The Batman Who Laughs #7 - DC Comics

THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS #7, September 2019

Featuring an utterly bizarre final confrontation between the Caped Crusader, his Earth-22 counterpart, a shotgun-wielding Alfred Pennyworth and an adolescent Bruce Wayne from yet another realm of the multiverse, Scott Snyder’s narrative for Issue Seven of “The Batman Who Laughs” arguably makes something of a mockery of the American author’s claim that this (extra) publication was “the best way to… give ourselves more room to really land it right.” For whilst the twenty-five page periodical certainly lives up to its promise of delivering the titular character a resounding defeat at the hands of his “brother”, as well as a gratuitously bloody demise to the Grim Knight, the New Yorker’s pedestrian-paced plot doesn’t debatably involve any events so overly complicated that they couldn’t easily have been contained within this mini-series’ originally conceived over-sized sixth instalment.

Indeed, this particular publication debatably runs out of steam before it is even halfway through, as the World’s Greatest Detective repeatedly smashes his spikily-dressed nemesis about the head with several stone grave markers the serum-infected vigilant just happens to find lying around, and James Gordon supposedly rescues his father from becoming the first of Gotham City’s inhabitants to embrace their “darkest selves.” However, rather than stop the story there the Eisner Award-winner instead insists on making this book’s long-suffering 88,012 readers frustratingly wade through some seriously padded out scenes, packed full of some of Snyder’s most gobbledegook-laden, dialogue-heavy panels imaginable; “That demon, what he says is that there is no meaning in your actions, therefore the only meaningful act is to win. He is the fear that we’re both right, Joker and I.”

Mark “Jock” Simpson’s layouts also appear to succumb to this all-pervading, palpable desire to just stuff the misguided magazine with as many meaningless meanderings as possible, with his pencilling of the Batman Who Laughs proving especially undisciplined and rushed. Admittedly, the British cartoonist does imbue the occasional sketch with a noticeable nice touch, such as when Batman uses Martha Wayne’s headstone to batter his ghoulish-looking opponent to the ground. But once the action is over, and this comic is devoid of any need to continue, the artist simply begins producing a seemingly endless production line of debatably poorly-drawn pictures consisting of a badly-bandaged Bruce, and an all-forgiving Commissioner Gordon.

The regular cover art of "THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS" No. 7 by Jock

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

The Batman Who Laughs #5 - DC Comics

THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS #5, July 2019

Described by the “SyFy Wire” website as “Scott Snyder's Batman opus”, this twenty-six page periodical probably surprised many of its 108,677 readers in May 2019, due to its disconcerting desire to depict the Dark Knight as a decidedly deranged costumed vigilante who seemingly has no issue beheading a freshly-deceased corpse, just so he can scare the wits out of a posse of trigger-happy police officers; “I will come… for you and everyone you love and I will make what happened to this Bruce Wayne here look like a damned mercy.” Unnervingly however, such barbaric savagery on behalf of the Caped Crusader doesn’t end there either with the New Yorker’s narrative supposedly showing the super-hero subsequently succumbing to his inadvertent infection of Joker serum and battering an already badly-bruised Jim Gordon before the Commissioner can stop him turning Gotham City over to his evil counterpart.

Mercifully, such perplexing plot developments are though interlaced with a couple of genuinely pulse-pounding sequences including an intriguing consultation between this comic’s titular character and the nefarious Court of Owls. Wonderfully atmospheric, as the secret society judge the macabre super-villain from the supposed safety of their ornate auditorium, this hearing genuinely plays out like a black comedy as a wheelchair bound “youngling” coldly sentences the leather-clad hybrid to death, and then all too quickly discovers that her suggestion that the Talons “take your head… to make it a lamp” is a little presumptuous.

This surprising show of prodigious penmanship by Snyder proves particularly poignant once this book’s audience realise that the adolescent socialite’s desire to have “a night light for my room” is the least of the girl’s worries as the Batman Who Laughs murders everyone around them, courtesy of some well-placed bombs, and then deftly kicks the sick child into the fatal waters of Gotham River. So surreal a mass-murder is incredibly impactive, and contrasts nicely to the much more dynamically-paced simultaneously-timed flight of Gordon from three of the Grim Knight’s flesh-chomping ‘hounds’ through the metropolis’ underground waterways.

