It all comes down to this: Father fights son while the Devil Nezha and Mother Soul look on. Batman vs. Robin #4 is written by Mark Waid, drawn by Mahmud Asrar and Scott Godlewski, colored by Jordie Bellaire and lettered by Steve Wands.
While our three rookies face the effects of their actions or inactions, Commissioner Montoya pushes the line to prove Two-Face was behind the FoxTech break-in in GCPD: The Blue Wall #3, written by John Ridley, drawn by Stefano Raffaele, colored by Brad Anderson and lettered by Troy Peteri.Â
The penultimate issue of the series, Batman: Urban Legends #22 starts a Nightwing and Oracle two-parter, continues the ongoing Arkham Academy and time travel stories and has a one-off featuring Anarky.
Will Nevin: Is this the week weâre finally caught up from the terrible Matt Had Trouble Getting His Books Crisis of 2022? Because it feels like weâre all caught up ⌠except for maybe White Knight. And Iâm OK forever being behind on that one.
Matt Lazorwitz: Yup, although thereâs only so many books we can cover each week and it looks like DC isnât slowing down the number of Bat titles theyâre releasing, so we have to pick and choose some. And in one place, weâre back just in time for the finale, so we will have some more room soon.
Father Vs. Son
Will: So I had to get alllll the way read up on this one, and let me say: 1) Goddamned it, can we please have Alfred back? And 2) that was such a shitty way to tease this series when editorial knew it wouldnât lead to the actual return.
Matt: But it sure worked to get some people interested. I probably should have known it was a fake, but I wanted it so bad I was taken in.
But this series has done a good job of playing with all the characters it has. Batman is really well written in his struggle to deal with the possible loss of Damian to the darkness and his desire for Alfred to be alive again, even though he knows itâs not true. And this is Damian at his worst, but in the âhe couldnât be more evilâ sense. Heâs less of a condescending shit and more of a genuine threat than he has been presented in other instances when he could have broken bad before.
Will: There is *a lot* to keep track of in these issues, and most of itâs over my head. Really, you lose me when you start to talk about demons and ancient gods in a Batman title. But I guess Batman wearing Dr. Fateâs helm and being able to play with all the magic toys is cool. And thereâs the central emotional idea thatâs strong throughout the series â Batman questioning whether heâs been a good father or what more he could have done for the family. But as strong as that is, it can get lost in *waves arms at* whatever the rest of this is.
Matt: I am nowhere near as bothered by the genre stuff as you are in this one. Maybe thatâs 30 plus years of reading Batman stories across many genres and just being more used to him as a superhero, which this very much is. While my favorite Batman stories tend to be the ones of him fighting crime on the streets of Gotham, I still love a Batman who can punch Martians or face down alien hordes with Frankenstein on Mars. And I know all the characters who popped up in the earlier issues, so itâs just within my nature to roll with it.
My quibble on a lot of this has more to do with appropriation. I have no problem with Gene Luen Yang, someone of Chinese ancestry, using Pigsy and King Fire Bull, characters from Journey to the West, in his Monkey Prince series. But if youâre not familiar, Journey to the West is a Chinese novel from the 16th century that is possibly the most important and beloved novel in Chinese history. I love Mark Waid, but it weirds me out a little to see a white guy from Alabama using those characters without a lot of their cultural context. Iâm not citing any ill intent, or any ill use, but Iâd feel a little more comfortable if Yang had a story credit on this thing.
Will: Waid, I think, gets even less of a pass on this sort of thing than other white guys from Alabama (*waves at himself*) because youâd think heâd learn from what people had to say about Strange Fruit. But thatâs a big olâ nope. I feel like thereâs not any racism here, but itâs a profound â and unseemly â streak of stubbornness.
Matt: Yang is heavily involved in Lazarus Planet spinning out of this, so there is that. And heâs using characters from literature, so itâs not like heâs using real people, so I donât see racism in here. For want of a better analogy, itâs like an Indian novelist writing a novel where the villains are Uncle Sam and Johnny Appleseed; these arenât religious figures, but they are culturally significant, and someone not of that culture using them is going to raise an eyebrow or two.
But weâre still not talking about this issue. I think this series, and this particular issue, should be a turning point for Damian. He has had darkness forced upon him, heâs come out of it, heâs chosen to save a life, even a reprehensible one, because itâs the right thing for him to do. We should no longer have Damian-struggling-with-his-darkness stories. That character beat should be exhausted. But that has been the character arc that has defined Damian from jump, and I fear that, when writers in the future need to do something with Damian, they will revert him to his old, maybe homicidal, self.
Two-Faced but Not Two-Face
Matt: This continues to be the best thing John Ridley has done since he started writing more regularly for DC. While Montoya has been featured a bit in each issue, this issue zeroes in on her and what she is going through, and more than that, while it doesnât paint her in an entirely unsympathetic light, it does show how easy it is for even those with the best of intentions to abuse power when they have it, and not even see it as an abuse of power.
