Tomasi and I have a hot-and-cold relationship. I'm usually lukewarm, frequently cold, and occasionally hot. This issue? Burning.
Tomasi finally embraces a view of Damian that hews a little more closely to Scott Snyder's, portraying him as a mostly earnest kid who just really finds other people annoying. It's a refreshing change from the sociopath that we typically see in these pages. It doesn't mean that Damian is polite to the people that he's saving, but he is saving them and he means it. Often, in this title, Tomasi portrays Damian as a hero motivated only by impressing his father; he seems mostly ambivalent about the actual victims (more on that subject in the next paragraph). But, here, his father isn't there to witness his heroism (at first). In fact, you get the sense that Damian would prefer that Bruce never learns what he was doing, since he'd likely be mad at him. At long last, we again see the potential that Dick saw in Damian back in the days of the DCU.
But, Tomasi goes one step further. Not only do we finally see this potential, but Bruce does, too. As I just mentioned, Bruce's concern that Damian only cares for himself is something that I've shared throughout Tomasi's run. When I talk about Tomasi portraying Damian as a sociopath, I'm talking exactly about that concern. As such, Damian depositing Bruce's mother's pearl on Bruce's desk is brilliant. (It actually reminded me of the amazing scene in "Blackest Night: Batman" where Dick and Damian have to dig up the Waynes' graves and Damian remarks how most kids don't meet their grandparents that way.) Somewhere under there, Damian has a heart. It's all I really need to know. I just hope Tomasi remembers to show us those moments more often. I mean, I love a cranky, anti-social Damian. We just have to be reminded every once in a while that he's Bruce's son, not Joker's.
Speaking of Bruce, we also see Tomasi address my second complaint about his run, that Bruce is often depicted as a criminally negligent father. Here, we see Bruce show concern for his son and wondering whether he can stomach putting him in danger again and again. It actually goes to Joker's point that the Bat-family makes Bruce weak. (Again, I'm agreeing with Joker: scary.) Bruce might've been more cavalier with the other Robins, because he was younger and they were older. But, with his ten-year-old biological son, you can tell that he's wondering what he's doing putting him in the line of fire. I loved the moment where he yells at Damian that he reserves the right to be worried about him. It's exactly the sort of thing a father would do and it's nice to see Bruce (finally) behave that way.
The only negative to this issue is that we really never get to the bottom of the Saturnists or whoever they were. I think that we're supposed to believe that Joker set up the whole cult, which I guess I believe, though I'm left wondering why he'd bother. It seems unnecessarily indirect for him. In fact, in retrospect, Tomasi doesn't even really explain how they created the zombies or what the point of creating them was. But, this flaw is overshadowed by development in Bruce and Damian's relationship (the hug!) so I'll let it pass.
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