Tomasi's 'Tec Run Wraps, and for Some Reason We're Still Covering White Knight Stuff in a between-Holidays Bat Chat

Batman and Robin (?) swing in to save the rest of the Bat family from Hush, a new mayor of Gotham is elected and Bruce says goodbye to Wayne Manor in Detective Comics #1,033 from Peter J. Tomasi, Brad Walker, Andrew Hennesy, Dave McCaig and Rob Leigh.

Meanwhile, Harley, Duke Thomas and FBI profiler Hector Quimby are on the trail of Starlet in Batman: White Knight Presents Harley Quinn #3 from Sean Murphy, Katana Collins, Matteo Scalera, Dave Stewart and AndWorld Design.

Matthew Lazorwitz: Happy holidays, everyone!

Will Nevin: “Holidays”? What holidays? We’re still hard at work in the content mines, damnit!

ML: True, true. And while there are some great Batman Christmas comics, this week’s issues are neither great, nor Christmas-related, I think.

WN: Correct, sir, on both.

Detective Comics #1,033

Cover by Brad Walker, Andrew Hennessy and Brad Anderson

ML: So, that … ended. That’s what I can say about that. It wasn’t a bad comic, but it just felt like, “OK, we need to wrap up this Hush thing, get Nakano as mayor and clear the deck for Mariko Tamaki for after Future State.”

WN: I know you can’t read a thing that I haven’t published yet, but did you know I read in the last week “Hush” for the first time?

ML: I did not. Can you give us a sneak peak?

WN: Whole new column format I’m working on. (I like telling Dan about stuff in pieces.) [Grote’s note: Wait, what’s happening?] Anyway, my conclusion as to Hush, the villain? He sucks. He sucked in the original story, he sucked in the “Tales from the Dark Multiverse” one-shot I read back to back with it and he sucked in this arc. Here, though, he had the added baggage of a weird stock, mustache-twirling, “gonna sell your organs on the black market” villain plot. Bad all around.

ML: Yeah, Hush is a villain I could live without. He was a major force in the back half of the “Batman: Gotham Knights” series, which was painful, and Paul Dini and Dustin Nguyen did their damndest to make him interesting in their run on “Detective Comics” and “Streets of Gotham” around “Batman: RIP” and “Batman Reborn,” and while it’s the best Hush has ever been … well, that’s not saying much.

And what is really extra annoying about this whole thing (and I know I mentioned this last week, but it bears repeating)? We had at least a semi-interesting villain in Mirror for the first half of this arc, and then he just disappears as if the creative team just lost interest. And let’s be honest, we know he’s coming back at some point, because any villain who “dies” falling off a pier, levy, dock or embankment is not in any way dead.

WN: To totally convince myself, I went back to #1,031, and you’re right: Mirror jumps, there’s an explosion and a few panels later, we get the reveal of Hush with a Batman mask. (Go read our full talk if you want to understand what exactly was happening there.) There’s no escaping it — Hush is not Mirror, and Mirror simply vanished in the back of this arc.

ML: So this still does leave open my “Mirror is Nakano’s Tyler Durden” theory. Speaking of Nakano, somehow Gotham pulls off an entire mayoral campaign and election in less time than we’ve been fighting about the results of one in the real world, and hey, the one candidate we met won! What a surprise. This could have been something really interesting, but instead it’s just a way to introduce Nakano. We didn’t need this. Would it have been that bad if, after Future State, we come back and Gotham had a new mayor? It would have opened up pages to pay off Mirror and some of the other threads Tomasi had to rush through.

WN: I hated that stretch in the book. Hated it. After we get all of the Hush business done, we throw to this election epilogue, and I was going to complain about the voting if you weren’t: “[T]he ballot count is considered officially closed and confirmed[.]” Come the hell on, editorial. I, with half of the rest of the country, did not spend that week with the hots for Steve Kornacki for that sort of line to make it into your book. That was just a TV talking head — they can say anything. Have them say stuff that makes sense!

And Nakano himself is just as bad, literally saying to his wife, “I won; what do I do now?” Jesus, how stupid.

ML: As to the other bits of this book, since I can’t disagree with anything you just said, the confrontation between Damian and Bruce changes nothing and leaves us right where the book began, and again is just laying the groundwork for Damian’s solo backups in “Batman” and “Detective” after the break. It also again shows that Bruce doesn’t understand Damian’s grief and possibly not his own; telling his son he’s not responsible for Alfred’s death, after he has spent his entire life feeling like he’s partially at fault for his parents’ deaths, shows a complete lack of self-awareness, yes?

WN: Looking at Damian’s trauma through the lens of Bruce’s is an interesting thought that hadn’t crossed my mind because I am slow, but I think that’s a good point. I do like how Damian (again, a character I am loathe to compliment or enjoy) politely, poignantly and pointedly refused the Robin mantle.

ML: That is part of Tomasi saying goodbye to the character, and to Batman’s world in general. This is a guy who has been writing Batman and/or Damian in one book or another since the beginning of the New 52. He has written Damian in more issues than anyone, between Batman and Robin, Detective Comics and the two volumes of Super Sons. And so here he gets to say goodbye to the kid by giving him not a moment of pique, which lord knows the kid tends toward, but by showing he’s at least grown up enough to not punch Bruce in the face again.

The final couple of pages are the rest of Tomasi’s little coda, which probably means little to nothing to any reader who hasn’t been reading his entire run across these books, with Bruce gathering up Damian’s menagerie of pets (Titus the dog Bruce got him, Alfred the tuxedo cat that Alfred the butler got him, and Batcow who Damian adopted, plus Bruce’s own dog, Ace), and taking them on a trip away from the now abandoned Wayne Manor. It would have hit home a little more if I felt like any other writer would remember any of these animals except for maybe Ace anytime in the future, but it’s still a nice enough way for a creator to say goodbye to the world he’s been writing in for nearly 10 years.

