The Batman Who Laughs #6 - DC Comics

THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS #6, August 2019

Having endured Scott Snyder’s plodding plot for Issue Six of “The Batman Who Laughs”, it is hard not to imagine most of this comic’s 98,535 readers wondering just how the New Yorker managed to somehow convince “DC Comics” to expand this limited series “to seven issues in length.” Indeed, considering the laboriously drawn out nature of the titular character’s meeting with Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego throughout this badly bloated twenty-four-page periodical, it’s difficult to even see just why the Eisner Award winner himself felt he wouldn’t “be able to squeeze in everything we needed to in an oversized” final edition.

For starters, the entire opening quarter of this book could have been completely omitted without arguably hampering its storytelling whatsoever. Of course, there is an element of interest generated by an insight into an alternative Gotham where the city’s services have been privatised by its resident billionaire to the point where the elderly, wheelchair bound “B.A.T. Man” owns its police force, education and sanitation departments. But, considering that the heavily-moustached “man who buys all things” is all too easily saved from the assassin’s bullet by the Dark Knight teleporting him away from his public award ceremony, the entire sequence seems to have been penned just to fill in the time it takes for Jim Gordon and his son to access the Bat Cave’s Armoury; “That… Is a lot of batarang guns.”

Equally as unenthralling is the aforementioned confrontation between the Caped Crusader and his “evil counterpart” outside Wayne Manor, which persistently intrudes upon the much more pulse-pounding battle between the metropolis’ batsuit-wearing Commissioner and the Grim Knight. Presumably pencilled by Mark “Jock” Simpson to depict some sort of hallucinogenic aspect to the long awaited bout of fisticuffs, the artist’s lightning-lashed layouts seem to take an eternity to illustrate even the simplest of blows, and decidedly smack of the British cartoonist desperately trying to pad out this publication’s panels with as many overblown drawings of Batman prevaricating as he can muster.

Infinitely more engaging, is Gordon’s desperate attempt to incapacitate “the deadliest man alive” and the emotional conflict these sense-shattering shenanigans create when it becomes clear that the policeman’s adult son, James, is probably going to have to embrace his psychopathic urges in order to help win the day. Packed full of pathos for the struggling mass-murderer’s father, the pacing of the ex-Marine’s battle against “a version of Bruce where Joe Chill dropped his gun and Bruce used the gun on him”, is debatably perfect, as it increasingly generates a palpable mounting tension between both the two combatants, as well as Barbara's onlooking older brother.

The regular cover art of "THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS" No. 6 by Jock