Outwardly destined to die at the hands of his sons from an alternate universe, this breath-taking swim for survival is as frantic as it is horrifying, and owes a great debt to Mark “Jock” Simpson’s scratchy pencils, which imbues its fleeing figures with an inhuman quality all of their own. In addition, the British cartoonist, “best known for his work in 2000 AD”, arguably adds an extra element of ferocity to the blood-crazed Robins simply by providing the trio with such razor-sharp teeth…

The regular cover art of "THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS" No. 5 by Jock

The Batman Who Laughs #4 - DC Comics

THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS #4, June 2019

Despite being the third best-selling comic of April 2019, at least according to “Diamond Comic Distributors”, this twenty-four page periodical probably didn’t go down all that well with its 103,645 strong audience, considering Scott Snyder starts the book off with Batman and his lifelong father-figure, Alfred Pennyworth, going toe-to-toe with one another deep inside the Bat Cave. In fact, as this publication’s highlight is possibly watching a partially undressed Jim Gordon pitifully cry somewhat hysterically as his fingers are bitten by a trio of fiendishly-fanged Robins, it is hard to correlate or recognise anything within the New Yorker’s frustratingly choppy narrative which could be associated with the Dark Knight’s ever-enduring success over the past eight decades; “No! Stay away! Please Sob Stop! Someone help me!”

Admittedly, Bruce Wayne’s agitated alter-ego is clearly in something of a deranged state, courtesy of wearing a heavily-spiked visor forged “from the dark metal we stripped from Gotham”, whilst Gotham City’s Police Commissioner has just heard how an alternative version of himself died horribly by having a booby-trapped notebook with spring-loaded acid melt away his face. But even so it is hard to imagine either the Caped Crusader or the heavily-moustached former United States Marine behaving in such a cowardly fashion, especially when Mark “Jock” Simpson pencils Batman’s opponent so very clearly acting out of love for his misguided ‘son’.

Sadly, this impropriety with two of Bob Kane and Bill Fingers most recognisable creations doesn’t stop there either, as the Stan Lee Award winner even pens a bizarre “three hours prior” flashback sequence beneath Gotham at the Last Laugh Resource Compound, in which the masked vigilante is suddenly confronted by a badly injured Joker who utterly bizarrely just wants “to talk”, so as to wish his arch-nemesis good luck in the crime-fighter's upcoming battle against the Grim Knight and the Batman Who Laughs. The duo’s subsequent conversation as to whether the pair will be at war with one another forever, and whether there is a way to end their rivalry, has debatably been done before in Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s 1988 one-shot masterpiece “The Killing Joke”, so such an attempted re-tread of so iconic moment genuinely feels disingenuous of Snyder and Jock to their now legendary predecessors.

The regular cover art of "THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS" No. 4 by Jock

The Batman Who Laughs: The Grim Knight #1 - DC Comics

THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS: THE GRIM KNIGHT #1, April 2019

Crowbarred into the middle of the publication schedule for “DC Comics” six-issue miniseries “The Batman Who Laughs”, and reading like one of the Burbank-based publisher’s “Elseworlds” imprint stories, James Tynion IV and Scott Snyder’s “origin of the most dangerous Dark Knight of them all” is a terrific tale of a well-meaning person’s best intentions going horribly wrong once a distraught young boy crosses a deadly line and cold-bloodedly guns down Joe Chill immediately after the incompetent robber has murdered the lad’s parents right in front of his tear-stained eyes; “Shut up! Shut up and die.”

Of course, to begin with a Gotham City containing a billionaire like Bruce Wayne who is willing to shoot all of the metropolis’ most vilest villains dead, sounds like a recipe for its citizens to enjoy long, peaceful, prosperous and happy lives, especially when the “Angel of Death” dispatches all of the crime bosses like Falcone and Zucco, so subsequently “never faced the kind of colourful enemies the Batman of other worlds did.” But things swiftly deteriorate as the morose Caped Crusader simply decides “to start using lethal force indiscriminately to win” even against the metropolis’ Police Department, and in doing so additionally wipes out every inhabitant of both Blackgate and Arkham Asylum using “the finest arsenal Wayne money can buy”.

Faced with a Jim Gordon who is unwilling to stand by and watch his beloved municipal fall under the sway of a “globe-trotting… chief executive officer of a tech and weapons company”, Snyder’s “second-deadliest Batman” degenerates even further, to the point where he forcibly controls his own butler, Alfred Pennyworth, courtesy of an explosive device implanted in the old man’s neck, and seemingly executes any citizen spotted misbehaving via a death-dealing Wayne Enterprises satellite. Such a formidably determined dictator truly is the stuff of nightmares, and is so prodigiously penned, that it is easy to see just why the Eagle Award-winner was apprehensive about bringing this one-shot’s titular character in for “Dark Nights Metal” due to his worry that “the other evil Batman would pale in comparison to him.”

Interestingly, Eduardo Risso’s artwork also adds an extra element to the unsettling nature of this comic’s atmosphere by providing a mixture of pencilled and contrastingly painted panels throughout its twenty-eight pages. This decision to differentiate between the cold, calculating abduction of the police commissioner in the ‘real world’, with that of the Grim Knight’s much more colourful journey towards becoming a blood-drenched despot in his own reality, really does help emphasise the deeply-troubled anti-hero’s emotional state, especially towards the book’s conclusion when it seems clear Snyder’s creation has decided to kill Gordon having just relived his own defeat at the hands of an alternative version of the morally-strong moustached lawman.

