A little bit more on Guillem March's Joker Vol. 1...

1.) Guillem March draws several "cover" images of panels and scenes from The Killing Joke. Because writer James Tynion IV and artist Guillem March's The Joker is about the title character but uses former commissioner James Gordon as its protagonist, the book revolves quite a bit around the relationship between the two character, particularly the villains many and varied attacks on Gordon and his family over the years.

Naturally, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's 1988 Batman: The Killing Joke is therefore repeatedly referenced, being not only one of the most widely-read and influential Joker stories, but also because it was specifically about The Joker's attempt to drive Gordon "mad", in part by attacking and torturing his daughter, Barbara Gordon. 

The Joker Vol. 1 is very much a comic book in conversation with other comic books, particularly The Killing Joke, but there are other conversations happening as well (like, for example, Tynion seemingly criticizing the climax of Tom King's run on Batman by having The Joker offer his professional criticism on how best to hurt Batman to Bane, as previously mentioned in my review of the book). 

Because the events of The Killing Joke are so often referenced, we get the opportunity to see March draw scenes from that storyline in his own style, and, from a certain perspective, it is certainly interesting to see how March does so, having to be clear in what he's referencing while also making the imagery his own.

Above is a scene from the first issue of The Joker, offering a pretty direct "cover" version of a Bolland image of the Joker, right down to mimicking the pose.

Bolland

It's fascinating to compare the two images, to see what March considered important to keep and what he felt free to change. 

March's Joker looks less...happy, his lips contorted in a smile, but his teeth forming more of a grimace and the rest of his face looking angry. There's also a highly textured cragginess about The Joker's face as March draws it, with seemingly every ince of it spider-webbed with contorting muscles. 

In general, I think March's Joker owes more to that of Jim Aparo than to Bolland's.

2.) I think March is the best artist who is currently drawing Batman on a regular basis. Don't get me wrong. I still think Norm Breyfogle drew the ultimate version of the character, and Kelley Jones' version is still my favorite version, and I still think Jones is the greatest living Batman artist (although there's much to be said for Tim Sale, too). But among all the artists who draw the character regularly, or even semi-regularly? March has my vote.

Batman doesn't appear as often as one might expect in The Joker, his appearances in the first collected volume mostly clustered around the beginning as the premise of the series is set up, but here's his first appearance in the book, crouching like a gargoyle on a bit of Gotham architecture, as is his wont. 

It's a pretty nice image of Batman doing something extremely Batman-ly, in which he looks quite causal doing it, as if it's just an everyday part of his job, which I suppose it is. March has the ability to find the right balance, I think, between Batman as a real flesh-and-blood human being and a bigger-than-life, almost cartoonish creature of the night. (Note the musculature of his legs and shoulders on the one hand, and the blank eyes, too-big cape and the bleeding-into-shadow on the other hand.) That is, in my mind at least, exactly how Batman should appear. 

3.) Look at this scary-ass Joker. Gordon's narration makes much of the fact that he basically sees The Joker every time he closes his eye, and that the character seems to haunt him. The artwork shows several examples of this, but March isn't content just to draw phantom Jokers leering at Gordon through windows or above his bed while he sleeps.

When Gordon visits the grave of his son, we're presented with this nightmare version of The Joker, with multiple limbs, faces and facial features, like the character is boiling. 

It certainly drives home the extent to which terrifying imagery has permeated Gordon's life, that such visions of The Joker are basically just background noise for him now.

4.) March draws a good Batgirl, too. So I've repeatedly talked about how I think Breyfogle's Batman was the ultimate version of the character, as he drew Batman as a thoroughly human, athletic figure—in peak physical condition, sure, but still recognizably human—that wore the Batman persona, as from the neck up his face was constantly transforming into angry white triangle eyes and bared teeth over a field of black, and his billowing cape forming the shape of bat-wings or an angry, jagged cloud, or trailing him like a comet. 

I haven't seen much of March's Batgirl, but he does something similar with her here, and I think his depiction of the Cassandra Cain version of the character is exactly right: A female silhouette, a too-big, billowing, expressive cape, a cartoon bat from the neck up. He even has her oversized utility-belt pouches flopping while she's in action, just as her co-creator Damion Scott used to draw her. 

5.) Here's another scary-ass Joker. Relatively late in the first volume, Gordon and other characters are caught in a blast of what The Joker calls a nerve gas, which obviously influences the way Gordon sees and experiences The Joker. 

Note the multiple visions of him in the same panel, which seems to echo the earlier vision Gordon had of him, and  how March is able to exaggerate some of the character's features in the lower panel of the page, despite how exaggerated his design for the character—and, indeed, pretty much everyone's design for the character—already is.

In this story, The Joker's right eye has been replaced with a glass eye, Harley Quinn having shot his eye out at the climax of "The Joker War" story arc, and March makes good use of it throughout as just one more weird and off-putting detail of the character's face. In theat final image, it positively bulges out like it's about to pop. 

A little more on Batman Vol. 3: Ghost Stories

I know I already discussed Batman Vol. 3: Ghost Stories in a previous post, but I had a few other things I wanted to say about it. Specifically, eleven more things. 

Guillem March

1.) This is a legitimately awesome image.  Pages two and three of the collection are given over to a two-page spread in which Batman and Robin swing over Gotham City, and between the panels in which writer James Tynion IV and artist Guillem March are beginning to tell their story. 

