Batman and Robin #28 – Review

By: Peter J. Tomasi (story), Patrick Gleason (pencils), Mick Gray (inks), John Kalisz (colors)

The Story: Two-Face discovers, to his horror, that a coin has more than two sides.

The Review: In the spirit of the recent Olympics, I’ll describe Tomasi’s biggest obstacle to comic book greatness as a frequent failure to stick the landing.  A character-focused writer at heart, Tomasi can usually manage to start somewhere interesting and deliver a tight, even gripping narrative along the way.  But once you reach the conclusion, you sense he might have gotten caught up in the storytelling without thinking of what he wanted to get out of it.

In that regard, this arc is a typical sample of the Tomasi problem.  While the creation of Erin and her history with Bruce and Harvey has deepened the Batman and Two-Face mythos, it doesn’t appear she has any other use than that.  Her importance is thus primarily rooted in the past.  In the present, she served her purpose by drawing Harvey out, but with that done, Tomasi’s at a loss of what to do with her.  Nothing reveals that more than when he has Batman literally eject Erin from the story within the issue’s first few pages.  Despite her defiant commitment to villainy later on, it’s quite apparent that her future use will be limited.

Batman and Robin #27 – Review

By: Peter J. Tomasi (story), Patrick Gleason (pencils), Mick Gray (inks), John Kalisz (colors)

The Story: Harvey goes full circle from P.D., to D.A., to D.O.A.

The Review: While it’s easy enough to mark the point where Harvey Dent’s life diverged from Gotham’s golden boy to one of its most terrifying threats, it’s a little harder to piece together why he flew between extremes so quickly.  It’s a bit too simplistic to believe that a scarring, no matter how seriously traumatic, can turn someone homicidal.  Surely the seeds of madness need to have been sown earlier than that.

Past issues on this arc have suggested precisely that, with Erin making repeated accusations of Harvey’s two-faced nature even before she literalized that figure of speech.  This issue initially seems to continue that trend, showing Harvey’s beginnings as a public defender, freeing criminals on technical errors in police procedure, as well as his role as the McKillens’ family lawyer.  It’s also hard not to view his switchover to D.A. cynically, especially as it’s prompted by financial and political backing from a younger Bruce and other men of influence.

Batman and Robin #26 – Review

By: Peter J. Tomasi (story), Patrick Gleason (pencils), Mick Gray & Keith Champage (inks), John Kalisz (colors)

The Story: There were never such devoted sisters—in prison.

The Review: One of the storylines that really left an impression on me when I was just getting into comics was Mark Waid’s Divided We Fall arc on JLA.  It was the first time I saw the superhero genre as capable of real psychological explorations from characters who seemed to be little more than their costumes.  How hauntingly fitting, then, that splitting Bruce Wayne from Batman left the hero faceless and mute beneath the mask.

Waid was obviously trying to make the statement that Bruce, the man himself and not just his skills and abilities, was an essential part to Batman.  This was harder to believe in earlier days, when Bruce used his plainclothes identity solely as a daytime placeholder until his nightly activities.  Tomasi has reversed this trend, making Bruce Wayne the true center of this series, and Batman the tool—a highly effective one, mind—he uses to accomplish his goals.

Batman and Two-Face #25 – Review

By: Peter J. Tomasi (story), Patrick Gleason (pencils), Mick Gray (inks), John Kalisz (colors)

The Story: If you’re planning a prison break, there’s no better helper than Batman.

The Review: It always strikes me as odd how superhero writers, especially DC’s superhero writers, tend to portray the civilian lives of their protagonists as incidental to their vigilante activities, the obligatory coffee breaks in a work day of fighting crime.  I understand, of course, that it’s the costumed stuff people buy in for, but there’s no reason why our heroes’ personal lives can’t be an equally intriguing part of their stories.

With perhaps the exception of Scott Snyder, no other writer than Tomasi has gone through so much effort to make Bruce Wayne as much a part of a Bat-title as his alter-ego.  In this arc, Batman takes an even further backseat in the story as Bruce steps up as an intermediary player in the ongoing conflict between Erin McKillen and Harvey Dent.  Even with the mask on, the lines between Bruce and Batman is more blurred than it’s ever been, given his personal investment in Erin and Harvey’s lives, both in and out of costume.

