There appears to be a potential Batman/Joker team-up looming. Beyond the gripes, the premise is unique and interesting. While reading I kept getting the feeling that an artist like Bill Sienkiewicz would absolutely crush this. The book is creepy but the atmosphere doesn't feel as creepy as it could be. The colors are all washed out which combined with the pencils lead to bland aesthetic throughout the issue. It could grow on me depending on the direction of the series. The knock on the comic is the art direction. This is a lot of action and actual detective work on Batman's part which is a good sign for the series. There's a twist and the comic ends on a huge cliffhanger and a lot of questions going forward. Upon returning to the Batcave Batman finds the Joker s towed away. Fortunately for Joker, he escaped a couple days prior and the stand in within the cell was murdered. While the investigation is happening there an attempt on the Jokers life in Arkham. Upon investigation, Bruce comes to the conclusion that the Batman Who Laughs has returned. In the aftermath of the scene, Batman finds a corpse of himself. The comic opens with Batman in the middle of breaking up a heist. Notably, Robin – aka his son Damian Wayne – is absent from this sequence.The Batman Who Laughs is the highly anticipated series from Scott Snyder & Jock which focuses on the Batman turned Joker from Dark Knights Metal. The comic is entertaining but I couldn't help but feel that this one doesn't quite live up to the hype. Upon revealing to them the reasons for this training, though, his mind snaps, and with The Joker's toxins now dominant, he fatally ambushes his four most trusted allies. Knowing that at some point that he will succumb to the nanotoxins and must be taken down, Batman establishes a rigid training protocol for Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Red Robin to secretly prepare them for this eventual encounter. These chemicals are shown to have the same adverse and slow-acting effects on Batman in the aftermath of The Joker's demise. Upon killing his foe in such close proximity, Batman is exposed to the very toxins that not only created The Joker in the first place, but continued to drive him into an increasingly downward spiral of insanity. That's not the end of The Joker's impact on Batman's life, though, or on the rest of this world. When an enraged Batman breaks free, he commits an act atypical of the character in most worlds of the multiverse – whether intentionally or otherwise, he ends The Joker's killing spree by snapping the villain's neck during the course of their battle. Having slain both the Gotham police force as well as the rest of Batman's foes, Joker embarks on a murder spree of Gotham's parents before proceeding to infect their orphaned children with his deadly toxin, engaging in a repeated perversion of Batman's own origin. That's not to say Batman and The Joker don't have a deadly encounter – in a decidedly high-stakes showdown along the same magnitude of Snyder and Greg Capullo's climactic "Endgame" arc in Batman, The Clown Prince of Earth -22 has Batman at his mercy as he launches a different kind of endgame. Yes, as previously revealed by Scott Snyder in an interview with CBR, there is Joker toxin involved, but the issue shows that the character's beginnings have a much farther reach than just another encounter between two longstanding foes – beginnings that are drenched in the kind of darkness that readers have come to expect from any world in the Dark Multiverse. RELATED: The Batman Who Laughs May Become a DCU Staple After Dark Nights: Metal
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |