What happened when the heroes who would some day be the World’s Finest met for the first time? Find out in this new version of the first meeting of Batman and Superman in Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #18, written by Mark Waid, drawn by Travis Moore, colored by Tamra Bonvillain and lettered by Steve Wands.
Trapped in Arkham with only Scarecrow as an ally, Nightwing must travel into the hidden back rooms of the asylum to find and save Oracle and make his escape in Knight Terrors: Nightwing #2, written by Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad, drawn by Daniele Di Nicuolo, colored by Adriano Lucas and lettered by Wes Abbott.
Catwoman is training an inexperienced Batman to fight his war against the Joker. Her sister, Maggie, also known as Sister Zero, is trying to put down the vigilante life even as Joker closes in on her. What might Selina’s nightmares tell us about the upcoming Gotham War? Find out in Knight Terrors: Catwoman #2, written by Tini Howard, drawn by Leila Leiz, colored by Marissa Louise and lettered by Becca Carey.
Will Nevin: Jason Aaron’s writing a Bat mini, and Doug Mahnke is doing the art. Ain’t that somethin’?
Matt Lazorwitz: Jason Aaron is at his best writing crime stories, so while I’m a little worried this is a space story rather than a gritty Gotham one, I’ve loved enough of his creator-owned and mature readers work (Scalped, Southern Bastards) to be pretty excited. And Mahnke has always been a strong hand on a Bat book, so this has a lot of potential.
Will: It could be great. Or it could be one more tilt at fighting god. Nowhere in between, I think.
World’s Finest
Matt: We enter the next intermission arc of this volume of World’s Finest with a new take on a story we have read many times: the first meeting of Batman and Superman. Mark Waid, being someone who is so deeply knowledgeable about the history of DC Comics, could have easily retread the original, with Batman and Superman meeting on a cruise ship, but instead he goes for something different. He brings Superman to Gotham to help solve a mystery. And it works.
Will: I know you’ve gotten more out of this series to date because it’s been so deep and rich in lore and history. But this issue was by far my favorite: a simple story reinvented and told extraordinarily well by one of the best at doing such a thing.
Matt: We’ll talk about the story beats in a minute, and some of the other character ones as well, but the thing that made me really happy here is that, other than a couple passing mentions of preferring to work alone, this didn’t lean into the Batman, “This is MY CITY!” thing. I’ve said this on an episode or two of the podcast recently, but that trope is done to death, and also makes Batman look like an idiot for not accepting help when it is absolutely necessary. It made me so happy to see these two interacting as peers and allies, if not friends yet, rather than adversaries.
Will: And neither is acting out of character. Batman *should* be interested in a metahuman operating in Metropolis, and the world’s greatest detective would probably be able to 1) deduce that Superman had a secret identity and 2) figure out what it was. But going right to war with this mystery man doesn’t make much sense either, which more or less doomed the Snyderverse. But, yeah, you’re right — this was a damned near refreshing take on this idea.
Matt: And it contrasts with the villains, who aren’t working together in nearly as copacetic a manner. It’s so easy to go with the typical Joker/Luthor team-up, but Waid never goes for anything that simple. Instead teaming up Riddler, arguably Batman’s smartest foe, with Jax-Ur, Krypton’s maddest scientist? I love it. Using Jax-Ur’s Superman: The Animated Series design, which is much closer to the now more famous Zod, rather than either his original, which is more portly Lex Luthor from Krypton, or his post-Crisis, a tall, lanky creep, is a choice, but if you’re shooting for quick visual recognition, you can’t go wrong with picking anything from the DCAU.
Will: Naturally, I had no idea who that was supposed to be, but I’ve accepted that with this series — it also helps that there was markedly less of that in this issue. It’s interesting to see Riddler as basically a prisoner here, reduced to merely a conduit for Jax-Ur. You gotta think he’s going to be feisty and looking for some revenge at some point.
Matt: Nobody puts Riddler in a corner.
Travis Moore steps in as artist on this issue, and as with the other between-main-arc issues, Dan Mora leaves big shoes to fill. But whether it’s the editor or Waid himself, whoever is selecting these other artists knows what they’re doing. Each artist has that retro feel, able to capture a Silver Age vibe, while still telling the story in a modern way. Love it.
Will: And each story has maintained that fun vibe, too. Gordon openly speculating that, “Yeah, maybe a signal would be nice” for Batman and the needlessly complicated plot that Bruce concocted to remove all doubt of Clark’s true nature were campy without venturing into self-parody. This book stays out of Batman ’66 territory (which, as I will state for the record, is not a bad place to visit!) but avoiding outright silliness while maintaining some levity is not an easy thing to do.
Nightwing
Matt: The first part of the Nightwing tie-in to Knight Terrors was one of the more bizarre and nightmare-logic fueled parts of the event we have read for this crossover. This issue doesn’t lean as heavily into the nightmare logic, but more into the logic of nightmares. As the characters realize what it is, they begin to discuss exactly what the symbolism means. As I am woefully behind on my weekly comics, this might be standard for what happens in the second issues, but it struck me as novel, and the issue still has some truly disquieting material, important for a nightmare-themed story.
Will: We had some body horror, more dream logic (Nightwing willing himself to stay asleep to see the nightmare to its conclusion) and a general feeling of unease. This was interesting, Matt, but it was not fun.