WN: I’ve read little (if any) of Tomasi’s work, and while I wasn’t particularly enamored here, I did like the shutting down of the Manor. It’s at least a little acknowledgement of what’s supposed to be a new status quo for Bruce that hasn’t really been addressed post-“Joker War.”

Batman: White Knight Presents Harley Quinn #3

WN: As with so many things in the Murphyverse, I didn’t find this to be offensively bad, but it was a 30-page book that read like a 45’er. I forreal checked how far along I was, saw I was only halfway finished and groaned. It was that sort of read.

ML: I know exactly what you’re talking about. I almost prefer the offensively bad, because that way, it feels like there’s momentum behind the book. This issue was just very flat.

WN: Ah, but how can it be totally flat if we’re not leaning into the “boy obsessed with his mom and other woman and decides to become a murderer” trope?

ML: By … not exploring them and treating them like the tropiest tropes to ever trope?

WN: It has to be a feign, right? Quimby can’t be the killer in drag, can he?

ML: I … hope to God you’re right. It is just so easy and hackneyed that I can’t imagine going in that direction. Am I giving SGM and Co. too much credit in assuming it’s an obvious feint to cause drama between Harley and Quimby?

WN: Judging by the preview for #4 in which we see Quimby sneaking around in tactical gear, it’s hard to say for sure — they could be doubling down on mistrusting the guy only for him to turn out OK (which seems the most likely route), or he really could be a drag killer. Aside from the plodding and the funky plotting, this issue commits another one of the great sins of the Murphyverse in not paying attention to (or maybe understanding) time. So this universe is a world in which Batman has been warring on crime for “decades” and yet he doesn’t appear to be particularly old or infirm — and that’s just an example from “White Knight.” There’s lots of stuff in this issue that doesn’t make sense.

ML: I was going to ask about that! The timeline is wonky. If Quimby was obsessed with Harley when still living at home, even if he was … let’s say 13, Harley would have to have been in her 30s at least at that time, so now at least 13 more years have passed. Harley would be pushing 50, and Batman and Joker would be at least that age, probably five or so years older. And when did Duke come into this whole mess?

WN: I think Duke was in the first volume — hard to say since it all mushes together like slop. I suppose Sean Gordon Murphy thinks this is OK because Batman: The Animated Series did it — in that it was clearly modern, yet had all of the art deco flair and didn’t necessarily commit itself to a specific time. But that worked because B:TAS was charming, and we were kids (or at least much younger). Here, it just insults your intelligence, and I wasn’t even thinking about the problems with our main characters. Quimby’s mother — Sofia Valentine — is framed as one of the “Dashing Dames,” a group that is supposed to be a bunch of Golden Age of Hollywood starlets. Wikipedia tells me that’s roughly from the 1910s to the 1960s. She also makes a reference to being a vaudeville performer, and that industry was dead and buried by the 1930s. So let’s peg Valentine as a Hollywood star of the 1940s, which puts her birth in the 1910s-1920s. She is depicted here as being spry and active, able to attack with “her signature bolo knife.”

This book has smartphones. We’re clearly in the present day. This woman has to be at least 100 given the references and what little we know of her backstory. It’s dumb, and I hate it.

ML: OK, a quick Google search says Duke was in volume one, but having now read both volumes, yeah, it’s a jumble. What I can’t remember is, does Duke have a different backstory in this world than in the mainstream DCU?

WN: From what I remember, he’s a former cop who quits to help out his community of Backport, which seems to be a stand-in for Harlem and other majority BIPOC communities that are often ignored by the entrenched power structures that “White Knight” nominally criticized.

ML: OK, I was having a hard time remembering that backstory, since I read the first volume as it came out in singles. Is it wrong I feel icky about taking one of the few Black characters in the Bat mythos and grafting a new backstory onto him, one that is pretty stereotypical as well, just to fit with the story? This might be getting into something way deeper and more systemic, but doesn’t that have a “BIPOC characters are all interchangeable” sort of vibe to it that is super not good?

WN: I think if you carry the vision of the character from “White Knight” — someone who was Black and had a problem with the status quo and was working to change it — into the rest of the series, it certainly has more of a purpose. Here, he’s just another cop, and there’s nothing particularly Duke Thomas (prime or other universe) about him. Commissioner Gordon would make sense and be interesting, but we rarely do things that are both in the Murphyverse.

I think a lot about Punk Rock Jesus and about how Murphy thought he could handle critiques of reality television, Christanity and centuries of English/Irish strife in one book. That’s the galaxy brain we’re dealing with here.

ML: Yeah, I got nothing more on this.

So, we’ll be hitting pause for a few days, as Xavier Files morphs into its new form as ComicsXF on Friday, but have no fear! We’ll be back the following week with this week’s Batman Annual and the first issue of Future State: Next Batman. Will, have yourself a happy holiday week, my friend!

WN: You too, my dude. I’ll be hard at work on [redacted].

[Grote’s note: No, seriously, what’s happening?]

Bat-miscellany

Memo to colorists: The Grey Ghost doesn’t have to be completely gray. Readers will get it.
Damian makes a Hellraiser reference in Detective. I never thought of Damian as getting into pop culture, but somehow I can see Hellraiser being right up his alley.
Inks *and* pencils for Detective seemed off this week. Double shipping can’t end fast enough.

Matthew Lazorwitz

Matt Lazorwitz read his first comic at the age of five. 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 creator interview podcast WMQ&A with Dan Grote.