Review: Batman: The Knight hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

There is a point late in Batman: The Knight, when a young Bruce Wayne has sought a master academic to learn to control his own brain — to generate emotion on demand, to shut off pain — where the plot essentially stops in favor of an existential treatise on the dual nature of meaning, how life can be simultaneously the most significant thing and also passing dust. If writer Chip Zdarsky has momentarily lost the story, he’s at least raised the level of discourse, and that portends well for his upcoming Batman run.

Knight, beautifully drawn by Carmine Di Giandomenico, has as its difficulty that most of what we see here, we’ve seen before; a majority of the stories, if being retold, are straight out of the “young Bruce Wayne travels the world looking for mentors” playbook. In that way, Knight feels sometimes mundane; we already know how this or that is going to play out, nevermind that the whole concept presupposes a pointy-eared cowl in the end.

But wrapped around the classic “Bruce’s journey” stories that we already know is a dramatization of a newer “Bruce’s journey” story introduced just within the past couple years. We have seen all these stories before, but we’ve never seen them together. Furthermore, I never expected DC to double-down on what they double-down on here, and that in itself makes The Knight significant reading.

Certainly worth a look if you’re not already versed in Batman’s origins, overall Batman: The Knight makes me eager to see what Zdarsky will do in his Batman run proper.

[Review contains spoilers]

Knight is a pastiche of pre-Batman Bruce’s classic training journey blended with James Tynion’s recent Batman Vol. 4: The Cowardly Lot addition of his travels with future “Ghost-Maker” Minhkhoa Khan. If this is not immediately obvious, it’s because DC barely touches the plot on the book’s back cover and Ghost-Maker doesn’t make the scene until the fourth chapter, but so it is. And if Cowardly Lot already hinted at Batman and Ghost-Maker’s relationship being less than lovers but more than friends, Knight goes there even more explicitly with “the little ghost that broke [Bruce’s] heart.” There’s still an out for plausible deniability — Talia’s in the mix — but Knight’s real exegesis is as the most clearly queer-coded Batman origin we’ve seen so far.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

I was surprised frankly to even find Ghost-Maker here. When Tynion left DC, I’d figured that would be about all for Ghost-Maker; he was shunted over to Batman, Inc., but that series has been cancelled now after 12 issues. DC could have as easily sent Ghost-Maker to limbo at that point if only for clearing the decks in favor of more recognizable characters, letting alone any perceived controversy over Bruce having a male crush. Given how much we already know about what transpires in this time period for Bruce, to an extent Knight’s most interesting parts are filling in what we haven’t seen of Ghost-Maker prior to his introduction. In all but name, this is really Ghost-Maker’s first miniseries just when it seemed unlikely he’d ever get one.

Indeed, because in between that, Zdarsky mostly plays the “young Bruce” hits — Hugo Strange, a Catwoman stand-in, Henri Ducard, Giovanni Zatara, and Ra’s al Ghul.¹ Di Giandomenico illustrates it all headily, between his fearsome demon in the Zatara chapter and Ra’s techno-advanced base of operations, but there’s no suspense that Bruce will quit his quest and become a stage magician nor does the reader spend any time wondering who the mysterious man in the desert might be.

Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright came to mind more than once for the modernization of Bruce’s story, with jokes about finding training mentors on websites, for instance. I also felt some similarity between how Birthright’s Dave McCaig and Knight’s Ivan Plascencia have these colored; Di Giandomenico reminds sometimes of Leinil Francis Yu, sometimes of Andy Kubert. But ultimately Birthright was forging a new Superman origin while Knight, again, just tells familiar stories in new packaging (a Batman/Zatanna story dealing with much the same timespan appeared close to this in Batman: Urban Legends).

At almost the very end, one way Knight is able to build tension is in making Bruce’s future Batman career seem the wrong path; faced with Ra’s al Ghul’s grandiose plans for saving the planet, his idea to “go back to Gotham and walk the streets looking for muggers” seems suddenly like failure when we know it shouldn’t be. Zdarsky accomplishes a keen turnaround in not too many pages to explain why Batman, with all Batman can do, should spend his attention mainly on Gotham, suggesting that a focus on the big picture inevitably means losing touch with individual humanity, versus a deeper investment in a relatively smaller cause.

So, we have in Batman: The Knight a book simultaneously daring and safe. It tells nearly no stories of its own in any way demonstrably different than they’ve been told before, but it makes new ideas about Batman, who he is, and how his stories can be told further canon than they were. It also spends a lot of time thinking on the page, and that’s never a bad thing. Again, Knight makes me all the more eager to see where Zdarsky will take things from here.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.75

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1. If Strange and Ra’s are not classically “Bruce trainers,” they’ve surely joined that ilk at this point by dint of Christopher Nolan’s movies and Gotham.  ↩︎