Matt: Oh, no, this definitely makes the skin crawl. It’s also another of these stories set within what seems to be a shared dreamscape. The Batman, Joker and Catwoman series all have one person trapped, but as with books like Titans and Wonder Woman, this seems to be the actual consciousnesses of Oracle, Scarecrow and the Batgirls trapped in this Arkham. This is not a complaint about this series, and it might even be answered in one of the issues of the core book I haven’t gotten to yet, but it seems like the rules on this are vague: Why are some people trapped alone and others together? The easy answer is it depends on what the creators wanted to do, but I would have liked some explanation in story. Not even necessarily here. This is more an issue with the event that I am just airing here.
Will: Have you been reading the main story? I’ve tried to avoid as much of this as possible.
Matt: I have read issue #1, and have #2 and #3 in my to read pile. As I have been on vacation with my in-laws/at a work conference/covering Flame Con for this very website the past three weekends when I do most of my non-column or pod-related reading, I’m about a month behind. That’s one of the goals of my vacation next week: come back caught up. I can think of no better thing to do with a week than read a bunch of comics.
Will: I can only hope for your sake that they’re good comics, Brother Matt. Report back with anything that you’ve learned about this event that is finally, mercifully wrapping up, because I am dang anxious to get back to some regular books.
Matt: Hard agree. Even in the best cases, like this and Detective Comics, this concept has a short shelf life.
I would love to know what writers Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad gave Daniele Di Nicuolo in the way of instruction for the two-page spread of the Arkham cafeteria. Was it as limited as a few of the characters that needed to be there, and Di Nicuolo was able to fill in the rest? Or was it a more detailed list? It’s one of those little bits about knowing how the sausage is made I’d love to know.
Will: Did you have a fave in that spread? Mine had to be Minecraft Croc.
Matt: The one that I liked the most was probably mothman Killer Moth staring at the lightbulb. But the one I appreciated the most was the tarantula version of Tarantula on the floor. The vigilante turned supervillain who sexually assaulted Nightwing should have a prominent place in all his nightmares.
This might be the only one of these series I really wanted more from. We get hints of what the nightmares of the Batgirls were, and I would have loved to see exactly what happened to them, especially Cassandra. Cloonan and Conrad’s Batgirls was a criminally underrated series, and I would have loved to see a fuller last hurrah for them with Babs, Steph and Cass.
Will: I know she doesn’t have her own ongoing at the moment, but Babs alone would have made for a good story … assuming we didn’t go back to the one story that we always keep going back to.
Matt: I was THRILLED that her fear here is her becoming over reliant on tech and being something less than human, rather than the wheelchair and what caused it; it felt like Joker not being here was a conscious choice, so bravo to everyone involved on that. If we never see a reference to that story again, it will be too soon.
Catwoman
Matt: I’m still working out everything that happened in this issue, and this series to be frank. This is more deeply plotted than a lot of the rest of these miniseries, and I think a lot of that comes from Tini Howard. As the series writer on Catwoman, and the co-architect of the upcoming Gotham War miniseries/event, Howard was trying to tell a story that helped to establish the psychological stakes of that story. Which means it’s doing way more heavy lifting than a lot of these breezy, never going to be referenced again minis.
Will: This one might be the only one that had to do any lifting at all in that it had to tie into “Gotham War” somehow, and it hasn’t been nearly as complicated for other books — as we observed with Knight Terrors: Joker, it might as well not have any connection to the series at all. But I thought this was a relevant read that gave us a Catwoman who may be conflicted as she attempts to realign crime in Gotham.
Matt: I was initially a little put off by the use of Joker as the main villain here. Sure, Catwoman has had her run-ins with Joker, but she doesn’t have the same adversarial history with him that she does with, say, Black Mask. It initially felt like the easy thing to do, since Joker is the default big bad in Gotham. But when you think about “Joker War,” where Joker tried to make all of crime in Gotham part of his empire run from Wayne Enterprises, it makes sense that Selina would see what he did, the pure chaos of it, as the antithesis of what she wants.
Will: We talked last time about how this story pulls from disparate timelines to make some kind of unpalatable narrative stew that could only make sense in the context of a dream. But ultimately, it does give the story a weight it wouldn’t otherwise have, with Selina seeing how all of these other plans and ideas of hers have failed. Why, then, would this new one turn out any differently? Doubt is a hell of a thing.
Matt: And the end of the issue, with the clown nuns? That concept in itself is enough to send shivers down the spine of any child of the ’90s who saw IT too young and went to Catholic school, but the final beat of the nightmare, of Selina dying and leaving her war unfought and in the hands of the people she loves? That is heavy. So much of what Howard has been doing on this book has been about Selina coming to terms with her responsibilities, you couple that with the doubt, as you mentioned, and it does a lot to lay the groundwork for why Gotham War is a logical extension of everything that has happened between Bruce and Selina since the wedding that wasn’t.
Will: I’ll agree with all of that (We all float down here in BatChat, Matt) and raise you a random question: Selina’s nightmare look was definitely inspired by Breakfast at Tiffany’s, right? Is there anything we can read into that, or do you think that was simply a stylistic choice?
Matt: I think the latter. There have been a couple times in her history where artists have homaged that look (I’m thinking her version in the DC Bombshells universe), so I think it’s just a slick look for someone with a propensity for black.
Bat-miscellany
- This week on the podcast, Robert Secundus joins us to talk about three stories featuring Azrael. And spoiler: We have a new bottom of the Big Board!
- And if that’s not enough Batman podcast action, check out this week’s WMQ&A, where Matt and Dan sit down with Michael Northrop, author of the new young readers OGN Young Alfred: Pain in the Butler.
- Because I love a good dad joke, my favorite Phantom Zone criminal is Superman’s dad’s cousin, Kru. That means his name was Kru-El. Nominative determinism at work.
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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.
