BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT returns with another volume of grim, gritty David Finch-ery, now assisted by Paul Jenkins on scripts.
We begin with the Bat Plane cruising to a mid-air stop before dropping a duffel-bag-bearing Batman onto his waiting city below. (Don’t pay attention to its wings, because the differences in how their trailing edges are drawn from page to page will drive you crazy.) Batman changes into the cowl-less, fancy clothes of Bruce Wayne, who then uses a grapple gun to swing over and around Gotham City in his tuxedo.
That’s kind of a heavy-handed entrance, isn’t it? Think about how many cell phone photos and YouTube videos we saw of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES filming in Pittsburgh. Now imagine how many cell phones in a real Gotham City would be trained on a Bat-Plane that’s hovering in mid-air, followed by billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne zipping around between skyscrapers like Spider-Man. It seems kind of loud and careless.
And I know what you’re thinking. “John, stop over-thinking everything. The intro is cool. Just relax for once in your life and have fun with it.”
But it’s not cool if, while I’m reading it, all I can think of is all the things that feel wrong to me about it.
Bruce gives another big speech at another big gala that’s similar in tone to the one he gave in last week’s BATMAN #1. But then Lt. Forbes (who apparently still hasn’t received that “spanking he’ll never forget” promised to him by Jim Gordon in Volume 1) arrives to make loud accusations against Wayne as he mingles with his guests.
His argument is ridiculous. He accuses Bruce of having help inside the Gotham City Police Department, because there’s no way a billionaire could fund Batman’s activities on his own.
Actually, Lt. Forbes, there is a way a billionaire could fund and coordinate Batman’s activities on his own. It’s called HIS GIANT BOX OF MONEY.
Obviously this is all a thinly veiled extension of Forbes’s seething vendetta against Gordon, but haven’t we already established in the other New 52 issues that the Gordon/Batman partnership isn’t exactly a secret?
Another problem with Forbes’s line of reasoning arises later in the issue, when Batman leads a GCPD SWAT team into Arkham. Forbes wants to know who in the GCPD is helping Batman. Apparently, the answer is “everyone whose name isn’t Forbes.”
Bruce flirts with a sexy socialite at the gala and glimpses a sexy new villain (designed with hormonal 13-year-old boys in mind) slinking through the halls of Arkham. Are they one and the same? They don’t share body type or skin tone, so probably not, but inconsistency has never stopped this book from dropping such a zinger before.
In BATMAN #1, Batman was already inside Arkham and ready to rock (with a sleeper agent waiting in the wings, no less) when the Arkham inmates broke free.
Here, Batman takes time to pose and jaw-bone with the SWAT team before taking command of them and leading them inside the asylum in a big single-file line.
And this time, the villains are all hopped up on some kind of steroid that makes them super strong and deformed!
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..
And then Batman announces that he’s coming in, rather than just going in (or again, already being in, as he was in last week’s Snyder story). Batman’s not a “Come out with your hand up!” kind of guy. Batman brings you out before you even know he was there in the first place.
And then the final page is like the big punch line. We find out the identity of the ringleader, and it’s a startling, shocking shift in the status quo of one of Batman’s greatest villains who’s gone through one startling, shocking shift in his status quo after another for years upon years, and none of them ever stick. This one won’t, either. It’s so silly.
Paul Jenkins certainly has his moments in the script (especially the last line of the first page), but Finch had lots of good writing moments, too. Where this book continues to suffer is in how all the pieces of the story seem so random and disjointed.
I do like the tone. This new volume is already having a lot more fun than the first, and that’s a good start. We’re also seeing a much healthier and happier Bruce Wayne and Batman, which surprisingly enough makes the hard-boiled Batman of DETECTIVE COMICS the odd man out in the new Bat-Books so far.
I do prefer the new costume Finch designed for BATMAN, INC. to the new Jim Lee costume here (with all its extraneous lines and padding, which Finch keeps to a mininum), but The Dark Knight certainly looks formidable. Finch’s faces are still a little too busy under Richard Friend’s heavy inks, while Alex Sinclair’s colors are right in line with the slightly lighter tone of Volume 2. (His work on Volume 1 was just fine, but a little too bright for a story so dark.)
This books does lots of things some of the other Bat Books have already done better in the New 52 (including the Arkham stuff, which pales in comparison to a similar but infinitely better told event in BATMAN #1), but it’s moving in a direction that’s at least trying to have fun (albeit without as much imagination or consistency or common sense as it needs). We’ll see what happens in issue #2. – John Bierly
SYNOPSIS: As a mysterious figure slinks through the halls of Arkham Asylum, Batman must fight his way through a gauntlet of psychos, and Bruce Wayne faces the unexpected legal ramifications of Batman Incorporated!