Batman and Robin #24 – Review

By: Peter J. Tomasi (story), Patrick Gleason (pencils), Mick Gray & Mark Irwin (inks), John Kalisz (colors)

The Story: You haven’t really lived until you bear the grudges of Batman, Gordon, and Two-Face.

The Review: As Villains Month has reminded us, the Arkham set of Batman’s rogues has become the most important and infamous of Gotham’s villains.  In context of Gotham’s fictional history, however, these psychos are a relatively new breed of criminals, particularly for the DCU as it stands now.  We tend to forget that before the rise of these deranged antagonists, there was already an entire underworld of the morally repugnant infecting the city.

Occasionally, a Batman writer will remind us that in between the flashes of chaos brought by Batman’s rogues, Gotham suffers from a pervasive, seemingly non-eradicable network of felons.  Usually, they appear only as generic thugs, gangs, or mobs—filler opponents for Batman to kill time as he waits for the next strike from Joker, Riddler, Penguin, Freeze, Ivy, etc.  Except for the Penguin, no one else from Gotham’s more mundane criminal element has even come close to being taken as seriously as any one of the Arkhamites.  Tomasi seeks to change that.

Batman and Robin #23.1: Two-Face – Review

By: Peter J. Tomasi (story), Guillem March (art), Tomev Morey (colors)

The Story: Heads, he flips the coin.  Tails, he doesn’t.  Wait…

The Review: It’s a common premise that all of Batman’s villains to some degree represent an aspect of the Dark Knight himself.  While this argument is harder to make for some rogues than others (Orca, anyone?), it’s easiest to see Batman’s reflection in Two-Face, who clearly mirrors Batman’s duality, a man who aspires to heroism even as he’s prone to darkness.  Two-Face offers the most credible portrait of what Batman can become if he ever crosses that line.

The reverse is true as well, particularly for Two-Face.  His disfigured alter-ego may have his sadistic crazy-pants pulled up tight, but even at his worst moments, Harvey Dent retains some of that tragic nobility which also characterizes his greatest foe.  Tomasi doesn’t explore this part of the villain as much as you expect—which is surprising, given how character-oriented a writer he usually is—but in the brief vignettes of Harvey’s past we see him as he once was: a force of good so powerful that he almost had “Gotham looking like Metropolis.”

Flashpoint: Batman – Knight of Vengeance #1 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (writer), Eduardo Risso (artist), Patricia Mulvihill (colorist)

The Story: And you said those mutants in the sewers were just an urban legend.

The Review: These Flashpoint tie-ins serve two purposes: one, they fill in some of the expository blanks that the central storyline neglects or hasn’t the opportunity to cover; and two, they offer us a tantalizing glimpse into a world whose existence will be all too brief and yet within its own continuity has a rich history all its own.

For that reason, you have to appreciate how Azzarello doesn’t play cute with this strange yet vaguely recognizable world he gets to work with.  There are no moments where he directly points out familiar characters and explains their changes with a wink and a nudge, as many writers would.  He simply incorporates them naturally into the story, as if Barbara Gordon has always been Thomas Wayne’s psychiatrist and the Penguin his casino crony.

Even if he wanted to, Azzarello couldn’t give these minor characters such treatment anyway without detracting from the really strong characterization he gives to our favorite anti-hero.  Clearly Thomas is less refined and sophisticated a vigilante than Bruce: he tolerates, even invites criminals to patronize his businesses; he allows Gordon to know his secret identity; he privatizes Gotham’s security; he makes little attempts to soften his public image.

Even in his crime-fighting, he doesn’t come across as superhumanly competent; instead it seems like he grits his way through challenges by drawing on an inhuman tolerance for pain.  We see the source of that tolerance when Azzarello reveals the details of his origins.  By now you know Bruce, not Thomas, died that night; this issue shows that fateful change came not from an alteration in circumstances, but one in Thomas’ character, a subtle one that nevertheless makes him react quite differently to the hold-up, and which leads inadvertently to his own tragedy.

Subtle describes most of the script, as it seems as disinclined to chatter as Thomas.  Only the most minimal, necessary sounds and words make themselves heard in this story, becoming even more chilling when they finally break the largely barren silence of the issue.  The whispered mantra of “Hell…” Batman hears during his sojourn in the sewers creeps into the corners of entirely wordless panels, only to complete itself when he finds their speakers: “Hellp uss…”