It's a pretty great image, and one which would seem to date to the time shortly after Tim Drake first became Robin but before "Knightfall", given Batman's still-blue suit. This is a time period in which Norm Breyfogle would have most likely been the artist to be drawing Batman and Robin together, and March does a pretty great early-to-mid-nineties version of the Dynamic Duo. Like Breyfogle, he has an admirable balance of realism and exaggeration in his Batman design, who is lithe and athletic here. He's also notably younger and happier looking then the bigger, bulkier, gruffer and more intimidating version of the character that March draws in the scenes set in the present. 

March just doesn't get as much credit for being as awesome of a Batman artist as he is, if you ask me. 

March

2.) I could look at pictures of Batman kicking Grifter in the face all day. For reasons I don't understand and can't even imagine, Lucius Fox has hired a bodyguard, and the bodyguard he settled on is Cole Cash, AKA Grifter from Jim Lee's early '90s super-team WildCATS (and various attempts to revive them in the decades that have followed).

Batman goes to visit Fox, but that necessitates a three-page fight scene in which Grifter tries to violently stop Batman from doing so, using his fists, knives and, ultimately, a hidden gun, which is how the confrontation ends, with Grifter apparently winning the fight. (It ends with Grifter holding a gun to Batman's forehead, at which point Fox arrives and breaks it up).

It's a credit to Tynion and March's storytelling skills that they actually made Grifter vs. Batman look like a decent fight, as it should really only take Batman about a panel to dismantle Grifter, by flipping his stupid face mask up over his eyes and punching him in the mouth, or grabbing his stupid face mask and pulling him into his fist repeatedly by it like one of those old balls on a string toys, or pulling his stupid face mask all the way down over his throat and choking him with it.

Basically, that stupid face mask looks like a real liability in a fight. And is stupid.

You know, I don't think I care for that Grifter character, which is why images of Batman kicking him in the face might prove so satisfying. 

There's also a pretty great panel in which Batman punches Grifter so hard in the stomach that he lifts him bodily off the ground a few feet.

The scene did make me want to revisit Grant Morrison and Val Semeiks' 1997 JLA/WildCATS crossover though, which I remember liking quite a bit at the time, despite not knowing/caring anything at all about the WildCATS.

March

3.) No one gives dirtier dirty looks than Batman. Check out the expression March draws on Batman as he gives a parting warning/threat to Grifter. He manages to frown and snarl at the same time, shooting daggers from his eyes that could gut someone like a fish.

 

Jorge Jimenez

4.) I'm not so sure about this Ghost-Maker character. The two most important elements of a superhero character, because they are the two most immediate elements, are their name and their costume. I don't really like either in the case of Ghost-Maker.

I've been operating under the assumption that the name "Ghost-Maker" refers to the fact that the character kills his foes, thus making ghosts. It's a dumb name, but it's dumb in a funny way, and I think it's a fine name for a character like, say, The Punisher, where there should be some remove between the reader and the goals and motivations of the character.

It seems somewhat frustrating though because so much of the character's background seems to suggest that the character's name should be The Ghost or Ghost, and I'm not entirely sure why it isn't, aside from the fact that maybe the old Dark Horse superhero (who teamed-up with Batgirl once!) has that name. 

Ryan Benjamin

See, Ghost-Maker has so hidden his identity and presence in the world that it's almost as if he doesn't exist...like a ghost! His special technology, with which he can even hide from Oracle, is called "Ghost-Net." So "Ghost" or "The Ghost" really seem like the way to go, no? 

If that's too generic, then one might consider an adjective, like The Gay Ghost or The Grim Ghost, no? Or even a color. The White Ghost is sort of a redundant name, and I understand why they went with white as the costume color, as it so sharply, visually contrasts with Batman's costume, but perhaps The Silver Ghost or The Red Ghost or The Crimson Ghost would have worked, while also allowing for a strong visual contrast (The Gray Ghost, obviously, was taken).

Then there's the costume. I don't necessarily hate it, but I'm not terribly fond of it, particularly the baggy pants and the mask, which, as I mentioned before, keeps making me think of a cartoon duck under it. I think the face is just a little busy. Something opaque and feature-less, like the original Red Hood costume (or the one that Jason Todd sported during Batman and Robin) or something reflective like Cobra Commander sometimes wore would have worked better; as is, the two little lights, the various black and white panels and the varying degrees of opacity and reflectiveness just look like too much to me. 

Although, I suppose, the busy-ness, like the color scheme, may be part of the point; his costume is as complicated and busy as Batman's is simple and iconic...? 

I liked Ghost-Maker's costume even less as I read on, as he appears in various flashbacks where earlier iterations of his costume that I actually liked quite a bit more. 

Carlo Pagulayan and Danny Miki

6.) See? The above costume is one that Ghost-Maker is wearing when he approaches young Bruce Wayne during the time the two were crisscrossing the world, seeking various masters to train under as they sought to become perfect crimefighters. During their first meeting, Ghost-Maker was wearing street clothes with the mask pictured above. This time he seems to have settled on an early version of an entire costume.

This one's not perfect, but I greatly prefer how much more simple and paired down it is. I also like the Netflix's Daredevil-esque mask more than the complicated face plate he wears in the present. 

Pagulayan and Miki

He'll appear in a later flashback wearing a slightly altered version of that costume, havin now added a hood, which adds to his ghostliness, and a pair of gloves. Of all the Ghost-Maker costumes in the book, I think I like this one the best. 

March

7.) Harley Quinn agrees with me. Ghost-Maker is a dumb name. 

March

8.) Is this the first time Guillem March has drawn Batgirl Cassandra Cain? Just curious. I think it might be, unless Cassandra appeared in Gotham City Sirens at some point. I would certainly be interested in seeing more of his version of Cassandra, given the strength of his take on Batman. Cassandra reappears later in the book, alongside her fellow Batgirl, Stephanie Brown, but she's drawn by Bengal and Pagulayan and Miki in those panels. 

