It’s the future of Gotham. Bruce Wayne remains in jail. The GTO is now a fascist Bat-themed police force. And Terry McGinnis works for … Derek Powers? BatChat returns to the Murphyverse for Batman: Beyond the White Knight #1, written and drawn by Sean Murphy, colored by Dave Stewart and lettered by AndWorld Design.
Ra’s al Ghul has decided to try to make the world a better place, and not by his usual means. And in a moment that will change the lives of all his family, Ra’s makes a public announcement where things go horribly wrong, beginning a war between the League of Shadows and Deathstroke’s new Secret Society in Shadow War: Alpha, written by Joshua Williamson, drawn by Viktor Bogdanovic with additional inks by Daniel Henriques, colored by Mike Spicer and lettered by Troy Peteri.
With the city blacked out from the villain E.M.P., Batman must make his way through the streets of the city to get the culprit to Blackgate as every gang in the city looks for him. Some want to free E.M.P., some want to kill him. Batman: One Dark Knight #2 is written, drawn and colored by Jock and lettered by Clem Robins.
Matt Lazorwitz: Hey, happy April Fool’s Day, Will! Fortunately we have three books to discuss this week, or our readers would have to tolerate a whole bit about the surprise drop of a Tom King/Bill Sienkiewicz Condiment King one-shot, reimagining him as an embittered veteran of the 2019-21 Chicken Sandwich Wars. But we do have three books, so we will discuss them.
Although I feel like an April Fool’s prank has been played on me for doing this reading.
Will Nevin: Maybe it’s just me, but I liked Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s I Am Kite Man, Hell Yeah, but I could see how a 145-page one-note OGN might not be for everyone. Still, it was nice to see Snyder work out his anxieties in something long and super complicated for once.
For our actual readings, though? I coulda done without another trip to the White Knight universe.
Here We Go Again…
Will: So there are a few moments in Batman: White Knight: Beyond the White Knight in which Sean Gordon Murphy wants to remind us, the readers, that these characters — Bruce Wayne and Harley Quinn and maybe another one or two (if I respected this book a smidgen more, I’d open it and check, but one read was one read too many) — were once costumed heroes and/or villains. He does this gentle reminder by altering their shadows. See? Bruce Wayne’s shadow has bat ears and a cowl! Harley’s shadow reflects the mallet-wielding character we know and Murphy’s infatuated with! It’s all very clever.
And as subtle as a church fart.
Matt: And it counts on knowledge of Batman Beyond for some of its shocks, something you don’t have, correct? You don’t know why Terry McGinnis working for Derek Powers is an oh-shit moment like it’s presented here.
Will: Any other writer would know that they couldn’t take on Batman Beyond in the world as currently constituted. Yes, Bruce Wayne’s been on ice for approximately 15 years (or as long as it takes for Joker and Harley’s twin babies to be a confounding, embarrassing mess that we’ll get to in a bit), but that’s not long enough for Gotham to become an “unrecognizable futurescape.” (Motherfucker has no concept of subtext.)
Matt: And let’s talk about Jason Todd. I just don’t understand why you would introduce him adversarially just to have him immediately swap to being on Bruce’s side. There’s no character transition here. He’s secretly Bruce’s ally, despite Bruce not knowing it? And why is Dick Grayson a fascist? Why why why?
Will: Why does Murphy constantly pit the world against his Batman for his Bats to both lose and be proven right? It’s the same story beat from the first chapter, although I guess Batman didn’t come out all that hard against the GCPD having unlimited money and some of the world’s most powerful superheroes. That whole section of basically explaining the status quo of this book — word for fucking word right there on the page — was painfully awkward.
Matt: We could continue to call out everything that doesn’t work here, and I’m sure we will hit it all over the next seven or eight months, but I have one thing I want to ask: Joker at the end of this issue. That’s in Bruce’s head, yes? He’s starting to lose his mind, and this is a manifestation?
Will: I read that appearance as one of the Harley/Joker twins, which seemed to me what Murphy was going for and is exceptionally cringey. In either case, it’s a bad idea, and I can’t believe we have seven or eight more books of this.
We’re going to get to an artist/writer who knows what the fuck they’re doing, right? Promise me we will.
Matt: Give it till the end of this column.
Will: Like Andy Dufresne, I’ve been through a river of shit and now you’re promising me a beach in Mexico? OK, I can wait.
It’s a War. A War with Shadows.
Matt: OK, as with the audio BatChat, we need to start with the problematic creator watch: Viktor Bogdanovic has made comments regarding harassment in the comics industry that were snide at best, and mocking at worst, and never gave anything close to an apology other than something that felt like a, “Sorry you were offended.”
Moving on from there: This is the beginning of the next Batman event, and part of the setup for Dark Crisis, so there’s a lot going on here.
Will: I’m glad we started with Viktor, because I hated most of his work here. Tonally, none of it seemed to sync with the gravitas of the story — what should have been a monumental moment for Ra’s feels flat. And Robin seems lifted directly from Teen Titans Go. Gross.
Matt: I feel like Williamson is used to working with stronger artists, ones who can give those splashes and double-page spreads real pathos. And I think there might have been some miscommunication somewhere. There’s a splash that has Batman holding Robin as he cries over the death of Ra’s. And there’s a semi-transparent image of the exact same thing above it. Usually that would be reserved for some other take on the characters; like Bruce holding Damian, say. But here it’s just the exact same image on the same page twice.
Will: Speaking of that moment, I understand a kid crying over the death of his pee paw, but when the kid is a trained assassin and pee paw is basically immortal, is the emotion really going to be that raw? And, yes, Damian is a made-up thing from Grant Morrison’s brain that is difficult to ascribe real feeling to, but still, the moment struck me as odd.
