Review: Batman: One Bad Day: Clayface hardcover (DC Comics)

Most of what I recall reading by the writing team of Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzig has been filler — finishing out Grayson, finishing out Green Arrow, couple issues on Wonder Woman and so on, such not to have a strong opinion of or expect much from the duo quite yet.

But, with artist Xermanico, their Batman: One Bad Day: Clayface is exceptional, rising to what I’d rank as second highest among these books. Their “One Bad Day” entry hardly plumbs the depths of Clayface better than anyone else might have necessarily, but the writers win on a point that would seem simple except it’s where so many others have failed: they understood the assignment.

[Review contains spoilers]

With one more “One Bad Day” book to go, for me the winner still remains Tom King and Mitch Gerads' Riddler, the book most faithful to Killing Joke itself. Aside from being even a sequel to Killing Joke, the Riddler book is largely focused on the Riddler himself; it involves the Riddler’s triumphant “ultimate” scheme against Batman; and it spins the Riddler’s origin (potential at least), with ties to the titular “bad day.” Each of these are places where other “One Bad Day” books stumbled — being more about Batman or the Bat-family than the villain; not involving any sort of villainy, to the point even of some Batman/villain team-ups; and neither telling an origin, not tying it to random unfortunate events, or both.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Kelly and Lanzig’s Clayface does not win on all of these points. Shockingly, for one thing, it delves into Basil Karlo’s origins not at all; you wouldn’t know a thing from reading this book about how he became Clayface or what his life was like before that time. Nor is there a Bat-focused scheme here; though Clayface succeeds in focusing on the title villain, with Batman appearing on only a handful of pages at the end, the story is mostly about Clayface on a self-serving killing spree in Hollywood. Nor is there any Killing Joke-esque question of whether Clayface perishes in the end, though I do read the “fade to black” narration as a nod.

But in a bizarrely wonderful set of scenes (which took me a page too long to recognize, I admit), the writers center Clayface around a Killing Joke movie, and a revisionist one at that, in which the comedian tries to reconcile with his wife and other bad events don’t take place. What follows is a strange re-casting of a truly dark story, a Killing Joke where the Joker character is suffused with optimism, which Clayface can’t hack because he can’t see beyond his own pain. His killing spree then becomes a figurative journey to thwart this vision, to see Killing Joke play out the way it did and not the way it might.

I read no messaging into the authors' use of Killing Joke here, so much as an acknowledgment of what they’re meant to pay homage to and a clever way of doing so. Too, that the authors and Xermanico make few but pointed uses of that trademark nine-panel grid. Ultimately, I’m finding here at the end, I don’t need much from my “One Bad Day” books, just a recognition at least that the creative teams understand the series they’re in.

I’ll add a word of praise for Xermanico, who both draws and inks himself here. I’ve liked the artist’s work on a variety of titles, including Infinite Frontier, but I thought he did especially well here in a number of scenes that turn on close-up depictions of people’s faces to convey mood or emotion, as well as rendering Clayface’s grotesque forms. This is, lightly, a body horror book, and Xermanico helps to sell that.

I can’t explain to you why Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzig cast Garfield “Beast Boy” Logan as the Gray Ghost in Batman: One Bad Day: Clayface, but leaving that aside, this volume was an excellent surprise. Should Clayface have been auditioning for a Gray Ghost movie or the like and not Killing Joke, I might not have appreciated this book as much. It says to me that my personal bar for the “One Bad Day” books isn’t prohibitively high (your results may vary); I’m just surprised more of the creative teams didn’t defer to the source material.

[Includes original and variant covers, character designs, black and white art gallery]

Rating 2.75