March

9.) Wait, he killed how many people? Here is where Tynion loses me with the Clownhunter character, who is otherwise one of those creations who perfectly balances awesome with stupid to equal out as a good super-comic character. According to Ghost-Maker here, Bao has killed 24 people. 24! A full two-dozen! 

That presents a pair of problems for the character.

First, it seems like a way too high number. I mean, we see Bao kill his very first clown in the pages of this very collection, as his origin story is recounted in the quite-excellent Batman Annual #5 (written by Tynion and drawn by James Stokoe). He hits a Joker henchmen with his bat-bat (a batarang-embedded in or tied to a baseball bat), and then sets him aflame using the Molotov cocktail the clown was preparing to throw at Bao's building. 

Fine. But the other 23? That's... a lot of people for an ordinary 17-year-old with no special skills and no training or any equipment to take out in a matter of days; like, The Punisher kills criminals right and left, but he's a highly-trained and experienced jungle fighter with an arsenal so big it once had its own comic book series. Bao's sole experience at committing acts of violence against others seems to be playing fighting video games. That, and he's pretty motivated. And that's it. 

I know "realism" isn't something one should go into super-comics expecting a lot of, but, with Batman comics especially, I need them to at least not be so far-fetched that I can't convince myself to suspend my disbelief.

Secondly, that is such a high body count that it seems preposterous that Batman wouldn't bust Bao. Had he killed one, maybe a couple of Joker's followers in self-defense, that would be one thing (Although the very name "Clownhunter" implies that he's actively stalking clowns to murder). But Bao has committed 24 acts of premeditated murder. 

In this comic, in the very panels following the one posted above, Batman tells Ghost-Maker that throwing the kid in prison wouldn't help, as he would only continue to kill Joker's henchmen from the inside (and likely with the help of Blackgate prison guards), and that, besides, the kid's only 17, and was traumatized by seeing The Joker kill his parents in front of him.

None of those lines of argumentation sound much like Batman. I mean, remember when he used to give Huntress shit for being too rough with the criminals she pursued? Or how he took down Jean-Paul Valley because he was so brutal and reckless that he might, theoretically, someday kill someone? It's hard to square that Batman, the one for whom life is so sacred he refuses to ever kill unrepentant mass-murderers and monsters like The Joker or Killer Croc or whoever, with one who is willing to let Clownhunter go free after he's killed more than two-dozen people. 

March

10.) Wildcat! I so missed the Golden Age during DC's decade or so of The New 52—when they were trying to operate under the understanding that there was no Golden Age, and superheroes "started" about five years ago when the Justice League formed—that just seeing any acknowledgement of any Golden Age heroes thrills me now. Like, I genuinely got excited to see a brief montage featuring young Bruce Wayne and various mentors, with Wildcat Ted Grant among them (as well as Zatara, in the previous panel).

Of possible note here is that Wildcat appear to be a white guy, as per usual, but in the Stargirl Spring Break Special #1, the Wildcat that appeared among the various JSA line-ups on the final splash page appeared to be a Black guy. 

???

11.) Does Ra's al Ghul know about this? At the climax of "Ghost Stories" Batman sword-fights Ghost-Maker...while shirtless. Is...he allowed to do that? I thought he only got in shirtless sword fights with Ra's al Ghul. 

A little more on "Their Dark Designs" (mostly just nitpicking and Kelley Jones covers)

I wrote a kinda sorta review of Batman: Their Dark Designs—kinda sorta reviews being my specialty at EDILW!—in the previous post, but I had a lot more to say about it than I had room to do so in that particular format. Although I can't say I had a lot more of any real worth to say about it, as I mostly just noticed a lot of allusions to '90s Batman comics and some buggy continuity. But I thought I'd put it all down in a separate post because why not? If you have a copy of the collection handy, feel free to follow along...!

Tony S. Daniel and Danny Miki

1.) Gunsmith, not Gunhawk. When I first saw the above panel, I assumed that Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan's gun-toting villain with an American flag bandana had gotten a more menacing design update by artist Tony S. Daniel, but this is, in fact, Gunsmith, not Gunhawk, the villain I was thinking of.

Gunhawk was an original creation of the Dixon/Nolan team, and he first appeared in 1994's Detective Comics #674, during Jean-Paul Valley's brief stint as Batman. Gunhawk's costume was sort of mess, pairing green and black spandex with a target-like icon suggestive of Deadshot's, a visor like Cyclops' and, most memorably for me, an American flag bandana worn over his head. He had a partner/girlfriend named—sigh—Gunbunny.

Kelley Jones

As minor a character as he is, you may have run into him lately, as I have. He returned in 'Tec #708-#710, "The Death Lottery," a story arc that was recently collected in Batman: Knight Out (reviewed in the previous post). He also appeared during Dixon and Nolan's 2017 maxiseries Bane: Conquest. 

Gunsmith appeared for the first time in Batman #85, making him one of several original characters that writer James Tynion IV and company introduce in "Their Dark Designs" (along with Mr. Teeth, The Underbroker and, of course, The Designer).

Like Gunhawk, Gunsmith seems to be another generic-ish mercenary, a former member of the U.S. military turned killer-for-hire. But Batman Secret Files #3, collected in Batman: Their Dark Designs, features an eight-page story by writer Dan Watters and artist John Paul Leon that fleshes the character out a bit.

