All-Star Batman vol. 3: The First Ally

With this, Scott Snyder’s “Batman” victory lap comes to a close.  The first two volumes were pretty enjoyable even if they weren’t swinging for the fences in the way that the writer’s work with Greg Capullo on the main series did.  For this third volume, Snyder teams with his “American Vampire” partner Rafael Albuquerque for a story that looks to add some not-insignificant details to the backstory of Alfred Pennyworth.  Do these details wind up making one of the most pivotal characters of the Bat-mythos more interesting? While his previous work had me hoping that things would work out in the end, Snyder’s efforts wind up amounting to a long walk off of a short plank.

It starts off fun enough with Batman and Alfred chasing after Hush as he flies over a baseball stadium in Florida.  The reason Hush is down here in the first place is because he’s posing as Bruce Wayne to buy a device called the Genesis Engine from some mobsters who have quite a bit of pirate history in their veins.  This leads Batman, as Bruce Wayne, to “impersonate” Hush in order to bid on the device, but things go wrong and soon the hero is leaping out into gator-infested waters to escape his pursuers. Though this leads to some familiar members of Batman’s rogues gallery tipping their hand regarding their presence here, the real surprise comes when Alfred realizes that there’s another party in the mix to acquire the Genesis Engine.  One who trained him as well as he has Batman himself.

Alfred’s history as a theater actor and veteran of the Special Air Services has been noted and called upon many times in service to Batman’s exploits.  Here, we find out that on top of his existing military service the loyal retainer to the Wayne Family was also working as an extralegal agent of the Crown as part of a black MI5 operation overseen by one man.  The two of them working together successfully took on a number of threats to Britain before a predictable falling out ended their partnership.

Snyder wants us to see the parallels between Alfred’s overseer and his new partner alongside Alfred and Batman’s own relationship and get us to wonder if the butler really has done right by the person who is effectively his son over the years.  The problem with all this is that the answer was always going to be, “Yes, of course he has,” and the writer doesn’t really find an interesting way of getting there. Alfred’s overseer is the predictably ruthless ends-justify-the-means-type and nothing like the caring butler we’ve been reading about for decades.  Asking us to find some parallels that justify Alfred’s worries of if he’s enabled Bruce rather than helped him just doesn’t work.

That’s even before we get to the new partner Alfred’s overseer is working with here.  This masked and armored character is presented as a suitably formidable threat and a potential identity that makes a lot of sense.  Except that identity is presented in such an obvious manner that you know there has to be a twist coming. When that twist finally arrives, it’s… honestly kind of dumb.  I can understand why this particular character was cloned, but it just feels silly to have an evil version of them running around the DCU now. Snyder probably thinks he’s introducing a cool new Bat-villain to the canon with direct ties to the character himself.  I see this character as either never being mentioned again or being killed off to further another story in his return appearance.

Though the core story of this volume is something of a mess, there are still a lot of little things about it that do work.  Like the opening car chase, the exact nature of how Batman’s impersonation of Hush goes wrong, his encounter with the villains after being rescued from the alligators, and Alfred’s take on the “Always be yourself unless you can be Batman” saying.  Snyder also does a good job of getting inside Alfred’s head over the course of the volume. His description of the troubled relationship he had with his father and how he thinks of Bruce as his own son at this point are both well-reasoned and affecting.  It’s a shame that we couldn’t have had all this in a better story.

“The First Ally” also has strong art from Rafael Albuquerque going for it as well.  The artist has adopted a rough, painted style in recent years and it works really well here.  We get lots of energy from the action scenes as Albuquerque manages to pitch them in a way that feels like they’re going to spiral out of control at any second.  He also gives the conversational scenes the appropriate sense of comfort or drama as the scene calls for it. I should also mention that Albuquerque’s painted approach wouldn’t work as well without the dynamic work of colorist Jordie Bellaire who frequently goes for the unconventional coloring choice in a scene and always makes it work.

This volume is rounded out by the story “Killers-in-Law” written by Albuquerque and another Rafael, Scavone.  Originally published in five eight-page parts as the back-up story to the issues collected here, it tells us about the time that Batman impersonated a Russian street fighter in order to infiltrate an organized crime syndicate he was invited to be a part of back in his homeland.  Why has Batman done this? This syndicate, the Myasnik Family, is preparing a shipment of weapons to Gotham in order to profit off of a gang war, and our hero is going to make sure that it never reaches his city.

Here’s where I’d like to say that this story outshined the main one, but “Killers-in-Law” is just okay.  Where “The First Ally” tried to add something to the Bat-mythos and failed, this 32-page story comes off as an extra-sized issue of “Batman” that was originally broken up into five parts.  There’s a minor bit of novelty in setting the story in Russia, but it’s standard issue in every other regard. From the generic henchmen that Batman fights to the predictable ruthlessness of Princess Vik, daughter of the Myasnik Family’s ringleader, and the wholly unsurprising revelation that her father wasn’t the man she thought he was.  The story does feature some great moody artwork from Sebastian Fiumara which will hopefully get him work on other “Batman” titles illustrating better stories than this one.

It’s not a complete washout, but “The First Ally” is the weakest “Batman” story I’ve read from Snyder.  There’s some fun to be had but his efforts to build a story out of some new bits of Alfred’s backstory that he invented don’t work out in the end.  It also doesn’t begin to overcome my irritation at the fact that Snyder and Albuquerque are working together again on something that isn’t “American Vampire.”  I know partnerships like theirs and their own creative impulses don’t mean that we were denied what I’m about to note, but I’d have rather had five more issues of “American Vampire” than the “Batman” story we got.