And Another One Down, And Another One Down: Animal Man, Batman: The Dark Knight Coming To A Close

It’s been a little more than two years since DC launched their New 52 reboot, and while DC still puts a big, “The New 52!” bullet on almost every cover of every book each month, there sure as hell aren’t 52 of those original release titles from September, 2011 still kicking around.

And now there will be two fewer. DC and book creators Jeff Lemire and Gregg Hurwitz have announced the cancellation of two original New 52 books, one surprising, one not (and yet still disappointing).

To wit: Animal Man and Batman: The Dark Knight will be concluding their runs in a few months, each with issue #29.

Everything Old Is Still Old: Joker’s Daughter / Batman: The Dark Knight 23.4 Review

Of just about any of DC’s VIllains’ Month titles, there has been an inordinate of interest in Joker’s Daughter – the thing came out the day before yesterday and copies with the 3D cover are going for $100 on eBay, for Christ’s sake. Even I couldn’t get a copy with the 3D cover at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me that if I insist upon screeching that I want to see crazy girls in 3D that I do it outside where the police can hear me.

So the obvious question is whether the comic book is actually worth the interest. Sure, a lot of the demand seems to be based on the fact that DC egregiously underestimated the number of people who wanted this book with the 3D cover, Which is fine, and a prime example of the free market and supply and demand in action, but in no way addresses whether the book is actually worth reading or not: after all, 20 years ago, Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 with the polybagged chromium cover was going for hundreds of dollars for the same reason, but a lack of supply still couldn’t make that book anything but a pile of shit by a writer who gave us a legitimate hint by repeatedly showing readers the word “doom” in big letters.

Well, having a regular old 2D copy means that I can actually open and read the book, and see what’s going on on the inside. And what’s going on in there is… weird. It is supervillain origin story as goth cautionary take by way of indictment of female body image via on-the-nose Greek tragedy. And it is a difficult book to review, because I am not 100 percent sure just how I feel about it; the book is certainly more ambitious a venture than I would have expected for a character spun off from a dude whose origin is being kicked into a vat of acid, even though I think it is a long yard away from sticking the landing. And it certainly goes in an direction and tries for a complexity that I would not have expected for a character joined at the name with a dude whose M.O. is to make people laugh themselves to death.

Oh: and Joker’s Daughter beats Jesus up. So there’s that.

My Dead Canadian Girlfriend: Batman: The Dark Knight #21 Review

We haven’t spent a lot of time talking about Batman: The Dark Knight since its relaunch in September 2011 – honestly, we haven’t reviewed even a single issue. And part of the reason has been that the title has always existed on the fringes of the Batman universe – the main plots have been in Batman and, to a lesser extent, Batman Incorporated, but Batman: The Dark Knight has always kinda done its own mostly self-contained stories. And being a comics Web site, we’ve tended to pay more attention to the big, money shot stories while Batman: The Dark Knight has sorta chugged happily along on its own, telling smaller, more simple and self-contained Batman stories.

And in its own way, Batman: The Dark Knight #21 is no different. The conflict happening here isn’t one that I’ve seen referenced in any of the other Batman books. The conflict is based on a relationship that hasn’t been mentioned anywhere else. It features a B-List villain in The Mad Hatter, who is the kind of villain you normally dig up when you have a story requiring a nutjob and you realize that it’s only been three months since the other Batman books have used The Joker, The Riddler, or The Scarecrow… and frankly, The Mad Hatter only gets picked once the writer sobers up enough to realize that resurrecting Chandell continues to be a shitty idea.

So what you wind up with is a Batman comic that almost exists in its own little bubble universe where it can just tell a simple Batman story. And that’s exactly what it does: it give us a Batman motivated only by the events of its own story, filled with rage and showing a ton of iconic visual action, with a simple message to deliver about how Batman exactly is different from the monsters that he battles. And, not being a part of the greater ongoing Batman continuity, it is kinda doomed to be midlist that probably goes out of print pretty quickly. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a damn good and simple story, and one that’s well worth checking out.