The issue of Batman DC didn't want you to see

[cyberghostface]

A little trivia bit: a while back DC had an event called "This issue: Batman dies" across the Bat-titles which basically amounted to villains fantasizing about killing the Dark Knight. The issue of Gotham Knights was told from the perspective of Victor Zsasz but the issue was pulled at the last minute because it was too gory. Recently the artist posted some of the pages on his Facebook here.

Comments

[icon_uk]

Well, whilst the art is decent, this is one I'd have left on the shelf without a qualm.

The "In this issue Batman dies..." theme was in most cases a bit of an OTT fantasy of the villain.

This highlights that Zsasz is such a shallow character (he's a remorseless, emotionless mass-murderer and that's really all there is too him) that you can't really have an OTT story with him in it, so it's just... more generic mass-murder.

[doctor_spanky]

This is why the murder-clown version of Joker is so deeply uninteresting. Snyder's whole face-removing arc is one of the dumbest things I've read. Not to be a total h8r, but it said nothing new or interesting about the characters or the genre (and it certainly says nothing about, y'know, real life), and it was too unpleasant to be any fun.

It's as ridiculous and silly as the 60s Batman show, but without any stabilizing morality or joy. Really hoping his run doesn't last much longer.

Sorry, all the poison's out now. I'm not a Snyder fan, or a fan of all these self-serious grimdark comics that seem to be so popular nowadays. Don't get me started on Hickman's Avengers and it's pretentious turgid cosmic nonsense. Ok now all the poison's out.

[espanolbot]

The face-removing part isn't something Snyder thought up, from what I read, more something done in a different Batman book that he was kind of stuck with.

The actual Death of the Family story I enjoyed, as it seemed to emphasise how smart the Joker was over just killing people, though I much prefered the Owls and Year Zero storylines.

[icon_uk]

There's "The Joker's smart" and there's "derailing every other Bat title for two months (plus a month of follow up) for a crappy one-gag pay off which wasn't even funny and shouldn't have needed a single issue between them to cover"

[mrstatham]

Which, to be fair, is more of a problem with editorial pushing for these crossovers. When Snyder essentially dealt with the rest of the Family in a couple of pages prior to the finale, I thought that would have been just fine - because that didn't really say 'Joker himself is everywhere at once', more 'Joker's really thought this one through'.

But.. Yeah. None of the crossover issues were really justified at all.

[mrstatham]

Snyder supposedly agreed to the face-removing, although how much of that is editorial pushing him to be the face of the Batman line is difficult to say, but there was some confusion over who thought what up, but... To me, it seems like Snyder got saddled with it, frankly. He did his best to spin it as a 'look how ridiculous this is that I'M wearing a mask, just like you, Batssssss' in-story, but the complete lack of focus for it just suggests that, again, it wasn't his idea.

[lego_joker]

High-five, man. You've said everything I've always wanted to say about both Snyder and today's Joker.