Will: For those of us who donât have that encyclopedic memory, can you refresh us on what/when Harvey so traumatized Montoya?
Matt: So, Harvey became obsessed with Renee when she stood up to Batman for him post-âCataclysmâ/pre-âNo Manâs Land,â and it only deepened during NML, when she served as the liaison between Dentâs fiefdom and the Blue Boys during Harvey and Gordonâs uneasy alliance to bring order to Gotham. And after the return of Gotham to the rest of the country, well, when Renee spurned Harveyâs advances and he found out she was in the closet, he outed her with a photo of her kissing a woman on the bulletin board in the Eisner and Harvey award-winning second arc of Gotham Central, âHalf a Life.â
Will: I was worried we had already read that for the show and Iâd forgotten it, but nope! (That was âSoft Targetsâ we did and ranked quite highly.) But as to this book, youâre absolutely right â this is Ridleyâs best DC work this side of One Bad Day: Penguin, and for many of the same reasons â itâs grounded, relatable and shows a more street-level view of Gotham and the people fighting for it.
Matt: Renee here is so sure that Two-Face is behind the FoxTech robbery from last issue, something the reader knows he had nothing to do with, that she is willing to go black budget and violate Harveyâs civil rights by performing illegal surveillance to prove his guilt. And she is so wrapped up in it, she completely ignores Officer Ortega, who is facing real problems with racial bias in the GCPD. If it were a character we as readers didn’t have sympathy for and a history with, it would be very easy to write the commish off as a rogue/bad cop, but we know Montoya isnât that. So instead we see her as a victim of her own trauma and as someone who is letting it influence her better nature.
Will: And her story is so nicely weaving in with those of the cadets. Really, the only shame in this book is that it doesnât have the runway of something like Gotham Central, so everything feels a bit more accelerated than it should.
Matt: Ridley put a lot of balls in the air with the start of this series, giving us three cadets plus Montoya, and two of our cadets barely got any page space this issue. Weâre at the halfway point of the series, and he has a lot to deal with in those final three issues. I hope he can pull it off, because this has the potential to be a great piece of Bat media. I just donât want the themes and characters to get lost in an accelerated plot.
Penultimate Urban Legends
Matt: This is the next to last issue of Urban Legends, and for an anthology like this, 23 issues is not going to be a bad run.
Will: Itâs the cycle of such things at DC, isnât it? They create an anthology series, use it to try out new writers and artists and let it go when it no longer sells enough to justify its utility. This certainly got a longer run than the sad Legends of the Dark Knight retread, and weâve gotten some good stories â heck, one of âem even cracked our top 30.
Matt: And it will always be the book where Tim Drake came out, so there will also be serious historical significance in Bat lore. But I donât think any of the stories from these last couple issues will go down in history. That is not to say theyâre bad; I enjoyed this issue. I just don’t feel like they have the weight of those earlier issues, when this series was getting a bigger push.
Will: I wouldnât say this is necessarily going out on a low point (not to say that you said that!) because âThe Murder Clubâ is getting at some Wayne family dynamics I always love to see â and any story that plausibly introduces Damian to Thomas and Martha has to be worth something. But youâre right in that the luster has worn off a bit â I didnât think there was anything particularly interesting in the Anarky story, for example, and that was one I had to read over a couple of times just to figure out what the ending was trying to get across.
Matt: Yeah, the Anarky story felt like an inventory story they dropped in just to fill out the issue. I was excited to see the Nightwing/Oracle story because Jamal Campbell, who wrote and drew it, is one of my top artists in comics, and while heâs done a lot of critically lauded work (Naomi, Far Sector), Iâm glad to see heâs blowing up, between getting the lead story in this issue and becoming the artist on the new Superman ongoing starting in the new year. His art is so dynamic, it was made for a character like Nightwing.
Will: The art is pretty strong on âArkham Academy,â too. That story was initially a hard sell for me (What exactly are these people teaching? How to be better supervillains?), but when I finally understood this to be Gothamâs answer to âscared straightâ programs, it was pretty cute ⌠although weâve got some wildly varying tones in here between Waylonâs bullying as a child and the violence on the final page.
Matt: Hayden Sherman, who does the art for that story, has also been doing the Two-Face backups over in âTec, so Iâm expecting them to graduate to the big leagues, with a solid run on the main story of a Bat title, soon.
Will: Sherman â they of the @Cleanlined handle on Twitter â was born to draw Croc. Each one of his scales is pristine.
Bat-miscellany
- Merry Christmas from everyone here at BatChat. This weekâs podcast features more tangents than usual, as well as The Batman Adventures Holiday Special, a Golden Age Christmas story and the graphic novel Batman: Noel.
- Tim Drake: always a better detective than a fighter.
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.
