Among the vagaries of trade-waiting, I saw that Chip Zdarsky’s Batman Vol. 2: The Bat-Man of Gotham collected Batman #131–136, I clocked that in relation to the upcoming “Gotham War” crossover, and I didn’t think more of it. It’s only late in Bat-Man, when things start to get really wild, that I recalled a quickly scanned headline — that through some magic of addition Batman #135 is also Batman’s 900th issue — and that helped put some of what’s strange, weird, and then almost downright unbelievable here into context.
I might have said, before I realized this was an anniversary, that this is not exactly how I like my Batman. Zdarsky’s previous, Batman Vol. 1: Failsafe, was too much in the mode of summer blockbuster for me, but at least it involved the “realism” of Batman’s homemade robot trying to kill him. Here, Batman traverses the Multiverse, in a story that gets wilder as it goes and indeed comes real close to the supernatural. It’s sci-fi superheroics, not detective fiction superheroics, and even as I grant the long legacy of cosmic adventures and the supernatural among the Batman mythology, I’d rather solving a good ol' murder in Gotham any day.
