Review: BATMAN #23

BATMAN #23
Written by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV
Art by Greg Capullo, Danny Miki, and Rafael Albuquerque
Release Date: August 14, 2013

BM_Cv23_q4si145qfy_Let’s get the basic review stuff out of the way quickly: Batman #23 is good. The writing brings together moments from Bruce’s youth and childhood as he reaches an iconic moment, the evening where he retreats, battered and bloody, to his father’s study. Nearly crushed by the knowledge that his crusade as he is fighting it has failed, Bruce faces his darkest moment, darker perhaps even than the evening he lost his parents, and he receives an omen. A messenger from the night alights on the bust of Bruce’s father and delivers the one tool that has been missing, the method, the face Bruce has sought all his life. Capullo’s art, as always, creates the perfect environment for the most realistic and least plausible of superheroes, a mixture of cartoonish figures in a world of impeccable detail and perspective. (Compare, for example, the perfectly bemused rendering of Edward Nygma with the naturalistic pig-nosed bat.)

That said, we’re actually in something of a weird time as Batman readers. Two current Batman titles, Snyder and Capullo’s flagship Batman and Pak and Lee’s Batman/Superman, have jumped back into the past to tell their stories. Two titles, Detective Comics and the rotating guest star Batman and . . ., are solid, but not quite at their best. (Batman and . . . in particular has suffered from the loss of Damian Wayne’s Robin, although it’s starting to make really good use of a reinvented Carrie Kelly.) Batman: The Dark Knight struggles to be worthy of note, and Batman Incorporated has just ended after spending a year mostly in its own little universe.

Added together, there’s a lot of good stuff out there for Batman fans (especially if you include standalone/out-of-continuity titles like Legends of the Dark Knight, Batman ’66, and Batman: L’il Gotham), but it’s easy to feel that there’s not much of an overall direction or sense of coherence in Batman’s corner of the DC universe right now. This, of course, might not be the worst of all possible worlds. Batman has always been DC’s Wolverine — everywhere, all the time, laws of physics (or storytelling logic) be damned.

Sometimes it can feel like Snyder’s writing is driven by this same impulse. In Zero Year there are echoes of both Batman: Year One and No Man’s Land. We’re being given extended origins for The Riddler as well as a Red Hood who may or may not become The Joker. We have an Uncle Phillip character who both reintroduces elements of pre-Crisis Batman stories and ties New 52 continuity even more closely to Snyder’s grand story of Gotham’s great families.

And taken by itself at least, the last thing you can ever accuse Snyder’s writing of is lacking direction or coherence. It’s a mad, brilliant clockwork, every element carefully designed and placed. It’s almost enough to make a reader wonder what the other titles are doing.

But maybe strict consistency between titles is overrated. Maybe sometimes more is actually more, even — or especially — when things don’t entirely fit. The old past and the new past. The loner who is a member of every team. The Robins and the characters who were Robins but were never actually Robins even if they were always really Robins.

Batman’s world is a strange place. Let’s keep it that way.

Verdict: 9.0/10

Authors

Related posts

Top