Our Bruce, wearing the Dark Knight Return's outfit and '66's utility belt, is a wild, wild thing indeed. Also, the whole issue of his missing hand was resolved pretty easily--a little too easily, if you ask me. A little advanced surgery and a new bionic hand. I wonder how long this will last once he gets home--if he'll hang on to it, if it'll self-destruct or be destroyed, or if he'll get it replaced by a human hand/healing/who knows what?
Then again, Arthur made it -how- long with a harpoon hand?
To be honest, the idea of our Bruce meeting all those other variants was a nice idea, but it felt a little too revolving door for me--a hi-and-bye sequence of all sorts of familiar variants (DKR, '66, BTAS, Beyond, Golden Age, Silver Age, etc) but we didn't really get a -story- out of most of those encounters, which is a shame when you consider how -different- some of them are from "prime" Batman.
(And let's face it, the whole multiversal thing is a -tiny- bit played out at this point with everyone getting in on the act, so this doesn't even have the same sort of emotional impact it would have in a different time. I'm not saying we needed to stretch this out with like, an issue for every Bat-variant, or anything like that, but it was like pinball with the bouncing around and the mere hinting at what might have happened.)
A fun story, but was it really everything it could have been? Was it suitably epic?
Eh, if everything is epic, nothing is. I think this was epic enough, personally.
The idea that he met '66 Batman and realized that was a Bruce who was more prepared than even he was... that was a pretty gold star moment. Worth the price of admission, IMO.
I'm kinda with you. I'm only so interested in yet another "Character X meets every multiversal variant of themself," and we're getting this literally the same week as Sabretooth doing the same thing. Plus there's the Spider-Verse...Jon Kent is meeting variant versions of his dad...Jessica Jones did The Variants a little while back... And of all those, this seems like the most self-congratulatory of the lot.
Like, yes, okay, it's always nice to see Adam West Batman and Crotchety Old Bruce with Terry McGinnis. And, uh, it's OFTEN nice to see DKR Batman. But it's a little weird to argue that every Batman in every universe is just an absolute peach of a guy ("I always see Batman, always fighting, never giving up") when we had the Batman Who Laughs and his entire dark universe of evil Batmen just a writer or two ago.
Like, is it really impossible to imagine a Batman who sucks? Now I kind of want to see a Batman who's never fighting, always giving up. Or a Batman who's a cricketer. Or...most radical of all...a Batman who's never heard of the Joker and doesn't need to.
Zdarsky clearly wants to say profound things about the characters, and I'm glad he's willing to swing for the fences. But it feels like the fanservice is leading the philosophizing here, rather than the other way around.
And meanwhile we're about to get another round of -Venomverse- which is apparently a thing. Not too long after Spider-Gwen did it, while she's now meeting mashups of herself with villains. And there was the Miles multiverse adventure. And all of these somehow separate from the Spiderverse stories.
DC practically wallowed in this trope during the Death Metal and Dark Crisis, etc. Of course, they invented multiverse crossovers.
I'm not saying I don't like it, because I do, and nostalgia's a hell of a drug when you can invoke a dozen different variants on a beloved property that are callbacks to movies, tv, games, comics, animation, but the intent here was clearly for an epic celebration of the character to mark a milestone issue and maybe a few -less- versions and a little -more- story for each would have been cool.
I mean, Bruce doesn't stop and go "what the fuck HAPPENED to you?" when he meets DKR. He doesn't wonder what happened to Kingdom Come Batman. He doesn't marvel at how innocent '66 is by comparison. We get a single brief scene with Movie Batman. And so forth. I'd rather see them have interactions that really reflect how they're the same, but why they're different, and how they view each other as a result. "Hi and bye" is indeed fanservice where we go "I understand that reference!" without exploring what it -means- on a deeper level.
Am I asking too much? Of some writers, yeah. But Zdarsky's always struck me as the sort of writer who could make it work because he can get characters on an emotional level.
the nature of the Dark Multiverse seemed to be that it barely existed. Like those possibilities came into existence because they were real, but they were so unstable they collapsed int theselves
well, it actually references Batmen who've never heard of the Joker. In those realities Red Mask causes them to come into existence
A Batman who sucks would stop being Batman, so that's out
The weird thing is that the fighting new Jokers line seems to come in what I'm guessing is Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (given the Mike Mignola-esque art style and the alt-Batman's costume design in that panel) when the original Gaslight comic did reference their version of the Joker when Bruce goes to meet Theodore Roosevelt...I mean, James Gordon.
