Ice he was dying. Now this caught me off guard. We’ve seen Chance hack and cough in front of her. We’ve seen Chance talk about how many days he has left to live. But I guess most of that was internal monologue and not an actual conversation?

Armaan: I wasn’t surprised by this, actually. Chance keeps his secrets. They never call attention to the fact that he kept her out of the loop … but he avoids the subject. Ice has never talked about it. Looking back at issue #2, all Ice has technically been told is that there was an attempted poisoning. For a lady of action, Ice has had no sense of urgency in solving this murder, and no sense of urgency in her time with Chance. 

Chance wants control over his death. It makes sense that he’s been territorial about it. I’m willing to bet (insofar as you can make bets about hypotheticals involving fictional characters) that if he wasn’t so off his game with Batman’s arrival, and if he hadn’t temporarily died in Ice’s arms in the opening, she’d still be in the dark. 

Dan: This relationship started with Ice trying to guide Chance away from Fire in his investigation. There was a time you could question her loyalty to him. But since Guy’s death (“death”?), they’ve had a shared secret to bury, and that’s likely brought them even closer.

That said, knowing what we know now about what she didn’t know, I wonder why she loves Chance. If she didn’t know he was dying, why has she stayed with him? I almost feel like this series would benefit from an issue from her perspective, like we got with Fire, Guy and Booster in the Tales of the Human Target special.

Armaan: Why does she love a ruggedly handsome man as drawn by Greg Smallwood who brings in an old-school manliness but has none of the toxic possessiveness and immaturity that Guy has? Who could say.

But you’re right that I would love an issue from her perspective. A moment in her head. She’s like Chance in a lot of ways — she chooses her words carefully. She’s guarded, and unlike Chance, we have no access to her inner monologue. So we make what we can of what she gives us. And Bat-stuff aside, I really enjoy Chance and Ice getting the, uh, chance to just talk in this issue. 

We also get to see her make them a little dream house out in the desert, made entirely out of ice (probably the most transparency we’re going to get until the end of this series), and the style of this house is telling. It’s an old fashioned suburban home. Idyllic. There’s even a car parked in the driveway, a postbox, a few trees. A home that lets Ice cast herself in the role of a 1950s housewife — specifically, an American housewife. Ice is Norwegian, but everything about her — her style of dress, the type of man she falls for, the house she creates and the land she’s chosen to call home — everything suggests she’s taken on American dreams. She also has two things that can make those dreams real: her powers and, more importantly, her image.

King and Smallwood’s take on Ice is that of a woman who is obsessed with her image. The only backstory we get of her is as a girl who became so consumed by a fantasy that she managed to change her own memories to make it real. Chance is a very traditional fantasy of a man, at first glance, and she threw herself into the fantasy of him. Drew him into a dream, and Chance fell right into it, because in his mind Ice is a perfect dream of a woman, too. 

There’s one important difference between the two.

He sees her as perfect. Which means he’s going to throw up any lie he can to keep that perfect image of her afloat. His truths come out only when that image starts to tarnish. As if there’s a nobility to delayed honesty. And Ice? Ice knows when she’s being lied to. She sees the worst of her men with crystal clear blue eyes. And she embraces romance anyway, as if an essential part of romance is a rotting at the heart of every relationship, and now that she knows where it is, her love story is complete.

They would make the worst long-term romantic couple. The very worst.

Dan: Yup.

In the desert, Chance and Ice share dueling ideas of death — Ice’s “You are, then you aren’t” vs. Chance’s “Every day you die, every moment you’re not who you were the moment before.” There’s a tough-guy childishness to Chance’s version. Seeing his father killed in front of him has made him feel like he has to cop a nothing-matters attitude that is suicidal in its own way. It’s his way of taking control of the thing that will inevitably take control of him. 

But also — and I know not every story is intended to be in conversation with every other story — there was literally a JLA story where they went to Heaven and Hell. Superheroes go to the Judeo-Christian afterlife all the time. The very fact that Ice died and was resurrected would betray the idea that death is the end in this world, otherwise we’d just be reading a story about how Guy Gardner and Fire sought revenge for Ice’s death and instead poisoned some schmuck hired to impersonate their mark. Who does Chance fall in love with then? Fire? Doctor Mid-Nite? Luigi?

Actually, Luigi’s pretty good to Chance, now that I think about it. Keeps him in pizza. Maybe he shouldn’t rule that out.

Armaan: We are out of the realm of canon with this tale, so maybe this is a universe where none of the Heaven and Hell stories actually happened. However, you do make a great point: Hold on tight to a man who keeps you in pizza.

What Are We Even Doing Here?