John Paul Leon

It doesn't take up much space, all of two panels, but that there's enough to make the character into an individual character with a gimmick of sorts, and that's enough to make him a decent Batman villain. And a better one than Gunhawk, I would say, but 'hawk still has more appearances to his name. I guess we'll see if any other creators choose to use Gunsmith, or if Tynion himself chooses to return to him. Certainly the character's association with guns, not just the fact that he uses them but that he likes, thinks and talks about them so much, makes him an interesting foil for Batman. At least he was for those eight pages of Batman Secret Files #3. 

Daniel and Miki

2.) "The movie is insane and so epic and is probably rated R...There's one scene where Batman drops an F-Bomb." The above panel follows five panels in which Deathstroke and Batman fight, the former talking the entire time. Since Tynion wrote a grawlix, we can assume that Batman did not say "Shut the hell up and fight me," as "hell" and "damn" are the swear words Batman uses the most often, and are A-OK to print in DC's DC Universe, Rated T-for-Teen comics. "Shut the hell up and fight me" is the most natural-sounding thing Batman could say in that panel, by the way.

No, since it's a grawlix, it has to be a stronger word than "hell" or "damn" (not that "Shut the damn up and fight me" makes sense anyway). And since "Shut the shit up" doesn't make sense, I guess we can only assume that Batman said "Shut the fuck up and fight me," which, damn, that doesn't sound like something Batman would say, does it...? 

Daniel and Miki

3.) Imagine watching The Lego Batman Movie and thinking that is the one thing from it that the Batman comics could use more of. Early in the story arc, Batman calls Lucius Fox, who is hard-at-work in subbasement 13 of "The Wayne Enterprises Tricorner Yards Campus," known as "The Hibernaculum," and the two have a very exposition-y discussion about this new "autonomous factory floor, capable of printing and assembling machine parts at short notice," and the new vehicle Batman asked him to build there this morning.

We see the bowels of the new vehicle under construction, and an ominous bat shape that Fox calls "a bit terrifying," but there's a bit of suspense as to what it actually is. Fox provides some clues during the conversation, when Batman asks if it will do what he needs it to: "It'll run easy enough... It'll be able to scuttle up walls, pounce and track your targets." 

That's right, it will scuttle.

Batman refers to the in-progress vehicle as "The Nightclimber,"  but it's pretty obvious that Tynion, Daniel and company are just introducing The Lego Batman Movie's Scuttler into the DCU for some reason.* 

We only see it in action briefly near the climax of Batman #85, the first chapter of the arc, as it scuttles up the side of a building in a sequence that echoes Batman climbing atop a building earlier in the issue, and it then transforms into a bat-plane and takes off; it will spend the rest of the arc in this bat-plane mode. There are a couple of story reasons why a new vehicle is introduced, including demonstrating Batman's abilities as a designer who is always creating new things, to illustrate the role faith plays in his mission, and to give him something to collaborate with Fox on, but the main reason seems to be that Tynion thought The Scuttler was pretty cool. He just didn't like the name. 

Guillem March

4.) For someone who doesn't like to kill, Batman sure seems to have attempted to kill that lady. Batman is famous for his refusal to ever kill a foe, no matter how terrible a monster that foe might be, no matter how many innocent lives might be saved if he decides to take one guilty life. The rationales will shift as regularly as the context, but the existence of that line Batman never crosses is a constant (At least in the comics and most mass-media extrapolations, the first cycle of Batman films being outliers in the fact that Batman does kill in those). 

It seems to me, though, that what really keeps Batman from killing people is luck as much as anything else. I mean, he's a big guy, he's decked out head-to-toe in body armor, and dude is always dropping on top of people, flying kicking them, throwing them around, punching them with his gauntlets, throwing pieces of sharp metal at their heads...statistically speaking, it seems like Batman would almost have to accidentally break someone's neck or fracture a skull every couple of months, you know?

This arc contains a particularly egregious example, in which the only thing that spares his opponent would seem to be that the writer decided she she shouldn't die from her injuries. 

Batman gives chase to the assassin Cheshire on some sort of crazy urban luge that he ejects out of  The Scuttler Nightclimber, rides down the sheer face of a sky scraper and than pilots along the city streets, pursuing her motorcycle. She eventually decides to backflip off of her bike, land high-heels first onto his chest and stick  her poison-tipped finger nails into the sides of his face. 

When she asks if he has any last words, he replies, "Brace yourself," and steers her directly into an oncoming semi.

The assassin survives being hit by a truck that had to be driving at least 35 miles an hour one way, while she sped at it spine-first at God-knows-how-many-miles an hour the Bat-Street Luge travels. It doesn't even knock her out! She's scuffed up pretty good, and is bleeding from the nose and mouth after getting hit by a truck, but she's still talking to Batman afterwards. 

That Cheshire is one tough broad, apparently. 

March

5.) I confess to loving the "Penguin going to war" imagery. Seemingly the first of the villains to recognize what's going on, The Penguin decides to act immediately, stuffing a whole bunch of deadly truck umbrellas into what I imagine is something between a golf bag and a wearable umbrella stand. 

The character has so long been portrayed as a more-or-less legitimate business man style realistic gangster, one who poses as a nightclub owner while committing more mundane crimes like arms-dealing, blackmail and gun-running, as opposed to the sorts of spectacular terrorist attacks that the various Arkham inmate villains so regularly engage in (or the bird-themed crime that he used to engage in so regularly before the 1990s). 

