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All good things must come to an end. This issue marks the end of Dan Jurgens and Mike Perkins’ The Bat-Man: First Knight. As I have already said, I absolutely love this series. Can the final issue manage to tie up all the loose ends while managing to be satisfying? Let’s take a look under the hood.
The end times
This issue picks up right where the last one ends. The Voice makes it clear that his plan to take Gotham is about to start before we cut to Bruce mulling over whether to take up a firearm. This is when Julie Madison walks in on him, mask off, cape on. This provides Bruce with no other option than to reveal his identity to her. They talk about his use of guns, ending in a *ahem* romantic entanglement between the two.
I don’t feel like this is unnecessary. I am often cautious of Black Label titles using the label as an excuse to be excessive, but this does not feel like one of those times. Seeing them interact in previous issues they seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company. This Bruce especially needs more people to confide in, and even if I’m not completely sold on the Rabbi character, I can appreciate giving him a lover to confide in as well.
Come the next morning, Bruce is tinkering in his lair, having decided to destroy all the guns in his house. He is tinkering with a cadaver in an attempt to devise a weapon against the Monster Men. With this task complete, he goes to run his next errand. He appears at the hospital where Johny the Whip is being held. I love how he uses his Bruce Wayne persona to help him get in. It’s nice to see Jurgens using a lot of different sides to the character. He’s doing chemistry by hand, detecting sans computer and using all the means available to him. while I do love rough-around-the-edges early Batman stories, it’s nice to see him become more well-rounded.
All hell breaks loose as the Monster Men arrive in the hospital, setting The Voice’s plan into motion. It all gets pretty hectic from there as we cut to Julie Madison on a film set near the fires break out, to the Rabbi defending his synagogue and finally, the Bat-Man’s journey to take his enemy down.
Unfortunately, this issue didn’t hit as hard as the others did. The concept was great and the execution fantastic, but there was always a little something I could fault. These things come together in this last issue to create a significantly larger fault. My problems can be encapsulated mainly with one character: The Voice.
I didn’t ever particularly care for the character in the limited glimpses we got of him. I made the mistake of thinking oh well, at least it will somewhat be a reinvention of Hugo Strange. Update: it was not. I don’t dislike The Voice because it’s not Hugo Strange. I dislike The Voice because from what a strong story we’ve had, he’s a very weak and pretty lame character.
I love every character in these books, they all feel so full, but The Voice really feels like a letdown of a villain. My other issues lie, not with the character of the Rabbi, but with his relationship with Bruce. In the first issue, the dialogue between Bruce and the Rabbi was one of the weaker points and I find that that is still the case here. It often feels like a place for the characters to divulge emotional exposition.
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