Batman #135 // Review
Bruce Wayne has decided that he needs electroshock therapy. And he’s going to administer it himself. What the hell...he IS in Arkham Asylum, after all. It’s not what it sounds like, though. He’s not giving himself electroconvulsive therapy. He’s lost his right hand, and he’s losing a lot of blood. So he’s repurposing an old ECT machine to cauterize the wound. Things have gotten pretty bad for Wayne in Batman #135. The Batman series reaches its 800th legacy issue in a story written by Chip Zdarsky. The art is rendered by pencillers Mike Hawthorne, Jorge Jiménez, and Mikel Janín. Adriano Di Benedetto handles the ink. Romulo Fajardo Jr. brings color to the page.
After the crude electrocauterization, Bruce has a nifty spiked batclub on the end of his right arm. Gotham City is overrun by leather-winged man-bats that have been unleashed by Red Hood. The villain isn’t having a very good time. He knows that Batman is after him. On another Earth in a parallel universe, Red Hood is the Joker. He’s having something of an inner crisis as a Batman suddenly appears to deal with him and his darkness. Bruce Wayne must face who he is if he is to defeat the threat to another Gotham City in another universe.
And things just get weird from there. The big 800th issue anniversary of the Batman comic book features cameos by many different Bruces...from Michael Keaton to Adam West to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight to the old guy in Kingdom Come. See: Batman is chasing the Joker across time and space, and...it really seems like Zdarsky’s trying to do a somewhat lame “Into the Batverse” type of thing with the anniversary issue, and it doesn’t work. Zdarsky had been going in a bit of an intriguing direction early on, but...it loses its momentum once things get wacky.
The art team manages a pretty tight hold on the solemnity and grim darkness of the initial parallel universe that Batman is in. It’s nice and generally well-executed. The real razzle-dazzle of the visuals in this issue comes as Batman tumbles through a variety of different parallel universes, including that of the 1960s TV show and Tim Burton’s art direction on the 1989 film. (Batman runs into the Keaton Batman right after the final scene of the movie.) The fidelity to the variety of art styles and formats makes for a fun tumble through the history of one of the most storied characters in all of pop fiction.
As fun as it is to see everything tumble through at the end of the issue, Zdarsky and company take a hard turn when everything looks like it will resolve somewhere around Page 26. Really, they could have ended it there, and it would have been a solid glance into drama with Batman. Though the art in the final pages is impressive, it scarcely justifies ruining the ending of an otherwise interesting and reflective drama.