I think that makes The Penguin one of the more interesting of the main Batman villains, and I personally find him a bit more fascinating than others in that he's one of the oldest and greatest Batman villains, but, if we can assign the fictional character motivations of his own, he seems to have intentionally chosen to be a B-grade villain and just settle for making a lot of money, rather than destroying Gotham City, killing Batman or ruling the world like The Joker, Ra's Al Ghul, Bane, Two-Face, The Scarecrow and even The Riddler (who's had an interesting career path over the last 30 years, having both retired and gone straight). 

In fact, it's so him to do any sort of "hands-on" villainy that when he does engage in it, it can be presented as something of an occasion. I'm thinking of Doug Moench, Kelley Jones and John Beatty's 1997 Batman #548 and #549, for example, or the point in Batman Eternal where he decides to take fighting a rival into his own hands, regardless of legal peril it puts him in. 

Jones

Anyway, March's imagery of a Penguin with an entire arsenal of gimmick umbrellas strapped on his back, attacking and kidnapping a team of the world's deadliest assassins lead by Deathstroke, The Terminator is at once awesome and ridiculous, and manages to show the character in a particularly bad-ass light.

I like The Penguin that is too clever to do crazy shit all the time and has to plea insanity to stay out of the electric chair or keep a needle out of his arm (or however they perform capital punishment in whatever state Gotham City is in), but I also like that he's not afraid to pick up a bumbershooter and mix it up with the likes of Batman or Deathstroke every once in a great while. 

Jorge Jimenez

6.) Honestly, I expected a guy calling himself The Designer to be better designed. It's not that the Designer's costume is terrible, really, it's just kind of all-over-the-place in terms of theme, giving him a sort of incoherent fashion sense. His boots and beaded necklaces say "pirate," his camouflage pants say "modern soldier", his fur-lined cape says "aristocrat", his military medals say "dictator cosplay"...he's got a big, medieval-looking sword, shoulder pads that wouldn't look out of place on a football field or an Image Comics cover from 1993, and his face is concealed by a feature-less mask, baring only the fancy "D" for Designer.

It...almost kinda sorta works, but it seems a bit much, and I think there's too much tension between the mask and the clothes, what the character does (design crimes) and what he looks like (a modern riff on Marvel's Baron Zemo). Much of his costume looks like what one might expect The General to wear when he grew up. 

Now, I'm not sure what the character should look like, as he's presented as something of a cypher character, an archetype with no real personality, history or weight. He's a villain we know nothing about who fights a hero we know nothing about, a character who enters this narrative as a sort of urban legend-come-to-life, a bogeyman character that Gotham's villains swap stories about, and he is here mainly to design a perfect crime spree involving four of Batman's greatest villains. 

In that regard, perhaps the military accessories make sense, to the extent that "military" evokes "strategy", but  I don't know, it just felt a bit messy to me. And again, the dude's name is "The Designer"; I know he designs crimes not costumes, but I really expect a villain with a name like that to be one of the better-dressed villains, you know...? 

Jimenez

7.) Catwoman is wearing the wrong costume, but she's wearing the wrong costume consistently. I know that continuity has gone out the window, but that doesn't mean it can't still bug me when it's wrong! When we flash back to the meeting between The Designer and the four villains that made up "Underworld United" in the 1966 Batman movie (and yes, Tynion does drop that name to refer to the quartet collectively at one point), the time period is what would have been sometime during or shortly after Year Three, given the fact that Batman was working with Robin at that point. At least, that was when Robin debuted in the post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint timeline. Post-Flashpoint, Robin Dick Grayson started working with Batman almost immediately, probably during his first year (remember, the entirety of Dick, Jason and Tim's tenures as Robins were all supposedly set during a single five-year period on the New 52's hyper-compressed timeline). 

Dick is shown wearing  his New 52 Robin costume, which would seem to orient this post-Flashpoint, during the New 52 timeline...which Death Metal and its various continuity rejiggering follow-ups seems to be radically revising anyway (The artists should probably not commit to a particular Robin costume then, but simply dray him in silhouette with an "R" symbol, to keep the imagery canonical as DC's history shifts so much around stories like this).  

While The Joker, Riddler and Penguin costumes are all more-or-less timeless, being basically just suits you could have customized by any Gotham tailor with sufficiently colorful fabric on  hand, Catwoman is wearing the purple costume she wore during the first volume of her own ongoing series, launched in 1993. So she's outfitted as she would have been around Year Nine or Year Ten of the pre-Flashpoint timeline (If this were set around Year Three of that timeline, she should be wearing a costume similar to that in Batman: The Long Halloween or Dark Victory).

However, in the (terrible) "War of Jokes and Riddles" story arc of Tom King's Batman run, also set closer to The New 52's Year One, Catwoman was similarly attired, so while her early '90s costume will evoke a relatively late period in Batman history to anyone whose been reading these dang things or a couple of decades (and/or keeps up with the trades), it seems that at least she's been wearing the wrong costume consistently, and that is her post-Flashpoint "Year One" costume. (And I have to assume this story is catering to readers who have been reading Batman comics for a few decades, otherwise Tynion's allusions would be more like appropriations.)

Just as it might have been better not to draw Robin with a costume marrying the panel to a particular continuity if things are in the process of shifting, maybe they should have given Catwoman either a brand-new costume (she does change costumes a lot), or some sort of hybrid one, like the won she wore in Batman/Catwoman: Trail of The Gun**, which fused her early, gray color scheme and her '80s costume's tail with the basic design of the purple '90s costume 

March

8.) I sincerely hope Tynion buys all of Dixon's drinks at comics conventions. Late in the arc, Batman is fighting Deathstroke atop the Nightclimber and they fall off into the street, just as The Riddler is launching his Designer-designed attack. Batman orders Deathstroke down the nearest subway station, when up pulls...The Bat-Train!

