Review: Batman Vol. 1: Failsafe hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Batman Vol. 1: Failsafe is a pulse-pounding summer action flick, I’ll give writer Chip Zdarsky that. Taken with a bucket of popcorn, this book is just fine; Zdarsky tugs some particular strings to win over long-time fans, and taken in tandem with his Batman: The Knight, we see a specific and interesting conception of Batman emerging.

As the beginning of Zdarsky’s Batman run, however, Failsafe is also markedly strange, uncomfortably too large and too small in waves, and also built as Knight was mostly on the backs of others' stories. Though artist Jorge Jimenez is making a name as the defining Batman artist of the Infinite Frontier era, his presence here on a book not so tonally different from Batman: Joker War or Batman: Fear State, not to mention Justice League, makes Failsafe feel all too familiar. In his first time out, Zdarsky swings for the fences and makes it, but I’m concerned what he has for the fans whom this isn’t their first ballgame.

[Review contains spoilers]

The winningest thing about Batman: Failsafe is that Zdarsky brings in Tim Drake as Batman’s Robin, evoking on the page that perfect “third time’s the charm” partnership. Zdarsky has to write his way into it — the “open to new possibilities” Batman at the end of James Tynion’s Batman: Fear State has devolved to “I can never be happy” Batman at Zdarsky’s start, and he and Tim bicker pettily at the beginning before “Failsafe” gets underway and needs make friends. But the Tim who’s got Batman’s back in the Arctic at the end of the world, responsible for saving Superman, is exactly who we all expected Tim to be some 30 years ago, and I’m glad Tim is the Robin for this story even if DC’s general winds still blow toward Damian.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

It is indeed the end of the world, and if it’s your first end of the world, it’s a doozy — robotic intelligence Failsafe, designed by Batman to defeat Batman, has gone rogue, and it’s enslaved Gotham and trounced the Justice League in an effort to take out the Dark Knight. That’s all highly, wonderfully dramatic, and with a clensed palate I might even enjoy giving Failsafe a second read. But no sooner of late was Gotham enslaved by Bane then the Joker took over, and right after that by the Magistrate and the Scarecrow; for the serial reader, my reaction to Batman awakening to find Gotham under siege was not “Oh, no” but “Not again!”

In this way, really much like The Knight, Zdarsky’s moving fascinatingly between the curious and the mundane. It’s a good big action Batman epic, but of the kind we’ve seen before and with the same artist. At the same time, Zdarsky starts here instead of building up to it, so maybe that portends an interesting complication to come. Failsafe is built on the back of Grant Morrison’s Batman RIP when Knight too re-told other stories almost to a fault. But then again, notably, there’s no real villain here, just Batman cleaning up the outsized consequences of an almost laughable mistake. It feels as though, with the next step, Zdarsky’s Batman is on the cusp of being either mostly dismissable or utterly ground-breaking.

See in the same way the final chapter, a magnificent seven-page sequence in which Batman literally falls from the moon to Earth and survives. It’s riveting, a fantastic piece of action and sci-fi, worthy of a Mission Impossible movie. But the punchline of Batman dryly brushing off his ordeal belittles the setup; ultimately those seven pages of action affect the story no more than if Batman had caught a Zeta beam down. To be sure, Zdarsky’s brought the excitement, but I haven’t seen enough yet to know if there’s anything to distinguish this underneath that excitement.

Batman: The Knight turned very much on the idea of Bruce Wayne training himself to be “the best,” an endeavor in which he succeeds so well that he ultimately narrows his sights to Gotham lest his best-ness corrupt him. Failsafe is to an extent the aftermath — faced with his best-ness, Batman creates a failsafe to stop himself if he were corrupted, which then runs amok and requires Batman to intercede.

There’s an interesting thought experiment made fictionally concrete here — what is “the best,” and can anything be better than the best and if it is, is the best still the best and so on. I’m unsure that can resolve into anything reasonable, but there at least I feel Zdarsky working with threads of the Batman character that we haven’t seen explored so much. And yet, that’s undercut by some aspects that seem avoidably silly: that Failsafe should be so sophisticated but unable to grasp the nuances of Batman’s “murder” of Penguin, and that same sophisticated machinery should be reliant on Alfred routinely pushing a button, Lost-esque, to keep from coming alive and taking over the world.

I appreciate that DC includes Zdarsky’s Batman backup stories here, one delving into Batman’s Zur-En-Arrh experiences that factor into “Failsafe” and one being Catwoman seeking out heirs to Penguin’s will. We’re in a weird Bat-period though, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, and also because — following from Tynion’s era of interconnected Bat-family titles — now we’ve got Tini Howard writing Catwoman connected to both Batman and Punchline: The Gotham Game and we’ve got Zdarsky writing Catwoman within the Batman title that seems like it’ll be equally relevant to that character. I’m curious to see how it can be reconciled, if at all.

With Batman Vol. 1: Failsafe, it's a good time to be a new Batman reader. For the rest of us, we’ll have to wait and see.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.25