The Batman Who Laughs #1 - DC Comics

THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS #1, February 2019

Announced at the San Diego Comic Convention in July 2018, this opening instalment to Scott Snyder’s six-issue mini-series undoubtedly captures the attention straight from the ‘get-go’ with its thrill-a-second opening featuring the seldom seen Bat-Raptor racing against a convoy of rowhouse-carrying flatbed trucks along one of Gotham City’s arterial freeways. In fact, this action sequence’s frantically-sketched panels, tightly packed full of heavy moving freight and the squeal of burning tyres, is arguably demonstrative of the Caped Crusader at his very best, hurling a lethal barrage of batarangs one moment, and cushioning a well-timed leap onto a fast-moving vehicle with the body of a hapless felon in the next.

Unfortunately for this comic’s readers however, this sense-shattering flurry of activity is disappointingly as good as the New York author’s narrative gets once Batman discovers the corpse of a Bruce Wayne duplicate which was secretly being smuggled out of the metropolis “to be hacked up” and Arkham Asylum is invaded by this book’s terrifying titular character. True, Jock’s marvellously pencilled massacre of numerous outmatched guards within the corridors of the criminally insane by the Grim Knight, as well as the Joker’s subsequent cold-blooded brutal murder at the hands of the Dark Multiverse’s most “insatiable villain”, undeniably provides this slightly 'over-sized' publication with a second injection of pulse-pounding positivity. Yet sadly, the “DC Comics writer extraordinaire” soon snatches away any shock caused by so traumatising a scene by quickly revealing that it was actually one of the Clown Prince of Crime’s Slapstick Men who received the deadly pick-axe to the head and not the chemically-bleached criminal himself.

Similarly as dissatisfying is this twenty-six page periodical’s conclusion, which almost seems to have been crowbarred in to its already near bursting covers simply to provide Snyder’s story with a suitably thrilling cliff-hanger. For despite only recently being confined to an Arkham cell, the Eagle Award-winner would have his audience believe that somehow the Joker “knew what was coming for him”, so not only managed to conveniently escape his captivity by having a duped decoy replace him, but also arrange for his patsy to undergo enough name changes so as to lead Batman to both an old Gotham Comedy Club and then eventually back to the Bat Cave where his greatest nemesis was waiting for him on the other side of its underground waterway security systems; “Now, now, Jeeves… I’m supposed to say Knock Knock first.”

Writer: Scott Snyder, Artist: Jock, and Colors: David Baron