Batman #134 // Review
Bruce is in a familiar place. He’s in Gotham City. Unfortunately, this Gotham City is completely different from the one he’s spent his life defending. Now, all he has to go on are cage instincts and the hope that everything is similar enough for him to save a nightmare of the city he loves in Batman #134. Writer Chip Zdarsky continues to plunge the detective into a skewed world with the aid of penciler Mike Hawthorne, inker Miguel Mendonca, and colorist Adriano Di Benedetto. The dark parallel universe trope may have been done to death over the decades, but Zdarsky finds some novelty in it one more time.
There’s a madman named Red Mask who is looking to infect the whole city with a poison gas that could lead to madness for everyone. Batman is there to try to stop him, but there are some powerful opponents there who are going to make matters quite difficult. He may be on the wrong Earth, but that could work to Batman’s advantage, as he is up against people he knows from another life who don’t know him at all. Hopefully, their weaknesses aren’t that different from the ones they have on Bruce’s Earth.
Zdarsky has been setting up the showdown for a while. It’s an intriguing idea to throw a detective in a position where his knowledge may be imperfect. The nightmare-altered versions of very familiar characters don’t come across as being particularly interesting. However, Zdarsky does a good job of illustrating the harshness of the world in which Bruce finds himself by showing how it has treated people like Barry, Lex, and Clark. Zdarsky may not be exploring incredibly original territory, but it’s a fun idea to have a detective thrust into a world that’s almost but not quite the one that they’ve mastered the knowledge of. It’d be like putting Sherlock Holmes in a late 19th-century fantasy steampunk London populated by elves and goblins. He’d know some of the basics, but so much of the culture would be lost to him, placing him solidly OUTSIDE of his area of expertise. Zdarsky manages this on some level with Batman on the Gotham City of an alternate Earth.
Grey. There’s lots of grey in the issue. Lots of cold, institutional backgrounds and various forms of incarceration. It’s a pretty dismal setting. Hawthorne and company aren’t really offered much of an opportunity to provide any kind of counterpoint to the visual bleakness of the setting. The grim drama dominates the page, punctuated as it is by the occasional outburst of explosive violence. The action can feel compellingly brutal at times, but on the whole, this is a journey into a dense and stuffy kind of darkness. The darkness is OK and everything. It would be nice to have something lurking in animate shadows that would draw the reader in beyond the bleakness.
It is difficult to imagine the story continuing for much longer the way it is. It certainly seems to be reaching its climax. Bruce is likely to return home at some point in the next couple of months. The Earth he is on is not without its charm. It would take a longer walk in and amidst the darkness to truly find something worth exploring, though. There have been far too many brushes with dystopian mutations of familiar worlds in comic books over the years. Zdarsky would need to spend more time in this world for it to provide a greater depth of insight.
