Review: Gotham Academy: Maps of Mystery #1 comic book (DC Comics)

What makes a Robin a Robin? Do they need to live in Wayne Manor for a time? Is it important there’s at least one conversation where Alfred tells Bruce, “You’re being too hard on the child” and then consoling the Robin with cookies? If Batman crime-fights with the character and then, in the end, calls the character “Robin,” does that make a Robin a Robin?

[Review contains spoilers]

These questions (for which the answers are “Who knows?” and “Just enjoy it!”) become pressingly important in the context of the recent special Gotham Academy: Maps of Mystery, in which Gotham Academy’s breakout star Maps Mizoguchi appears in a Robin costume more often than not. Clearly, of course — because we haven’t had a multi-part “Battle for the Short Pants” event and Damian Wayne is still scheduled to appear in the new Batman & Robin series — Maps is not replacing Damian as the Robin du jour to appear on T-shirts and lunchboxes. But at the same time Maps comes from the Robin War time period where just calling yourself “Robin” (or wearing red shoes, apparently) made you a Robin, and before the end of the first story, Batman refers to her as Robin …

Though published as a “special” rather than a trade, Maps of Mystery collects Maps' varied few appearances since the end of Gotham Academy: Second Semester — a short story from the second Batman: Black and White miniseries, the backup story from Batman #119–121 (also reprinted in Batman: Abyss), and a story from the DC’s Saved by the Belle Reve special. Though I don’t believe anything other than Gotham Academy itself or a few throwaway lines made it into CW’s short-lived Gotham Knight TV show, my guess is that both this collection and the recent new reprinting of Gotham Academy’s first series in one volume have their origins in TV tie-ins that didn’t turn out as prescient as hoped.

Obviously rather nothing here is assuredly in contiunity — neither backups nor one-off stories get immediate rights to “the truth.” Though, DC made the curious choice to print the stories in this book out of publication order (or maybe no one there is thinking about this as closely as I am) — publication was Black & White, Batman, Belle Reve, but this book presents Batman, then Belle Reve, then Black & White.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

This is notable (if there’s anything here to interpret) because the Black & White story starts in medias res with Maps as Robin, certainly easily dismissable as an “imaginary story.” By starting with the Batman backups, however, which relate Maps' “origin” as Robin, the Black & White story then has precedent, not just an imaginary story but a continuation of what we saw before. (Maps does not leave the Batman backup, “They Make Great Pets¹,” as Robin proper, but we still might project the Black & White story to somewhere in the future rather than being imaginary entirely.)

The sticking point, at least when the Black & White story came out, would be Batman’s costume, with a yellow oval behind the Bat-symbol — surely Batman hadn’t worn that costume in some time and likely never would again, and so then of course the Black & White story is just writer/artist Karl Kerschl’s entertaining flight of fancy. But when Kerschl’s Batman backups came around, lo and behold Joshua Williamson has Batman wearing his Batman Inc.-era yellow oval costume in the main series, which some artists drew in Batman: Shadow War as no different than the 1980s oval costume. Suddenly even that discrepancy in Kerschl’s stories isn’t much of a discrepancy.

Placed between these two, for reasons not entirely clear, is the most recent, the Gotham Academy story from Saved by the Belle Reve. Of them all, this one rings the most “true,” not referencing at all Maps as Robin, but rather picking up of sorts where Second Semester left off. As I surmised in my review of Gotham Academy: Second Semester Vol. 2, given Olive Silverlock’s ubiquity throughout Gotham Academy but that we’ve mostly heard from Maps since (here and elsewhere; review to come), Olive has apparently disappeared.

This story, by Gotham Academy originators Brenden Fletcher and Becky Cloonan, with Kerschl on art and late-series artist MSASSYK on colors, is a fun exercise in getting the band back together. I’d be happy if there was more Gotham Academy, I’d be satisfied if they all went off in search of Olive, but equally I don’t much mind if the creative team were to finally focus on Maps and the rest without Olive taking up most of the narrative space. To wit, it’s a particular thrill that after two series, we finally meet the Mizoguchi parents and see more of where Maps and brother Kyle come from.

(Once again, to my chagrin, the writers treat the character Colton particularly blithely. Here we learn Colton’s parents are pulling him out of Gotham Academy and moving him to Metropolis, when it’s been established already that Colton’s father abuses him, possibly due to Colton’s sexuality, and that Gotham Academy has been Colton’s “safe space.” It’s a strange duality in which, all these years later, the audience continues to know so much about Colton’s troubles and the characters so little.)

I’d intended to pick a favorite among the stories in Gotham Academy: Maps of Mystery, but in the end it hardly seems necessary. “They Make Great Pets” is funny and thrilling, and with a moment of really unexpected violence among the Gotham Academy set, and Black & White’s “The Davenport House” is a fine short-form Batman whodunit even outside Maps' presence. The irreverent, irrepressible Maps is a fine Robin, truly a light to Batman’s darkness and a font of obscure information, though I’d hate to see what dour modernity she’d be subjected to outside the Gotham Academy team’s hands.

2.5

Rating

For all DC does these days with youth-leaning original graphic novels, surely more Gotham Academy material has a place?

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1. “Maybe Martians could do better than we’ve done?”  ↩︎