Like most of the new vehicles and gadgets that appear in this arc, the Bat-Train, as Deathstroke calls it, doesn't get much panel-time, and we only see one real exterior shot of it and one interior shot, as the pair take it to The Riddler's location. 

This isn't the first time Batman has had his own special form of rail travel, of course. 1993's Detective Comics #667, by Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan, introduced the Bat-Subway Rocket. The invention of Harold, it was basically a rail-mounted Batmobile that was meant to take the Dark Knight directly into the city from the Batcave, using abandoned subway lines and rocket engines.

Jones didn't put it on the cover, but I'm gonna post his cover anyway. 

Bruce Wayne suffered his career-ending injury at the hands of Bane before ride the Subway rocket, but both Jean-Paul Valley and Dick Grayson made use of it during their short stints as temporary, replacement Batmen. (It would have been an ideal way for Teen Wonder Tim Drake to get into town without having to ask Alfred for rides, but Dixon gave the 15-year-old an early driver's license, since his father's paralysis meant he was needed to drive him around, so Tim used his own Robinmobile, The Redbird, instead of the Rocket.)

As for the Bat-Train, it is bigger, scarier and more intimidating than the blue Subway Rocket, although it's not entirely clear why Batman would need a train-sized form of rail conveyance, rather than the Batmobile-sized Rocket. I guess he's got so many sidekicks and partners now, the Bat-Train would be a good way to get them all from the Batcave to the city...

March

8.) I would think "big-ass" or "big fucking" would be more appropriate ways to refer to that hammer. Instead, based on the number of characters in the grawlix, I can only assume that what Harley says in this panel is "But right now, I'm going to hit you in the head with this big fuck hammer until you wake up," and man, that doesn't sound right....

March

9.) But back to continuity... When Batman finally confronts The Designer, he explains what he deduced about his plan. When it comes to the part about "five of the highest-paid assassins in the world" coming to town, Batman notes they would have been different assassins at the time. One of them would have been The KGBeast, ho is pictured with his gun-hand. Of course, back then, when Dick was still Robin, Batman had yet to fight KGBeast, who appeared in 1988's "Ten Nights Of The Beast," well after Dick had become Nightwing and Jason Todd and been killed, but shortly before Tim began training to be Robin and...aw, DC doesn't care about continuity, why do I...?

*That reason being that he liked it a whole lot, I guess. The same reason I assume Tom King is writing The Phantasm character from Mask of The Phantasm into the DCU in the pages of his Batman/Catwoman series. And the same reason that if 17-year-old Caleb were writing a Teen Titans revival in 1994, he would have included  Alan Grant and Vince Giarrano's The Human Flea from Shadow of The Bat #11-12 on the line-up along with Robin, Superboy, The Ray, Damage and Anima. 🤷

**If you haven't read Trail of The Gun, don't worry about it. I remember liking it okay, but now I can't remember any details at all, so it didn't exactly make a lasting impression. It was drawn by Ethan Van Sciver though, so you definitely don't want to expose yourself to that guy's work.

Hey, North American publishers!

Why don't one of you translate and re-publish these for sale in our market? Looking for Guillem March books, all I see is Cover Girls and a bunch of Batman spin-offs like Gotham City Sirens, New 52 Catwoman (with Judd Winick!) and Talon...

I really like that Guillem March character's art, but I don't see it in very many comic books that are very good comic books...

Review: Batman and Robin: Dark Knight Vs. White Knight

DC launched Batman and Robin in 2009 as part of Grant Morrison's ongoing run on the Batman franchise. It was one of several instances where the writer rather shrewdly tied a new story direction to the launch of a new title, underlining the presumed importance of the new direction (and, perhaps not incidentally, generating higher sales than he would have by continuing on a pre-existing title).

This particular book was launched after the events of Final Crisis and the aftermath of Morrison's "Batman R.I.P." story arc in the Batman title left Bruce Wayne temporarily "dead." Dick Grayson became the new Batman, Damian Wayne became the new Robin and DC was launching a new title devoted to this bold new direction.

It was actually the first of two times Morrison's twisting and turning six-year Batman mega-plot birthed a new Batman title. When Bruce Wayne returned, Morrison left Batman and Robin, which had outlived its usefulness to his story, and DC launched Batman, Inc. for Morrison, a new book devoted to chronicling Wayne's attempts to build a global army of crime-fighting Batmen.

So what to do with Batman and Robin...? Cancel it? A successful title starring Batman? Of course not.

Instead, DC would keep it going, although their plan for doing so looks like it must have been more than a little confused, looking back on what the post-Morrison version of the title looked like: Ten issues by four different creative teams, three three-issue arcs by three different teams (the third of which suffered some pretty bad production problems, based on the number of artists involved with it), plus a one-off, schedule-filling issue by the fourth team.

This collection includes all of the post-Morrison issues of the first volume of Batman and Robin save for the final issue, a done-in-one written by David Hine and 2/3 drawn by Greg Tocchini, with artist Andrei Bressan drawing the final third. (What, exactly, happened during this period of the title's life is likely explained by the then-imminent launch of DC's "New 52"; at one point, Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason were announced as the new creative team for the book, but after one arc another creative team came in and, when the second, "New 52" volume of the series was announced, it was with Tomasi and Gleason as its creative team).

All of the apparent chaos behind the scenes obviously wasn't conducive to producing great comics, but there's surprisingly good work in this volume, some of it from creators who haven't produced much of note over the course of the last few years (artist Scott McDaniel and writer Judd Winick, for example) who nevertheless make rather strong showings within these stories.

