Batman & The Joker: The Deadly Duo #5 // Review
Bruce returns to the scene of a crime. It was some time ago. There was a wedding. The Joker crashed. So did the church. Now Bruce finds himself forced to work with the maniac if he is to save the life of Jim Gordon...who is being held hostage by another maniac altogether. (Mental health is kind of an issue in Gotham City.) Writer Marc Silvestri continues a charmingly dark look into the iconic foes and the city they inhabit in Batman & The Joker: The Deadly Duo #5. Artist Arif Prianto delivers an appealingly shadowy darkness to the page that never totally embraces the full horror of Silvestri’s script.
Batgirl wants to know where Jim Gordon is. She’s going to beat the hell out of him until he tells her. She might not be particularly concerned for his well-being. (Batgirl and the Joker have kind of a history. It’s not pretty.) Batman stops her just short of doing something she might regret. Batman’s got a lead deep beneath the streets of Gotham City, and he will need the Joker’s help if he’s going to save the life of one of his oldest friends. He’s going straight into the jaws of madness, and he’s going to need someone who knows his way around that landscape...
More than just diving further into the psyche of the two title characters (and a few others), Silvestri is taking a deep look at some of the history of Gotham City. Batman’s narration about a phantom subway network deep beneath the city is actually fun. Bruce Wayne would have to know a tremendous amount about every major public works project in the history of the city, and it’s a lot of interest to get a little tour of the city courtesy of Batman. Beyond that, the Joker actually seems pretty dull in this particular issue, but his interaction with Batgirl does give him a bit of appeal.
Prianto manages to make a grey and blue Batman costume look suitably badass. The powerful features below the mask keep him looking cool throughout the issue, but the combat between Joker and Batgirl is easily the high point of the physical action of the issue. Prianto is doing a pretty good job of bringing specific nuances of Gotham City to the page, but the actual horror of what’s going on deep under the streets of Gotham isn’t given quite the level of ghoulish horror that it needs to really hit the reader. The deeper, more sinister end of the darkness is lost to Prianto.
Silvestri’s work makes good use of one of the more iconic cities in the DC Universe. It would be very, very cool to get a comprehensive tour of Gotham City between Batman and Bruce Wayne. The history of the subway system that Silvestri is managing in this issue is actually a lot of fun. The Gotham City of the DC Comics Universe has never had quite the grand tour that it’s really deserved, and a story spanning every major neighborhood would be captivating.
