Review: Batman: One Bad Day: Ra's al Ghul hardcover (DC Comics)

Like Joshua Williamson’s Bane story, Tom Taylor and Ivan Reis' Batman: One Bad Day: Ra’s al Ghul is a keen Ra’s story, explicating some of the most interesting aspects of the character that so often get overlooked. At the same time — lest I sound like a broken record with this, the last of the current “One Bad Day” specials — it is hardly deserving of the “One Bad Day” moniker.

And so the tension, as with the rest: the “one-shot to graphic novel” format is one I’m inclined to support; that format gives these stories extra cache that many of them, with their writer/artist pairings, deserve that cache; and many of these stories have also been very good. But intimating these books' place alongside Batman: The Killing Joke suggests an element of horror that many of these have not provided, and in failing to live up, a cynicism emerges: that if we take away the format and the creators, many of these are “just” more Batman stories, unlikely to have any staying power. The potential of these has ultimately been greater than most of the books ever were.

[Review contains spoilers]

Arguably, in Ra’s al Ghul’s trappings as head of the League of Assassins and Damian Wayne’s spurned grandfather and so on, I think Ra’s identity as an ecologist (if ecological terrorist) gets less attention than it deserves. Indeed, I think far more interesting is when Batman’s rogues are well-intentioned people with bad methods — Ra’s, Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze — than when they are blithely, outright villains.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

That puts Batman, or at least the reader, in a more thoughtful position than if Joker’s poisoning the reservoir again. Without condoning murder, writer Taylor has an excellent thought experiment here — if Ra’s has killed the business heads most culpable in global pollution and installed their environmentally friendly successors without anyone knowing a crime has been committed, does Batman do better or worse for the world by revealing the plot? If in some way the specter of Alan Moore floats behind the entirety of this “One Bad Day” initiative, here we begin to see a bit of Watchmen — does Batman storm off to reveal the plot like Rorschach, or remain culpably silent like Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk?

Much of the book compares Ra’s immortal view of the passage of time to Batman’s mortal immediacy. The black and white ethics of a four-color superhero are on display here — for Batman, to take any life is a sin and murderers must be punished; something so esoteric as polluting the environment and endangering generations yet to come doesn’t rise to the same level of urgency. In the face of the good result of Ra’s bad actions and that Batman might spoil it out of a single-minded sense of justice, I was nearly convinced Batman ought just step aside. And it’s true what Ra’s says, that this is “restraint” — not the genocide of his previous schemes, but targeted killings only so far as to bring about the intended outcome.

Of course, Ra’s claims are only so convincing as, in this imaginary scenario, we might also posit that he could have used his longevity to amass wealth to buy up the offending companies or otherwise be a change agent with public policy rather than conspiratorial murder. And where it seems Ra’s has been right-ish and his scheme successful, bumping off two additional businessmen in relatively innocuous ways, Taylor tests our resolve when Ra’s kills 3,000 innocents to mask the murder of 11 others. We come to the point we always do in these debates, where Batman saving one life and letting countless billions suffer in the future seems unreasonable, but equally we’re left with the unanswerable question of how many lives is too many to murder to save those billions.

In all of these ways, Taylor’s Ra’s al Ghul story is good; it runs the danger of veering into well-worn Ra’s/Damian family conflict territory, but is mostly about the unfolding of Ra’s tight, tidy scheme and Batman uncovering it through some real detective work. Artist Reis is a stalwart, consistent talent whose wide and detailed figures are just right for the intricacies of Ra’s aged face and busy facial hair. If the callbacks to Killing Joke are not quite enough for me here, Taylor and Reis at least nod to Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams with the requisite scene of Batman and Ra’s sword-fighting shirtless.

It is not however, I’ll say again for the last time (this round), a “One Bad Day” story. We need perhaps look no farther than it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what Ra’s titular “bad day” is here — it’s not the day in the flashback when he’s almost executed, since he’s saved by wolves, and it’s not the day his favored wolf cub dies, since the whole plan is already in place by then. Despite Ra’s long life, he’s another — like Two-Face, like Mr. Freeze — whose origins are pretty well told, and that poses for Taylor some difficulty.

Neither do we get the “bad day” secret origin, and despite Ra’s and Batman’s face-off, neither do we get the kind of “we’re both running out of alternatives … and we both know it” kind of conversation the book would need to live up to its namesake. (As I write this, I see around the edges, in both Batman and Ra’s “dying” in this story, maybe there’s a broad enactment here of “Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you,” but it’s all too oblique for me to posit it as intentional.)

I’ve said before and I’ll say again, my expectations for the “One Bad Day” series are just my expectations, perhaps not what the books were meant to be, so my judgment of them as a success or failure is wholly subjective. That’s separate from each book’s individual story potential, where Batman: One Bad Day: Ra’s al Ghul more greatly succeeds (and that’s not surprising, coming from Tom Taylor). Rumors abound of more “One Bad Day” books, maybe spotlighting a more obscure round of Batman villains, maybe spotlighting Superman villains. Both of those possibilities excite me; the farther these can get from stories already told, perhaps the even better they will be.

[Includes original and variant covers, black and white art section]

Rating 3.0