You knew he was too interesting for just one crossover event…
This week DC brings back the big bad from Dark Nights Metal. Keep reading for a review of The Batman Who Laughs #1.
I’ll be honest, I thought a lot of the Dark Nights Metal event was kind of a mess. (See reviews for The Road to Metal and the Dark Nights Metal graphic novels.) The concept was very cool (alternate, dying universes clawing at a chance for survival) but at best I thought it was a little goofy, and at worst it was piles of exposition followed by technobabble followed by a deus ex machina or three. I think some readers enjoyed a classic, wordy DC story, it just wasn’t for me.
But the idea was so cool, these terrible, gothic, twisted versions of Batman and the League. (For the record, I really enjoyed the Dark Knights Rising anthology, where we got to see a ton of these dark universe characters.) I wished we’d gotten the look and design of the series with a slightly more interesting story.
And now it looks like we might!
The story is straightforward: a body has been discovered, one that looks like Bruce Wayne, right down to the same childhood scars, but Bruce is alive and well, so what’s going on? The Joker’s involved, but as the mastermind or a pawn?
While this issue set up that storyline, the first half of the book was taken up by an excellent chase scene. Add in a rooftop meeting, a prison break, and a conversation in the morgue, and it’s interesting without getting too deep. And while it wasn’t goofy like parts of the Dark Nights series, there was a little bit of humor here and there, a running joke between Batman and Alfred being the best of it. A darkly sarcastic Batman is my favorite kind of Batman.
I really enjoy Jock’s art (I loved his issue of Batman back in 2015) and I keep trying to think of who he reminds me of; there’s a few panels that really bring to mind Frank Miller, but I don’t think that’s it, there’s a little Matt Wagner too, but obviously it’s a style all his own. It’s very dynamic (I love the panels where you just see the end of Batman’s cape as he leaps out of the frame) and it’s got a classic Batman feel to it without being retro, and David Baron’s colors matched it perfectly. I liked it, and I’m looking forward to more of it.