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If anyone picked up this issue excited about it tying into the Absolute Power event, then you’ll probably be disappointed. For that, you’ll need to skip ahead to the backup. In fact, the main story this month is arguably a continuation of the Gotham War event more than anything else. However, rather than being about family drama and who betrayed whom, it focuses on a single, low-level criminal who got swept up in everything.
Living in Gotham as a criminal can’t be easy, as this glimpse into a simple thief’s life shows. Not only are you under constant fear of being captured by any variety of bat/bird-themed heroes, you’re not even safe with your own bosses. It’s a violent life where you do anything you can to survive. What sets him apart is that when he was burgling wealthy homes during Catwoman’s big plan to transform crime in Gotham, he discovered Batman’s secret identity.
What follows is a series of sequences where the thief, Teddy, tries to shop around selling Batman’s identity to various high-level villains. This acts as a sort of tour through the storylines that have taken place in Gotham over the course of the past year or so. Not only a pseudo-follow up to the events of Catwoman/Gotham War, but this also touches on Two-Face and what’s been going on in Detective Comics as well as Penguin’s kids from Tom King’s Penguin. Unfortunately it doesn’t do a great job of making those other stories sound appealing. Nothing that happens really has any sort of consequence. The story simply shows you some characters that have been prevalent in another title, something happens to make Teddy move onto the next group, then repeat. It somewhat reinforces the idea that Gotham is filled with danger, but I wish more were done with the concept.
The highlight of this sample platter is definitely Two-Face’s segment, as it at least comments on the nature of Batman and Bruce Wayne. What Teddy doesn’t realize is that Two-Face already knows Batman’s secret identity. To him, that knowledge isn’t a tool to be exploited, but a danger to be hidden away. Without the Bruce side keeping him in check, Two-Face says that a “pure bat” would be unleashed on Gotham and kill them all. The only reason he doesn’t kill Teddy right then and there is because his good side gets the better of him (though oddly enough without a coin flip).
There are echoes here of the themes and characters that have been present throughout Ram V’s Detective Comics, especially the past few issues. V has gone to great lengths to explore the relationship between Bruce and his Batman persona, and how one affects the other. Here, however, it just becomes a matter of “Batman without Bruce is a monster”, in line with the more simplistic characterization present in the whole Zur plotline. It’s almost funny that there’s now somewhat of an acknowledgement of Detective Comics‘ existence, given how at odds this title is with that one. For the life of me I cannot conceive of a way for the two storylines to have possibly happened at the same time, despite the occasional indication that they were supposed to.
Throughout Teddy’s attempts to profit off of Batman’s identity, we’re still supposed to see him as a somewhat sympathetic character. This is largely driven by his being a case of a crook forced to steal to support their family. It’s somewhat effective, if a tad cliché. As his get rich quick scheme fails again and again, the title hones in on its titular morality tale: you should always “be better”. This is embodied by Teddy’s son Yuto, who it turns out Batman helped guide away from a life of crime to get a business degree.
Yuto yells at his dad for how bad of a father he’s been, and how without Batman’s help he would have continued the cycle of crime that had trapped their family. We learn about how Batman stopped him when he was working for Scarecrow, but instead of beating him up, offered him a scholarship. Teddy is so ashamed from this conversation that he decides to leave Gotham and try to start over.
I understand what Zdarsky is going for, but it’s not a very satisfactory conclusion because it doesn’t feel like the core conflict was ever addressed or resolved. You can’t just “Batman paid for my MBA” your way out of crime in Gotham, and any personal problems Teddy had are just resolved with him leaving.
The art for this issue alternates between helping and hurting the overall story. Denys Cowan has decades of well-deserved work and recognition under his belt, but as can sometimes be the case, modern art styles don’t always mix with classic artists. Whenever he’s drawing an action sequence or environmental shot, it looks great. Cowan has an exceptional sense of page layout and flow from one panel to the next. Where the art struggles is when we see people’s faces. Cowan’s characters have always had an exaggerated, almost cartoonish style to them, but here they look borderline misshapen.
The difference between these two similar panels by Cowan is subtle, but important. It shows the importance of both the inker and colorist in bringing out a penciller’s talent. While both faces use abstract shapes and scratchy lines for detail, the newer one uses far more detail and digital coloring as opposed to the simple linework and flat colors of the 80s. What results is an uncanny effect where Cowan’s caricatured features clash with the more “realistic” presentation. The problems only become worse the more zoomed in a panel is, meaning that there are more discordant details featured. Cowan is a very talented artist, but his style needs to be used correctly or else it becomes jarring.
Score: 5.5/10
Backup: Brick by Brick
Now here comes the feature that the issue’s cover advertises so prominently: the tie-in to Absolute Power. We begin with Bruce narrating about how he bought the gun company that manufactured the pistol Joe Chill used to shoot his parents in order to shut them down. This feels odd. The whole point of Joe Chill (at least most of the time) is that he can be a stand-in for anyone. The specific mugger doesn’t matter, it’s the fact that it could happen to anyone that spurs Bruce to fight crime as Batman. Saying that Bruce bought the gun company that manufactured this specific gun implies a level of individualistic, tangential blame for what happened rather than any sort of larger system. I suppose it fits in line with the main story’s approach to solving crime via business degrees.
Rather than dwell on this political point, the story uses it to set up a metaphor: what if Bruce is the gun maker in this scenario? If he was willing to dismantle a manufacturer for making Chill’s gun, then does he need to be stopped for making Failsafe? This is ultimately why Bruce’s strange reaction to the gun situation exists; it sets up this moral dilemma of potential hypocrisy. Characters retroactively behaving in nonsensical ways in order to justify current plots has become somewhat of a reoccurring theme in Zdarsky’s run on Batman. It ends on a cliffhanger for further upcoming tie-ins, so we’ll need to wait and see how that all gets resolved.
Aside from that bit of prologue setup, the rest of the story is a fight between Batman and Waller’s “Paradise Lost” robot as it tries to capture Cyborg. It doesn’t last very long and is over almost before you get a chance to get a feel for what’s even happening. The art is service
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