The regular cover art of "THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS: THE GRIM KNIGHT" No. 1 by Jock

The Batman Who Laughs #3 - DC Comics

THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS #3, April 2019

Whilst Scott Snyder may well have intended “The Batman Who Laughs” “to be a stand-alone series where you can read it from start to finish without feeling like you need everything else”, the New Yorker’s script for “The Laughing House” most likely had any readers unfamiliar with James Worthington Gordon Junior scouring about looking for an explanation as to just why Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego would turn to the young man as his only hope to defeat the "Jokerized version of Batman who originated from the Dark Multiverse.” Indeed, despite the Commissioner alluding to all the security measures his bespectacled son must take so as to ensure the serial-killer maintains control of his psychopathic tendencies, it is difficult to believe that the Dark Knight’s only chance to succeed in this disappointing narrative is to force the remorseful youth’s personality back to when it was a murdering genius; “Look! At thirteen years old you were a legend! You had books, journals filled with routes, genius combinations!”

Equally as befuddling is “DC Comics” publicised belief that this twenty-four periodical starts to “fit together” all the pieces of its titular character’s plan, and the Burbank-based publisher’s promise that Oswald Cobblepot will play a prominent part in the sociopath’s schemes. True, the Penguin does provide one of the highlights of this comic when he goes “head-to-head with the darkest version of his mortal enemy” and watches his magnificent Iceberg Lounge get significantly torched in the process.

But all these pulse-pounding panels debatably depict is how lethal “the Bat Gimp” can be in close combat, as he surprisingly leaves the semi-conscious crime boss still alive following the cold-blooded murder of another alternative version of Bruce Wayne who apparently “actually ends up competing" with the Penguin to bring him down. Just how these senseless shenanigans progress The Batman Who Laughs’ scheme is unclear, unless the villain’s suggestion that the hapless Gotham City mobster “look into a guy who worked for you named Malone” is a galvanising clue of some kind..?

Quite possibly this book’s biggest problem though, is Mark "Jock" Simpson’s artwork which certainly makes its opening sequence involving James Gordon and his offspring appear as lifelessly flat as the cardboard boxes surrounding them in the store room. Disappointingly wooden-looking and consistently too dark, perhaps due to an overly-enthusiastic David Baron as colorist, even Batman’s highly-anticipated confrontation against the Grim Knight seemingly lacks the vitality a perusing bibliophile might expect from such two such well-matched adversaries…

The regular cover art of "THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS" No. 3 by Jock

The Batman Who Laughs #2 - DC Comics

THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS #2, March 2019

“After the shocking ending of issue one”, which saw the insane Joker calmly shoot himself in the heart with a backwards firing trick pistol, many within this mini-series’ audience probably felt that the Clown Prince of Crime was either finally dead or that at some point “DC Comics” were potentially going to acknowledge Scott Snyder’s storyline was a non-canon piece of fiction like those printed insider the Burbank-based publisher’s “Elseworlds” comics. Disconcertingly however, neither outcome would’ve been correct due to the New Yorker opening up this second instalment of "The Batman Who Laughs" with Jerry Robinson’s co-creation somewhat simply shrugging off so serious a mortal wound courtesy of Alfred Pennyworth providing a bit of suction here and a few stitches there; “It’s just a physical response. Most people gasp. I suppose it means he’ll live.”

This miraculous piece of surgery by “Bruce Wayne’s loyal and tireless butler” genuinely must have stretched most readers’ willing suspension of disbelief to its outermost limits. Yet it is simply the start in a long line of contrived plot developments which the Stan Lee Award-winner employs throughout this twenty-four page periodical, starting with Batman “using ever Joker toxin antidote we have” daily to stave off his transformation into The Batman Who Laughs for a week, and ending with Wayne Tower’s “final defence against any chemical or biological attack” being supposedly guarded by an elderly blind man who haplessly allows this book’s homicidal titular character to effortlessly stroll into the top secret facility and blow the entire building up.

Admittedly, this final action-packed sequence does provide artist Jock with ample opportunity to pencil the World's Greatest Detective literally slugging it out with his opposite number from the Dark Multiverse, and resultantly imbue this magazine with an all-too brief twinkling of exhilarating entertainment. But the breathless Caped Crusader’s surprising victory over his ghoulishly-garbed semi-conscious opponent is soon brought to a swift end when he is suddenly shot in the chest from a nearby high-rise roof-top by the Grim Knight, and any onlookers are arguably left wondering why the “alternate version of Batman who uses guns” waited until after his target has smashed into Wayne Tower before firing, when it would surely have been far more straightforward to just bring his man down whilst he was presumably slowly scaling up “the tallest [tower] in Gotham.”

The regular cover art of "THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS" No. 2 by Jock

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