Review: Batman Vol. 2: The Bat-Man of Gotham hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Among the vagaries of trade-waiting, I saw that Chip Zdarsky’s Batman Vol. 2: The Bat-Man of Gotham collected Batman #131–136, I clocked that in relation to the upcoming “Gotham War” crossover, and I didn’t think more of it. It’s only late in Bat-Man, when things start to get really wild, that I recalled a quickly scanned headline — that through some magic of addition Batman #135 is also Batman’s 900th issue — and that helped put some of what’s strange, weird, and then almost downright unbelievable here into context.

I might have said, before I realized this was an anniversary, that this is not exactly how I like my Batman. Zdarsky’s previous, Batman Vol. 1: Failsafe, was too much in the mode of summer blockbuster for me, but at least it involved the “realism” of Batman’s homemade robot trying to kill him. Here, Batman traverses the Multiverse, in a story that gets wilder as it goes and indeed comes real close to the supernatural. It’s sci-fi superheroics, not detective fiction superheroics, and even as I grant the long legacy of cosmic adventures and the supernatural among the Batman mythology, I’d rather solving a good ol' murder in Gotham any day.

That’s not to say Bat-Man of Gotham isn’t good — it is — and I’m not sure how far ahead Zdarsky was writing this, but there’s a now-familiar multiversal sequence that I think Zdarsky does better than it’s been in other mediums. If this almost Wonderful Life-esque Batman story isn’t quite to my preference, I certainly acknowledge it as a fitting anniversary story. Arguably this could have been published separately under the “Multiversity” line, maybe to bolster those books' lacking multiversal cred, but I do at the same time like this in the Batman line proper. Insofar as DC has struggled to use their much ballyhooed Multiverse in actual stories, Zdarsky delivers on that account.

[Review contains spoilers for Batman Vol. 2 and The Flash (2023)]

There’s an interesting juxtaposition of Batman: Year One and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns in Bat-Man of Gotham (and not just in the fact that Frank Miller’s latter Batman appears before the end!). Zdarsky’s Batman is markedly, curiously aged, more Clooney than Kilmer, one who’s injured most of the time and often keeps going just on the strength of his own demanding self-talk. But Zdarsky drops this Bruce Wayne into a Gotham without a Batman, one that needs one, and the story is replete with Year One iconography — the wool hat and “I shall become a bat” and teaching the evildoers to fear him.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

There’s an ouroboros sense of both ending and new beginning, perhaps properly contradictory. This is a Batman who seems at times about ready to wrap it up, talking about the old days when he “raised [his] boys” at Wayne Manor — Batman the empty-nester, next stop retirement — and yet in an adventure that hearkens back to the creation of the Joker. His hand has been severed(!) but he hides this from his family, the visage of an old man who doesn’t want to be worried over, and yet his robotic hand has technological improvements such to suggest a Batman for the 21st century.

It’s early yet to say where Zdarsky is headed with all of this. Father figure Batman is very much in vogue right now, though the arc of DC Comics tends toward aging their characters down, not up.¹ Notably, when Bat-Man jumps the (ahem) shark and dives into DC’s multiverse of Batmen, it’s the elderly Bruce Wayne of Batman Beyond who gets among the most screen time, commensurate with the Dark Knight Returns Batman, perhaps an indication of the older form Zdarsky’s idealized Batman might take.

It’s a full circle moment for readers of a certain age, too, to go from when Michael Keaton’s Batman was the epitome one wanted to see reflected in the comics to so far into the post-Batman 1989 era that the 2024 Batman meets Keaton as a multiversal antecedent. Again, no telling to what extent the recent Flash movie influenced Zdarsky’s multiversal sequence (and/or DC’s direction of the multiversal sequence), but as a Batman fan particularly of the post-Crisis era, I felt more pleased to see the Batmen of 1989, The Animated Series, and Kingdom Come than I necessarily was to see Nicholas Cage as Superman on the movie screen or late actors resurrected through CGI.

For a 900th comics-issue celebration, it seemed significant that the Batman cameos were not just multiversal but “multimedial.” I spot a Golden Age Batman and what looks to be a Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers Bronze Age Batman, but beyond a few Elseworlds Batmen, it is not as though there are major callouts to “Knightfall” Batman or “No Man’s Land” Batman or Grant Morrison’s Batman, Inc. Batman. Rather we have Batman of the movies, Batman of both live and animated television, and two different Batmen of the video games. I’m not concerned — comics have enough trouble, and if Injustice Batman keeps the Dark Knight in the zeitgeist, I’ll take it — but insofar as any of this stems from Zdarsky’s own preferences, I see here a more holistic acknowledgement of the Bat-universe overall than I’m used to seeing in the comics.

Art for the most part is by Mike Hawthorne, whose straightforward style is quite right for the alt-Gotham in the book’s more standard beginning, and I had none of the concerns that I did in Wonder Woman: Evolution. Miguel Mendonca is given to draw Zdarsky’s Tim Drake backup stories; Mendonca’s inking himself, I believe, and here his DC house style strongly evokes the 1990s, especially in Tim’s giant-R-and-shoulder-pads multiversal suit. Maybe the '90s are right for a Tim Drake story, though it makes a kind of unusual tale even more so (that Zdarsky cameos an alt-universe Janet Drake but not also Jack didn’t sit right with me). In the aftermath, Belen Ortega depicts well Tim and the Bat-family as a whole.

Batman Vol. 2: The Bat-Man of Gotham is, if I may, weird. It’s weird to start a “new era,” as the back cover says, in the second book of a run. It’s weird to suggest the Joker was created by a multiversal variant looking back in time to see how the Joker was created. It’s weird Batman scares away an alt-universe Superman by rolling his eyes back and talking in a scary voice. It’s weird Batman uses the phrase “backup human operating system” or that we’re still relitigating Zur-En-Arrh almost two decades since Batman RIP.

But where I think DC has fumbled big anniversary issues of late, what an anniversary this is, managing to be surprising and unprecedented and also for Chip Zdarsky to fit all that into his ongoing story. This run so far may be weird, but I’m intrigued.

[Includes original covers, about 25 pages of variants(!)]

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1. There’s plans, I know, for DC to have both “young” and “old” versions of their characters coexist, but I’ll save thoughts on that until I’m more informed.  ↩︎

Rating 2.5