Batman: Curse of the White Knight #1: Murphy picks up right where he left us, and I couldn't be happier. Napier's point from the first series about how Gotham really works is proven right off the bat when Arkham's warden visits the Joker. After turning off the security system, the warden approaches the Joker's cell because the Joker has promised the warden and his "associates" with "information." But, the Joker is really just interested in getting something from his cell: the "final joke," as he calls it. He then stabs the warden to make it look like he held the warden hostage and escapes. (Of course, he knew that Batman would see through that ruse, which he does, so he really just wanted to stab the warden. Oh, Joker! What a loon!) After investigating the Joker's escape and shaking down the warden for information, Batman and Jim discuss how they think Napier was right: the warden's "associates" (i.e., Gotham's elites) control Arkham and let the prisoners escape to profit from the Batman Devastation Fund. (This series continues to be the only realistic portrayal of Batman that I can imagine, explaining the inconsistencies that comics normally want us to ignore. Imagine if Tom King told this story.) This realization obviously shakes up both of them.
But, it becomes clear that Murphy starts the series this way to put the first series behind us. Napier was right; Bruce was wrong. Bruce has internalized this failure and realizes that it might be time to hang up the cowl, because he's gotten so much wrong for so long. But, this series isn't about sane Napier like the first one was. It's about the pre-Joker Napier "finding the Joker" in his old cell, a cell connected to a secret passage containing the body of Lafayette "Laffy" Arkham. (Heh.) Laffy was a British general who used to control Gotham Valley in the colonial era; he's also the main figure in a spooky children's poem popular in Gotham, where he's a vampire who eats children. (Oh, Gotham.) This issue actually starts with Edmund Wayne killing Laffy in a sword fight; we see him plummet down the well to where the pre-Joker Napier later finds him. The issue then segues to Alfred's farewell letter to Bruce, telling him to look under the floorboard in his room, where he finds Edmund's diary. Bruce can't read it yet, because it needs to be restored so it doesn't crumble, but he and Barbara acknowledge that the timing of the discovery is unlikely to be a coinky-dink.
Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Valley, a veteran who's seen better days, gets a terminal cancer diagnosis. He then suffers from a hallucination, knocking over candles in the hospital's chapel before his friends help him. Later, he's mopping the floor of a church where he spends a lot of time (seemingly having little else to do and atoning for unnamed sins). The Joker appears to him with a sword, the item (or at least one of them) that he recovered from his cell. He informs Jean-Paul that the Waynes stole Gotham from his family and that he needs to seek vengeance against Bruce. This part is the only part where Murphy made me raise an eyebrow. He doesn't reveal how the Joker knows about Valley, including the fact that he suffers form hallucinations, which the Joker obviously knows, since he behaves as if he's one of them to manipulate Valley into accepting the sword. But, Murphy's a good enough writer that I feel like he'll reveal what we need to know soon. In the meantime, I'm happy to wait as the mystery unfurls.
Dungeons & Dragons: A Darkened Wish #2: Seriously, do not waste your money on this series. (OK, I'm writing this review ten months after it was published, so I probably can't do much to stop you from doing so. But, if you're as behind as I am, beware!) I've never read a more nonsensical and scattered issue in my life. You'd think that it was just the flashback framing device, which usually trips up authors. But, we'd be lucky if it were our only problem. Each successive panel seems to have nothing to do with the previous one. At one point, a character appears quite literally from nowhere and announces himself in a way that implies that no one knows him, except for the fact that the ship's crew apparently know him quite well. It's all just a jumbled mess and makes me long all the more for Fell's Five to return one day. [Sigh.]
The Weatherman, Vol. 2 #2: LeHeup continues to tighten the narrative as we get closer and closer to Cross' goal, only to make it clear that she has a lot longer of a journey than she thinks. First, we learn that Kestrel is sending the lottery "winners" to a scientist named Dr. Argus, where he seems to expose them to the virus in the hope of developing a cure. Kestrel informs him that the transports -- presumably to take the survivors off Earth -- are ready, but he informs her that he needs at least another month. (I don't exactly understand why they need a cure before they can leave, but I'm sure that we'll get there.) It isn't just a bad sign because last issue we learned the survivor population faces collapse in three months. It's also a bad sign because he's banking on help from Dr. Nyseth, whom Cross and her team discover is dead. Moreover, the team only gets to that point because Garren sacrifices himself to buy them time to escape plague-ridden zombies and because a comic book-obsessed, bear-riding girl named Pace uses a micro-singularity bullet to destroy the enormous creature the zombies merged to create. (I know that sounds insane, but LeHeup really sells it as a perfectly understandable sequence of events.) Pace seems to be the team's only hope at this point, since she knew Nyseth and leads them all to her grave. But Garren's loss is huge. He wasn't just the team's moral compass but also its common-sense checker. I don't necessarily trust Cross to make great decisions at this point.
Also Read: Detective Comics #1,008
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