I know that this kinda sucks on the face of it, but I really like the way Ennis writes Batman here as this snooty, disdainful rich guy waving his Great Detective dick in people's faces and sneering at his villains about how much they suck. A lot of Seto Kaiba energy going on here.
Obviously Ennis is writing him to be distinctly unlikeable, but I'd totally be down for him being portrayed like this more often instead of the teeth-gritting tough guy routine he usually has going on.
I'd much, much rather have the Batman who held a villainess' hand to comfort her as she died of a terminal illness. The Batman who is always offering criminals jobs and healthcare to help them reform. The Batman who got Harley a nice dress to encourage her after she failed her first attempt to leave her criminal past behind. The Batman who regularly visits Two-Face to play chess with him in the hopes that giving Harvey a bit of normal human contact will help him overcome his evil side.
I don't like the teeth gritting asshole either, but there is the third option of compassionate Batman too.
Not saying that Batman should be a 100% jerk. But if he is going to be a jerk I'd like it if he was more extra and true to his posh roots about it than dirty harry.
Given Batman's comment about this being the price to pay for all the fun and games, did Croc actually do anything truly terrible in this series which could lead to this being seen as some sort of fitting punishment, at all? Were there actually any fun and games to start with?
I may be reaching, but from everything I've remember Ennis saying before, in interviews or in his comics themselves, he sees Batman and his rogues gallery as a bunch of toffs having a fancy dress party where the lower classes of Gotham pay the price; Waylon pays the piper for the nastiness on display that's bad enough to bring in outside forces. A government that Ennis puts on pretty even ground against Batman in terms of their self-opinion and how they view the other as tiresome, mostly useless, and myopic, I noted. Heck, you could even say that Waylon was picked as the fall guy here for Batman's portrayal because of his various intersectionalities (regardless of how much Ennis has said he hates identity politics). If I were being generous to Ennis, instead of character assassinating Batman he is displaying his preference for retributive justice in his narratives and this is just how Croc gets his, but that feels like even more of a reach. If the stuff he read was from the 70s and 80s, he would definitely be basing his Batman portrayal in the international and government stuff that had Bruce Wayne working with the CIA overseas when he had to and saving Ronald Reagan's life and leaving an at least one opponent to die rather than let them go free.
"from everything I've remember Ennis saying before, in interviews or in his comics themselves, he sees Batman and his rogues gallery as a bunch of toffs having a fancy dress party where the lower classes of Gotham pay the price;"
Ah yes Garth Ennis, champion of the poor and downtrodden
That must be why he doesn't do a thing to help them in any meaningful way
And so our comic ends with a billionaire white man putting a black man in a cage and handing him over to people who are going to enslave and experiment on him and treat him as something less than human because he was born different and we're meant to see this as a good thing -_-
I didn't think anyone could write Batman in a way that made me utterly despise him more than Chuck Dixon could but Ennis really proved me wrong
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scans_daily2021-11-23 07:05 pm
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Obviously Ennis is writing him to be distinctly unlikeable, but I'd totally be down for him being portrayed like this more often instead of the teeth-gritting tough guy routine he usually has going on.
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I don't like the teeth gritting asshole either, but there is the third option of compassionate Batman too.
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It's the only version of the character I find interesting and likable
Batman as a psychotic rage filled borderline fascist who might as well be Judge Dredd at anthro-con? Not so much
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Ah yes Garth Ennis, champion of the poor and downtrodden
That must be why he doesn't do a thing to help them in any meaningful way
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I didn't think anyone could write Batman in a way that made me utterly despise him more than Chuck Dixon could but Ennis really proved me wrong
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