Matt: I think there are two aspects to that. First, the arc of the Robin ongoing has been working on getting Damian more in touch with his humanity. The death of Alfred really screwed up his head, and this kinder, gentler Ra’s made efforts to reach Damian. Secondly, that grenade didn’t leave much more than ashes. Damian probably realized he’d need a dustbuster to get enough Ra’s into the Lazarus Pit to resurrect him, and that wasn’t gonna happen.
Will: *We* know that no death is final in comics, and I *feel* that Damian might think the same, even with the contrivance of a grenade. But since I’m a gentleman, I’ll concede the point.
Matt: I liked the story here, but I wonder how it struck you. I’ve been reading all three of the books that directly lead into this (Batman, Robin, Deathstroke Inc.), plus the stuff more tangential (Infinite Frontier, Checkmate). There are a lot of threads here, and I’m not sure how a reader who hadn’t been reading the entire DCU could have made all the connections.
Will: I was … less than impressed? Nonplussed? It read to me a lot like Fear State: Alpha — if you’ve been keeping up with any of the other books, then this one is absolutely skippable aside from the basic plot points.
Matt: This issue seemed like more setting up emotional stakes than plot ones. I can tell you what events happened in the plot of this story in four sentences: Ra’s al Ghul is dying and decides to try to do one good thing by turning himself in and trying to spread a message to people. A guy dressed as Deathstroke shoots him in the head and blows him up. Damian and Talia swear revenge. At the Secret Society headquarters, Deathstroke, now king of the supervillains, reveals it was an imposter just as the League of Shadows busts in.
What this adds is the help explaining why Damian and Talia, who have been at odds with Ra’s for over a decade, suddenly care, and if what you’re saying is accurate for all readers, it doesn’t pull that off all that well.
Batman, Come Out to Play-aaayyy!
Matt: After having Detective Comics weekly for the past three months, a bimonthly wait in between issues of One Dark Knight felt extra long. But good things come to those who wait.
Will: I think it *was* extra long. The first came out in December, right? And the second barely made March.
Matt: Wow. I guess time just has lost all meaning. Didn’t realize it had been that long.
Will: Jock, as I’m sure is no surprise, is still good at comics, but that long layoff really, really, really highlighted the need for DC to suck it up and write recaps for their books. Matt, I couldn’t even remember the goddamned character names, much less all the rival gangs scrambling to nab E.M.P. from Batman’s clutches. This comic is pretty as all hell, and the action is just as good as it was last time, and the oversized format still looks spectacular on an iPad Pro … but this second book was not the best reading experience.
Matt: Even if it didn’t have recap pages, it would have been better if we had a map at the beginning with all the gangs’ territory laid out and a “You are here” for Batman. We get fragments of the map in the issue, but without a full map right here, that doesn’t help a lot.
Will: And Jock would have done a great job with that page, too. Shit.
Matt: Removing that, this issue still rocks. This is Batman like I like to see him sometimes: on his heels, having to work without his gadgets, and proving even without those wonderful toys, he’s still the scariest mofo in Gotham. He thinks his way through a gauntlet of foes.
My ONLY quibble about the art, and it’s a minor one, is that I wish the gangs had more distinct looks. There was potential for this to look like The Warriors, with Batman cutting his way through the Gotham equivalent of the Baseball Furies, the Punks and the Lizzies, but they’re all pretty generic. This isn’t a completely grounded Batman: We have a walking E.M.P. man, so we could have had some high-concept, dramatic looking gangs.
Will: I see your point and raise you the idea that it’s dark as shit. I would have settled for fewer gangs with more personality because, again, I feel like I was dropped back into this cold and I have zero memory of who Brody is and why he’s important. And what’s your read on the prison commissioner? She’s obviously got her own agenda … and maybe some superpowers of persuasion?
Matt: I don’t know if she has powers, or is just really clever and knows how to push the right buttons. I think she wanted to get E.M.P. out in the open because the explosion of his powers that killed his wife and left Brody without a mother and with his dad, E.M.P., locked up also killed her family. Now that he’s out, she is planning to kill him in revenge, which she couldn’t do when he was under lock and key and not get caught doing it, so this whole thing is her long gambit to get revenge.
Will: That seems super complicated when you could have some “mysterious accident” in prison. Maybe she’s a planner and likes doing things on the cheap. What do you think the going rate for a “mysterious accident” in a Gotham prison is?
Matt: For a guy with as much bad will as is stacked against E.M.P.? A carton of cigs.
Vasquez, our prison commissioner, gets her bad guy cred honestly here, by leaving Renee Montoya to die in the overturned cop car. This is a big moment, and one you can only do in an out-of-continuity book, and is, importantly, not fridging. This doesn’t impact either Gordon or Batman’s arc: This just shows that Vasquez is a cold one, and really needed a major character to have that impact.
Bat-miscellany
- This week, editor of this column and “friend” of the show Dan Grote selects his story as a Patreon backer of the BatChat podcast. And because he likes to see us suffer, he selected Batman: White Knight, which tied in nicely with this week’s books. So here are three stories where the Joker returns to sanity, if ever so briefly.
- Beyond the White Knight will apparently have a tie-in book, so we got that goin’ for us.
- We get a small appearance of Lock-Up in Shadow War: Alpha. Created for Batman: The Animated Series, he is a former prison guard who captures (and locks up) criminals who escape justice on technicalities. There is a lot of potential for him in the world we live in today with questions about prison reform, and I think he’s waiting for his moment.
- Damned pesky constitutional rights.
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.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