The first story is very good, the second a little less so and the third even less so. Due to the fill-in nature of all three arcs, and the fact that the de facto Batman showrunner Morrison had already turned his attention away from the Grayson/Wayne Batman and Robin team means there's only so much any writer can do with the characters or characterization. All three writers managed to carry on Morrison's surface-level characterizations, however, and have fun with the inverted light-hearted, quipping Batman and dark, tight-ass Robin relationship, the Dynamic Duo as multi-generational buddy cops with Alfred as referee premise.

All three stories also manage to introduce new villains of varying degrees of stature and creativity, and boast some pretty decent art—at least until the very end of the collection.

Let's look at them one at a time, shall we?

"The Sum of Her Parts" by Paul Cornell, Scott McDaniel, Christopher Jones, Rob Hunter, Art Thibert and Andy Owen

The arc opens in medias res with Batman and Robin busting up a mysterious wedding ceremony of some sort, while Damian bickers with Dick over the fact that they both had an entrance line (That is, traditionally, Robin's job, but ur-Robin Grayson hasn't kicked the habit yet).

From there we flash back a few nights to a grave robbery of one Una Nemo, a brilliant, beautiful billionaire that Bruce Wayne was once semi-courting as part of his weird playboy act; he disappeared on her when Darkseid shot him backwards in time (although she didn't know why he suddenly stopped calling) and then she got shot through the forehead during a yacht robbery gone bad and, thanks to some barely alluded to comic book science about pollution in the water, she survived:

That's McDaniel's drawing of her. Here's Guillem March's, from one of the covers to Batman and Robin #18:

While the comically large hole in her head might beggar belief, this is a Batman comic, and it sort of works; she may look like she was shot with the sort of revolver that Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam might menace Bugs Bunny with, but it gives her that striking, gruesome Dick Tracy-villain look that so many of Batman's best enemies has. It also helps her meet the requirements of a good Batman villain: A striking visual that matches her modus operandi and her unbalanced mental state.

Now calling herself Absence, Nemo launches an extremely strange crime spree revolving around what's missing and what's not there. Her plan seems straightforward, and involves whipping up a cult following and a series of death traps for Batman and Robin, her stated plan being to kill enough of Bruce Wayne's new army of Batmen to regain his attention. More is going on.

It's a extremely well-scripted Batman story, working on the two levels the character's devious plotting is working on, while providing all the surface thrills that Morrison's conception of the all-new Batman and Robin team (and comic) had provided in previous issues, while also mining the fertile psychological territory that is inherent in the Batman experience (It's somewhat neat how Cornell manages to explore Bruce Wayne's behavior and state of mind in a story that he barely appears in at all, while also doing the same with Damian, Dick and the new villainess, and making it all relate.

Based on this story arc alone, Cornell might have been an ideal writer to follow Morrison on the title.

Given all the help McDaniel had in crafting the artwork—Jones gets a "with" credit for pencil art, while all those other names above inked these 60 pages—it's hard to tell exactly what's his and what's some one else's contribution, but it all looks like McDaniel's art. The figures have his signature design, they contort into thrusting, frozen poses when leaping or fighting, they are usually drawn leaping or fighting.

There's a lot of black in the art and it is, in general, richer, deeper, fuller than a lot of McDaniel's work in the recent past (Trinity, Arena, etc). There's a lot more detail to it, but it retains the semi-abstracted look of much of McDaniel's work, in which dynamic angles and figures propel the action as well as the story.

"Tree of Blood: Dark Knight Vs. White Knight" by Peter J. Tomasi, Patrick Gleason, Mick Gray, Keith Champagne and Tom Ngueyn

It sure takes a lot of guys to ink DC comics these days, doesn't it? The last three names above were the guys who inked Gleason's pencil art on this story. To everyone's credit, it's not incredibly obvious when a new inker comes in, and even with that many cooks in the kitchen, they produce much better than average 21st century Batman comics art.

I wish I could remember which blogger it was that called out how incredibly fucked-up the first scene in this story actually is (It was Tucker Stone, yes, but maybe someone else too...? Maybe everyone else? Tucker's take is, as usual, pretty funny. So you should probably go listen to it). In the book's first three pages, we see the three Robins—Dick Grayson, Tim Drake and Damien Wayne—hanging out in the kitchen with Alfred, making popcorn and smoothies and chatting. Then they gather in Wayne Manor's home theater with their dad/mentor and Alpha Bat Bruce Wayne to watch a movie.

It's a pretty cool, just-some-guys hanging-out, superheroes-behind-the-scenes sort of sequence, the kind that is more rare in Batman comics than in super-team comics. Sure, it's a little weird that none of the Batgirls were invited, and that Tomasi makes a point of this being the important part of the Batman family by having Wayne literally refer to them as "the whole family." But what's fucked-up is the movie they're watching: The Mark of Zorro, aka the movie young Bruce Wayne just got done watching with his parents before they were gunned down in an alley, an event that so traumatized him that he spent the rest of his life and most of his fortune dressing up as a bat to beat people up...and convince dozens of others to do the same!

After that, it is a pretty straightforward Batman comic, in which the Dick Grayson/Damian Wayne versions of the characters (Bruce and Tim apparently go off to their own comics after the movie), investigate the work of a new serial killer with a bizarre and presumably very expensive, pain-staking method of choosing and killing victims.