Armaan: It was mentioned in a throwaway line from last issue, but Christopher Chance has completely abandoned the whodunnit of it all, believing that Guy Gardner is the man who poisoned him. We haven’t had a moment where he’s processed this revelation, or where he’s confirmed it — if the mystery is indeed over, there’s been no closure for it. Which means one of two things is happening here: 

One, the whodunnit mystery is abandoned entirely, which I lament because it was the book’s biggest draw for me, and it’s been abandoned with little more than a throwaway line or two about how it’s over. For something that was such a big motivating factor for Chance, in a story that styled itself around noir detective stories, the fact that the mystery is tossed aside like an afterthought is leaving me feeling a little lost. It’s also been making the book feel like it’s floundering about until the end — the character takes are fun, but the story of Chance himself is unfocused.

Two, we’ve been red-herringed, and the mystery being “solved” was a MISLEAD. In which case I’m mad, because there’s no effort at all being put into that twist. We’re told, in the margins, not to worry about it anymore, in ways that are deeply unsatisfying and hard to believe. A good twist comes about when the audience swallows a convincing lie, but if we’re being lied to here, Dan, it’s very, very, very bad lying.

Dan: The last sentence of this issue is “Because he (Batman) figured out Guy Gardner is still alive.” If that is the case, then it’s possible Chance, and by turns King, is pulling one over on the reader the same way Chance pulled one over on Guy in issue #3 and Rocket Red in issue #8. In which case, things are about to get very interesting again very quickly. Covering up Guy’s murder is not enough of a plot point to sustain the back half of this series, so this could be the thing that gets the action back on track.

But here’s something else to consider: Why are they all going after Chance? Ice is the one who fatally froze Guy. How is there no heat on her? Because she’s in the JLI and therefore (Dominic Toretto voice) “family”? How come Ice isn’t having a nervous breakdown about anything other than Chance’s behavior? To be clear, her actions were justified, but she still killed a Guy. She still killed a member of the Justice League.

Armaan: Dammit, Dan. You did it. You asked just the right questions. Just the questions I needed to bring this aaaaallll back to Nancy, the Kord Industries secretary we both know is really responsible for this whole mess. 

Before I reveal my new Nancy theory, consider this: How did Guy get his ring back?

We see that Luigi had possession of it him back in issue #3, and that’s the last we saw of it until Guy showed up again to be killed in #6. What if Guy didn’t get his ring back — and what if it was someone else who was killed in his place? 

Dan: I’ve thought about that, and assumed Guy just got another one from Oa. To ponder otherwise is to worry about Luigi. And I need to believe Luigi is OK. He cooks-a the pizza!

Armaan: Ahh, but. We know of someone who has the power to look like Luigi. Or Guy. Or anyone he wants to, really. 

J’onn was written off as a somewhat sad sap of a man here, but he’s the one Chance should really have been paranoid about. He’s the only JLI member who can be turned into a block of ice, shattered and still survive.

My theory is that everyone’s in on it. Someone in the JLI tried to poison Lex Luthor, but that failed, and now it’s possible that Chance can ruin the JLI’s reputation by outing one of their number as a murderer. It doesn’t matter who used the poison really — they’re family. They will risk everything for each other. Guy’s “murder” was faked, to throw Chance off the trail; and considering Chance has given up on the mystery for the past few issues, it would have worked, if not for the fact that none of the JLI dared to let Batman in on the plan.

So Luigi taking the ring was a chance for one of the JLI to take it from him — as Luigi said, there are some women he just can’t say no to. J’onn then used the ring to pass himself off as Guy and safely be “murdered.” Fire was used to wrap the case up: If Guy’s responsible for Chance’s poisoning, and Guy is already dead, Chance has no motive for revenge, and all the more reason to go into hiding in his final days of life. 

Who, though, has the organizational skills, the cunning, the craft, the mastery of scheduling, the deviousness to actually put all of this together? Who needs the reputation of the JLI to remain spotless because she’s dedicated her entire career to working with one of their members?

That’s right. It’s Nancy. 

Dan: You magnificent bastard.

Armaan: This is a story about image. About disguises — the faces people put on, and the hits people take because of that. The lies beneath the face. And no one’s a fiercer and more competent protector of image than an overworked but highly motivated secretary. 

I rest my case!

Cheap Shots

• The issue title, “And when I have stol’n upon these sons-in-law,” is from Shakespeare’s King Lear.
• I am just now noticing that the color scheme of the computers and lighting in Doctor Mid-Nite’s office matches his outfit. Well played, Smallwood.
• The guy who wasn’t Batman at the diner still reminded me of Ben Affleck for some reason.
• “He (Batman) doesn’t smile” — I’ve got an entire Google image search and a Matt Lazorwitz that say otherwise.
• It’s hilarious (intentional or otherwise) that Chance drives out to the desert in an attempt to hide from Batman — a land without shadows.