Review: Ghost-Maker/Clownhunter by James Tynion IV trade paperback (DC Comics)

Buyer beware — I’ll mention at the top that Ghost-Maker/Clownhunter by James Tynion IV is incomplete. Among other things, the book includes Tynion’s Ghost-Maker backup stories from Batman #107–111, being the first five parts of a serialized story — but omits the Batman Annual 2021, the sixth and final part of that story. Not any of this is over-important in the grand scheme of DC’s next multiversal crisis, but the absence in this book is definitely noticeable; the fifth part of the Ghost-Maker story ends on a cliffhanger that feels weirdly unresolved if you didn’t know it continued elsewhere, into an annual not otherwise collected.

What’s ostensibly happening in Ghost-Maker/Clownhunter is among my favorite aspects of shared-universe comics. Nothing makes comics feel so much like a living entity as a supporting character who guest-stars among issues, specials, and backups, their story developing organically as they go.¹ And even better then when DC sees fit to grab all those disparate elements and collect them in one single trade.

That should be Ghost-Maker/Clownhunter, but given that missing issue and other give-or-take omissions, it’s not, entirely. It’s unfortunate because in reading together the Ghost-Maker and Clownhunter stories that are here, there’s a character study that could be more focused with the missing content. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve come a long way since the days Batman used to lecture Huntress just for roughing up criminals too much, to Ghost-Maker and Clownhunter, vigilantes who unrepentantly murder their enemies, operating in Gotham more or less with Batman’s blessing.

Particularly in mainstream superhero comics (at least on the DC side), it’s hard to write superheroes who kill without building in some squeamishness or putting them clearly on the trajectory to become superheroes who don’t kill. I don’t think Tynion avoids that entirely, but he does a passable enough job at least in the early days of these characters that I’m interested mainly to see how that paradigm plays out.

[Review contains spoilers]

Ghost-Maker/Clownhunter starts with a questionable choice, placing the Batman Annual #5 before a story from the Joker War Zone special; War Zone was published first, so to my eye it should appear first. Each of these are Clownhunter stories, and I imagine the editors put Batman Annual #5 first because it tells Clownhunter’s origin, but to me that’s a lack of trust in the reader; if Tynion told the War Zone story first — demonstrating Clownhunter’s mayhem before explaining who he is — that should be good enough for the collection, too. Further, a casual reader may not understand why the Joker War is over in the first story but ongoing in the second.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

As this book is about half-full of issues that are also collected separately², I’m loath to suggest adding more content that can be found elsewhere. However, a good order for this section would have been the War Zone story, the Clownhunter epilogue story from Batman #100 (also by Tynion), and then the Batman Annual #5. That gets the two stories with art by James Stokoe, a draw in and of itself, with #100 in the middle, bridging the two and explaining how Clownhunter comes to be punching through Leslie Thompkins' window.

Next in this book is that Ghost-Maker multi-parter, missing its ending; that’s additionally a shame because it’s the only content collected in this book and nowhere else, so it’s arguably the star of the show. Tynion and artist Ricardo Lopez Ortiz spin a wacky, manga-influenced action tale in which Ghost-Maker maneuvers a gauntlet between himself and his arch-foes, while they each tell a story of their greatest battle with him.

It’s gleeful over-the-top superheroics, not that much of a stretch from Tynion’s later Batman issues, though it might surprise someone who took a wrong turn and ended up here from Nice House on a Lake. Pertinent is that Tynion creates whole-cloth for Ghost-Maker a cadre of rogues; given that they’re just made, they seem a little thin, but insofar as Ghost-Maker has been retroactively blended into the core of the Batman mythos (see Batman: The Knight), that Ghost-Maker has rogues helps bolster the character’s faux history.

A theme in the first five parts of the Ghost-Maker story is his pathological fearlessness and his mercilessness, not to mention his imperviousness to pain. Again, it’s over the top, what seems a Ghost-Maker tall tale. This makes it all the worse that the sixth part isn’t here, because I’ve read it and it takes a lot of the piss out of the first five parts. There, we learn all of this is indeed a boastful story that Ghost-Maker’s been telling Batman; also that despite Ghost-Maker’s supposedly blithe exterior, what truth there was in the story involved avenging a wrong done to his parents. The first five parts seem pointless, Tynion having perhaps too much fun; that all comes to a very moving point in the missing sixth.

I’ve written about the Batman Secret Files: Clownhunter special before, so I won’t reiterate except to say that I noticed this time around it’s clearly a three-part backup story combined into a special; note the splash page and then recap about every 10 pages. This volume then jumps uncomfortably from Clownhunter to Ghost-Maker and back, DC’s awkward attempt to put all the Tynion material in the front and all the Ed Brisson material at back. Brisson writes the Clownhunter special and also the Batman Annual 2022 that leads in to his Batman Incorporated series with Ghost-Maker and Clownhunter.

There’s some connective tissue missing between the Clownhunter special and the annual, though most of it is cut-scenes among otherwise unrelated books, and I wouldn’t have expected DC to turn this into a Countdown to Infinite Crisis-type patchwork volume³. As I’ve said before, I do think the Clownhunter backup “DIY” by Brandon Thomas and Jason Howard from Batman #112–114 might’ve been appropriate here, as it’s not collected anywhere else and confirms, at least, that Clownhunter refused Red Hood’s offer to assist at the end of the Secret Files special. But, for this niche volume, neither am I surprised that DC wouldn’t want to have to pay royalties to a third creative team.

So the final chapter of Ghost-Maker/Clownhunter by James Tynion IV (the 2022 annual also collected in Batman, Inc. Vol. 1) finds Clownhunter with a new costume under the tutelage of Ghost-Maker, when last we saw him on the streets of Gotham with Red Hood. Again, how the uninformed makes sense of all of this, I can’t imagine. A book of backups, a book of random character bits all smooshed together, the kind of stuff that didn’t historically even get collected — that’s exactly what I want. But stuffing everything you’d want into a book like that while DC still makes a buck is, clearly, easier said than done.

[Includes original and variant covers, design and character sketches]

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1. The Silver Age “Zatanna’s Search” story is an early example.  ↩︎

2. In Batman Vol. 3: Ghost Stories, Joker War Saga, Batman: Secret Files, and Batman Incorporated Vol. 1.  ↩︎

3. Specifically scenes in Fear State: Omega and Batman #121, if you’re inclined to Frankenstein a volume yourself.  ↩︎

Rating 2.25