Batman: The Winning Card
He may have had an 85-issue run on “Batman” proper and a twelve-issue follow-up on top of that, but it seems that Tom King just can’t quit the Dark Knight. In addition to the “Killing Time” caper and the “Penguin” series, the writer and his frequent artistic collaborator, Mitch Gerads, serialized this four part story in the “Brave and the Bold” anthology series. It’s basically an updating of a familiar story in the Bat-mythos: The first time Batman took on the Joker.
The setup is pretty simple as socialites are being picked off by a grinning madman, while random families are being murdered at the same time. Nobody knows how, why, or even if these two things are connected, but Batman is going to find out. Except that while he swore to protect the city from itself, this represents a new kind of crime that he wasn’t prepared for. Is it something he’s even capable of doing at this point in his career?
King’s take on the characters here is an interesting one that’s consistent with what he’s done with them in his previous stories. Both Batman and the Joker are insane, but they each offer something to the other that makes them more than what they could be. In the Joker, Batman sees where insanity, even his productive version of dressing up like a bat each night to fight crime, can lead to and he has to strive to be better. In Batman, the Joker sees someone who isn’t cowed by his actions and is actually capable of challenging him in his schemes. As well as imparting just what a good joke is, and it’s something where the punchline isn’t, “What’s a tery?”
If you’re onboard with that school of thinking then you’ll likely enjoy this story as well. It’s also full of King’s usual writerly tics for better and for worse. The nine-panel grids, the repetition of dialogue and motifs are all here; though, this time around it allows for some amusingly morbid quips from the Joker (“My fiancee told me she wanted to have a fairytale marriage. […] So I dressed her in my grandma’s clothes and fed her to a wolf.”). Gerads provides supremely moody art throughout, imbuing even the daytime scenes with a certain level of ominousness. His Joker is also an impressively creepy design, displaying implacable menace at all times except for one key moment.
Sometimes the story can feel like it’s reaching for a level of meaningfulness that it can’t quite grasp, and those moments make me appreciate at least one version of this story that has come before. It also doesn’t quite nail the “He said the thing!” moment involving its title as well as it thinks it does. Still, “The Winning Card” is an interesting take on this familiar story and I can at least appreciate the creators’ attempts to try something new with it. Plus, even with the writer’s extensive history with Batman, this also comes off as something that can be read and even enjoyed independent of it.