Batman: Detective Comics vol. 7 — Batmen Eternal

Guess what?  I did sell my copies of James Tynion IV’s run on “Detective Comics” and picked up this volume on a digital sale.  I’m only reviewing it now because morbid curiosity and $4 will only get you a place in my digital library.  If you want me to actually read the concluding volume of a run I had followed up to its penultimate chapter, that requires a special set of circumstances.  Such as, I dunno… having a global pandemic cause the majority of the comics industry to cease publication and then get me to look through my Kindle to see what new thing I can write about.  On Monday, “Batmen Eternal’s” number finally came up.

Having read it, I can say that selling my physical copies of the previous six volumes wasn’t a mistake.  The finale to Tynion’s run kicks off with “The Trial of Batwoman,” as Batman calls his closest allies together to decide what to do after Batwoman killed Clayface.  Except that the trial is more about how Batman feels rather than anything Batwoman did, and in light of recent events she’s decided to hook back up with her father and his paramilitary sci-fi organization the Colony with an eye towards recruiting Luke Fox and Jean-Paul Valley to her side.  Then there’s Tim Drake who’s, after dealing with enough trauma over this run already, gets to deal with some more after the Colony’s former IT guy, Ulysses Armstrong, comes to him with a plan to give him everything he’s ever wanted.

I was about to use the phrase “shouldn’t surprise anyone” to describe the real aims of Ulysses’ plan, but that’s basically been the theme of Tynion’s run.  There has been exactly one good surprise throughout these seven volumes: When Batman realized he’d been tricked by Ra’s Al Ghul about the League of Shadows.  Everything else has played out according to the familiar superhero playbook. Right down to this volume’s conclusion where everyone, including Batman, puts aside their differences to take down a common enemy.  That this enemy is using technology from the future that’s also a variation on one of Jack Kirby’s crazier ideas doesn’t make it any more interesting.  

The same goes for the idea of a team book made up entirely of Bat-people.  Batman is a part of the Justice League and he’s run teams like the Outsiders before, but there’s never been an ensemble Bat-title where the entire team is made up of people who share his symbol.  I’m surprised that no one has tried to make a go of it before Tynion gave it his shot. Writers seem fond of repeating the idea that “Batman is never alone” for catharsis at the end of storylines where he’s done his best to push everyone away.  If nothing else, it was nice to see Tynion deliver a story that didn’t treat this fact as some great revelation about the character. It would’ve been better if this story had an ounce of surprise, or a villain that was more than just intensely annoying.

Sometimes it’s possible for a story to survive on the strength of a good idea.  In those cases it’s because the idea just has to support some short-form medium:  a short prose story or novella, an episode of a TV show, or a single movie. Stretching out the idea of a Batman team book over the course of seven volumes was something that still needed lots of good stories to support it.  What it didn’t need were stories that picked apart the conventions of the superhero genre that left the villains go unpunished. Or consistently delivered art that could be described as competent or unobtrusively workmanlike more often than not — which is as true here as it has been in previous volumes.  As it stands now, the idea of a Bat-person team book still stands as a good idea that’s waiting for justice to be done to it.