And then I think he was shown again in that multiverse crossover with the Earth-S Shazam family in...Convergence, I think, along with other Gaslight takes on classic Batman villains.
If I buy this issue alone, am I going to get enough out of it? Or do I need to have read the last six months' worth of Bat books beforehand to follow it?
I'm mostly interested in the crossover stuff and maybe the resolution, btw.
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Then again, Arthur made it -how- long with a harpoon hand?
To be honest, the idea of our Bruce meeting all those other variants was a nice idea, but it felt a little too revolving door for me--a hi-and-bye sequence of all sorts of familiar variants (DKR, '66, BTAS, Beyond, Golden Age, Silver Age, etc) but we didn't really get a -story- out of most of those encounters, which is a shame when you consider how -different- some of them are from "prime" Batman.
(And let's face it, the whole multiversal thing is a -tiny- bit played out at this point with everyone getting in on the act, so this doesn't even have the same sort of emotional impact it would have in a different time. I'm not saying we needed to stretch this out with like, an issue for every Bat-variant, or anything like that, but it was like pinball with the bouncing around and the mere hinting at what might have happened.)
A fun story, but was it really everything it could have been? Was it suitably epic?
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The idea that he met '66 Batman and realized that was a Bruce who was more prepared than even he was... that was a pretty gold star moment. Worth the price of admission, IMO.
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Like, yes, okay, it's always nice to see Adam West Batman and Crotchety Old Bruce with Terry McGinnis. And, uh, it's OFTEN nice to see DKR Batman. But it's a little weird to argue that every Batman in every universe is just an absolute peach of a guy ("I always see Batman, always fighting, never giving up") when we had the Batman Who Laughs and his entire dark universe of evil Batmen just a writer or two ago.
Like, is it really impossible to imagine a Batman who sucks? Now I kind of want to see a Batman who's never fighting, always giving up. Or a Batman who's a cricketer. Or...most radical of all...a Batman who's never heard of the Joker and doesn't need to.
Zdarsky clearly wants to say profound things about the characters, and I'm glad he's willing to swing for the fences. But it feels like the fanservice is leading the philosophizing here, rather than the other way around.
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DC practically wallowed in this trope during the Death Metal and Dark Crisis, etc. Of course, they invented multiverse crossovers.
I'm not saying I don't like it, because I do, and nostalgia's a hell of a drug when you can invoke a dozen different variants on a beloved property that are callbacks to movies, tv, games, comics, animation, but the intent here was clearly for an epic celebration of the character to mark a milestone issue and maybe a few -less- versions and a little -more- story for each would have been cool.
I mean, Bruce doesn't stop and go "what the fuck HAPPENED to you?" when he meets DKR. He doesn't wonder what happened to Kingdom Come Batman. He doesn't marvel at how innocent '66 is by comparison. We get a single brief scene with Movie Batman. And so forth. I'd rather see them have interactions that really reflect how they're the same, but why they're different, and how they view each other as a result. "Hi and bye" is indeed fanservice where we go "I understand that reference!" without exploring what it -means- on a deeper level.
Am I asking too much? Of some writers, yeah. But Zdarsky's always struck me as the sort of writer who could make it work because he can get characters on an emotional level.
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well, it actually references Batmen who've never heard of the Joker. In those realities Red Mask causes them to come into existence
A Batman who sucks would stop being Batman, so that's out
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And then I think he was shown again in that multiverse crossover with the Earth-S Shazam family in...Convergence, I think, along with other Gaslight takes on classic Batman villains.
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What ingredients does Adam West Batman put in that thing?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1GenfKR9pk
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But I do absolutely love how the plot denounces the whole 'Batman created Joker' and 'Killing Joker solves everything'.
So glad someone finally had the balls to write such a story.
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I'm mostly interested in the crossover stuff and maybe the resolution, btw.
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