Written by Jorge Jimenez, Mariko Tamaki,
Jamal Campbell, Kieron Gillen, Lee Weeks
Art by Jorge Jimenez, Emanuela Lupacchino,
Jamal Campbell, Jamie McKelvie, Lee Weeks
Published by DC Comics
A key thing to understand DC as a whole is how they see superheroes as mythic beings. Understanding their lore, their motivations, their impact on the characters and world around them.
Batman Black and White so often returns to the meditations on the things that make Batman, and it’s interesting to see how that may change over time or with new characters.
“Father & Son Outing” by DC artist favorite Jorge Jimenez in his writing debut covers a lot of familiar ground but through what we rarely see: Batman and Robin casing the joint before their next adventure.
Not only that, but in the daytime, as Bruce and Damian, just a father and son on some sick mountain bikes.
Arriving at a location by the waterfront, Bruce is detailing an upcoming bit of criminal activity they’ll be breaking up that night. It’s a scene we’ve seen in a million Batman stories: a midnight exchange of cash for whatever-you-like: guns, drugs, supervillain tech, who knows and who cares. No matter what it is, Batman and Robin have to stop them.
How much preparation must go into Batman’s work! He’s laying out a technical walkthrough like he’s getting ready for showtime.
A small noise in one direction, mini-explosives in another, kill the lights here, turn the lights back on there, and then the perfect perch from which Batman will descend.
As Bruce lays out the game plan, Damian keeps asking why they can’t just run in and knock some heads about. It’s simple, Bruce says: because using fear, misdirection and theatricality allows them to set the criminals against each other.
In their disorientation, the criminals will see Batman as more than a man in a costume. “They’ll know that they can’t defeat me. That they can’t kill me. Their only course of action will be to run.”
And, not for nothing, all the easier to subdue the soldiers, get to the dealers and their merch faster, and leave everyone tied up for the police.
It’s a charming story with a joke I won’t reveal here, and probably one you can already see coming from a mile away. But Jimenez’s affectionate portraiture of the Dark Knight in that moment is marvelous.
That amount of preparation, along with quick decision-making and experience-based instinct, are part of what makes Batman as effective as he is.
In “The Riddle,” The Wicked + The Divine du0 Keiron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie serve up a deeply inventing, mind-bending display into a Batman adventure where certain death is coming from any number of ways.
The setup is simple: Riddler has lured Batman into a maze of death traps, and he’s teamed up with Killer Croc, who also has abducted a bunch of orphans.
Gillen and McKelvie turn the story into a literal maze. Numbering each panel and placing choose-your-own-adventure captions, the story jerks the reader across its multiple pages. The project turns on dry humor and Batman dying, a lot.
The outcome where Batman lives, and Riddle and Croc are defeated, is embedded within those same panels. Can you find your way through it by playing Riddler’s game, or do you have to Batman your way out by making your own rules?
Sometimes, making one’s own rules is the only way through betrayal, regret and trauma in Gotham City.
Artist’s artist Lee Weeks brings his usual high art of comic book storytelling to “Signals,” in which Commissioner Gordon takes on an old case that left deep wounds. Will he seek his own vengeance to solve this cold case, a case he himself won’t even call Batman for?
Gordon finds that even if he cannot find justice, he does find some measure of peace. And Weeks depicts the other side of the Batman/Gordon friendship. Just as Gordon helps Batman from falling into the abyss in this endless war on crime, Batman can do the same for Gordon.
In “Blue,” Mariko Tamaki and Emanuela Lupacchino look at trauma and the abyss from the aspect of someone injured as collateral damage in Gotham’s war on crime: Gilda Dent, wife of Harvey Dent, before the criminal element claimed him. It’s fun to see them take Gilda to a femme fatale place in a way that feels entirely relatable in a superhero universe, yet a sad crusade all the same.
If one doesn’t let the darkness win, instead can they soar above tragedy and heartbreak? Artist Jamal Campbell takes his own spin at writing by showcasing the one and only Dick Grayson in “The Man Who Flies.”
We follow Nightwing on patrol in Gotham – swinging on his grapple, gliding between buildings, leaping from a police blimp with all his acrobatic grace and power. Campbell frames this story through the concepts of meditation and flow state, where all throughts simply happen and pass through the mind without the self latching on to them.
Dick’s memories, of family, heartbreak, loss, regret, appear as Polaroids. A distress call goes out to a brutal murder of a family, and Nightwing snaps into action.
Many Batfans are deeply aware of Dick’s complicated bond with Batman, and Campbell gives voice to “the expectation of a legacy to strive toward” when he was Robin, and “hollowness of a legacy unwanted” when he adopted the mantle when Bruce was presumed dead after Final Crisis.
But if there’s anything Nightwing learned from Batman, it’s that compassion must drive his war on crime as well, to care for those left behind just as he was.
That tenderness within the Caped Crusader isn’t remarked on enough.
This issue’s a real gift for an old, tired Batfan.