He's covered in something that renders him a glowing silhouette, with his eyeballs being the only normal detail one an see, and he has some kind of weird gun that paints things similarly glow-y (this detail reminded me quite a bit of the 2003 miniseries Batman: City of Light). To kill victims, he dresses them up as angels, pumps 'em full of drugs, and talks them into jumping off of skyscrapers.

The victims he chooses are what is perhaps the most interesting thing about the character—aside from the rather striking visual, which gets even more striking in the last scene, which leads me to believe Tomasi intends for him to be a repeat villain. This probably constitutes a spoiler: All of his victims are the relatives of Batman villains who are or have been incarcerated in Arkham Asylum, and his plan is to not only kill all of those killers, but wipe out their families and thus their bloodlines as well.

The downside of this is, of course, that it makes this one more story about all of Batman's old villains, instead of doing or saying much of anything new. There are welcome aspects to that strategy, like getting to see Gleason draw a large swathe of the rogues gallery—there's a pretty great scene where you turn a page and suddenly Man-Bat* appears out of nowhere flying tackling Batman—but it also simply covers the same old ground in a slightly different way. This is probably me as much as it is them, but I've read soooooo many stories about Arkham Asylum and its inmates at this point, I find stories dwelling on them rather tiresome now.

"The Streets Run Red" by Judd Winick, Guillem March, Andrie Bressan, Greg Tocchini and Andy Smith

Finally, there's a Winick-written Jason Todd story, which I think is the first one since Morrison sort of took over the character for an arc and offered his take on the long-dead Robin that Winick had quite clumsily resurrected and made into the new Red Hood.

Winick's version was a guy in a vaguely Spider-Man-shaped red helmet and street clothes, savagely gunning down villains like The Punisher (as to how he survived being blown up by a bomb and buried, it apparently had something to do with Superboy-punching, but let's not dwell on that).

Morrison reinvented Todd's Red Hood, giving him a cool new superhero costume (which I assume was designed by Frank Quitely rather than Batman and Robin #4-#6 artist Philip Tan, but I don't know for sure), a pair of signature crimson pistols and a sidekick of his own, Scarlet. Just as Dick Grasyon graduated to Batman, Todd made his own Red Hood persona more Batman-like. (That arc also revealed some rather weird details, like the fact that Todd was actually a redhead, but Bruce made him dye his hair black to look more like Dick).

So Winick returns to Todd after Morrison, and essentially writes him as he was writing him before, while acknowledging the cosmetic changes.

Aside from a flashback to Todd's days as Robin during the first ten pages of the book, drawn by cover artist March, and a visit from Dick Grayson's Batman to Todd's jail cell, the entire first issue is devoted to Todd in jail. Apparently, after the events of the previous Red Hood arc, he was being housed anonymously at Arkham Asylum, but is now being transferred to a regular prison.

There he regularly kills criminals—he's up to 95 before they think to transfer him back to Arkham.

Couple of things: 1) Yes, the lethal vigilante in jail killing his fellow convicts left and right is a Punisher story that's been written over and over 2) the Bat-guys want Todd in Arkham Asylum due to its greater security for his own safety, but Todd wants to be in a regular prison since he's not crazy—Arkham Asylum has terrible security, with folks escaping and murdering other people in there constantly, and wouldn't Todd rather be incarcerated somewhere he is able to kill folks like The Joker than somewhere he has to simply content himself with killing gangsters and "regular" criminals...?

Anyway, when Todd is being transferred again, he's "rescued" by The Menagerie, a team of mercenaries who are half-animal—the artists draw them as basically human with animal heads on top. They look kinda silly but, hey, new characters! That's something.

They are working at the behest of...Some Lady. Winick doesn't really explain who she is, or why she wants to free Jason Todd. She does know he's Jason Todd, though, so she somehow knows more about him than anyone at Arkham Asylum or the Regular Prison (Blackgate...?).

When Todd, with an assist from Batman and Robin, defeat The Menagerie, she calls him on the phone to tell him that she has Scarlet kidnapped, so The Red Hood (now wearing a compromise costume incorporating bits from his superhero-style costume and his Punisher-Lite costume) must form an uneasy alliance with Batman and Robin to rescue Scarlet by fighting...people. That work for that lady.

And, um, that's pretty much it. The story simply finds Jason Todd, follows him around, and then sets him free to fly off into an indeterminate future (I'm not certain; is this his last appearance before The New52boot, in which he would be reintroduced in the title Red Hood and The Outlaws...?).

The story isn't terribly ambitious, and lacks even a pretense of characterization of the antagonists, who are maguffins without so much as a veneer of non-maguffinosity. Where it really falls down, however, is the art. Which, as I mentioned, is by several artists, none of whose styles mesh in the least.

Any one of them would have probably done a decent enough job, but all together on a single story? It's a mess, and they're not even doled out, like, one per issue.

Here, for example, are three images by the three artists from the same story:

This, apparently, is where things really started to break down behind the scenes, and preparation for the New 52 relauch got underway and began interfering with the pre-New 52 comics-making.

Recently, Grant Morrison has announced that he's winding down all of his DC writing, which currently includes Action Comics and the recently relaunched Batman, Inc.

It will be curious to see what DC decides to do with that created-for-Morrison title when his run wraps up. Will they allow that book to retire with Morrison, or will they keep it going as they kept Batman and Robin going...?

If the latter, perhaps they'll let Cornell take it over. Based on the stories in this volume, he's the best they've got at following Morrison.



*Was Man-Bat an inmate of Arkham at any point in the comics...? This is the first I've heard of it, and I can't really remember an instance of him being shown as an inmate. I thought he wasn't criminally insane so much as sometimes he would turn into a giant bat, which is more of a chemical problem than a mental one..