Batman Annual #2 – Review

By: Scott Snyder & Marguerite Bennett (story), Bennett (writer), Wes Craig (pencils), Craig Yeung, Drew Gerraci, Craig, Jack Purcell, Sandu Florea & Marc Deering (inks), Ian Hanin (colors) and Dave Sharpe (letters)

The Story: Batman meets a new/old denizen of Arkham while testing out their security systems.

Review (with minor SPOILERS): Bravo to DC and the creative team for introducing a new character!  I know that the fanboys love to read another Joker story, but I personally find new villains to be much more interesting.  Only with new characters are there unclear motives, unclear powers and unclear outcomes.  All the new character needs is a little hook to make them unique and it is suddenly fascinating to watch the creators fill in the blanks of the character.

The new character from this issue is named yhe Anchoress.  She has a really cool hook in that when her powers manifested, she accidentally killed her parents and was sent for therapy at the original Arkham Asylum back when AA was a place where a Dr. Arkham actually tried to help the mentally ill.  As such, she hates Batman for turning AA into a supermax prison for his rogues gallery.  Once that happened, nobody cared about helping the mentally ill. They just wanted to keep Joker and Clayface in their cells.  It’s an interesting way to introduce a character and to make us look differently at a landmark like AA.  I mean, I think almost all modern Bat-fans look at AA as a prison.  It’s easy to forget that AA probably used to have a different purpose….like treating the mentally ill and perhaps now those mentally ill don’t have the same prospects for treatment.  Readers of this site know I love real-world parallels (and so does Scott Snyder, I think), so I can’t help but see relationships between this take on AA and the closing of mental health institutions in the 1980s and all the crime and homelessness that happened as a result.  It’s just interesting to think about some of these criminals or bums as mentally ill people who have been failed by “the system.”