COMICS REVIEW: BATMAN #10

Batman #10 Cover

have read the issue. I’m going to comment instead on several of the events and my take on them. After all the chaos that has happened in Gotham from the Court of Owls, the Batman goes to capture this incredibly dangerous group, only to find a great many of them dead at a formal dining table. In many comic movies, the action ends with the villain dead, which often leaves me thinking “What a waste of story potential.” I have the same thought here. For all the buildup they’ve been given since DC rebooted itself, it seems almost anticlimactic to me to kill them like this here.

We see one of Bruce’s new habits while thinking, which seems to be playing with two spent shell casings. Now, they never come out and flat out say it, but they strongly hint these are from the shots that killed Thomas and Martha Wayne. Admittedly, no one has ever argued that Batman was the poster child for mental health, but this just seems kind of, well, sick. Also, as Bruce lazes around playing with the means of his parents’ deaths, he is apparently wearing at least parts of his Batman costume. In the pre-boot continuity, there were several mentions of the rule about no costumes in the actual mansion, as part of the major, ongoing effort to keep Bruce’s secret. This, too, has apparently been done away with.

But the big shocking reveal of the issue is the real identity of Lincoln March, apparent killer of most of the rest of the Court of Owls, big time mystery villain is…. Thomas Wayne, Junior? Yes, somehow, Bruce Wayne never knew he had a brother. Let’s think about this a minute, shall we? Martha Wayne was a wealthy, well known, celebrity. Not only was Bruce never told of his brother’s existence, not only did Alfred either never know, manage to forget, or never bring it up (“I’m sorry, Master Bruce, I thought you knew about him.”??), but there are no surviving pictures of her pregnant, no one else ever mentioned this, and the various World’s Greatest Detectives that hang around the Bat-clan (Batman, Nightwing, Red Robin, Batgirl) never found a birth certificate, any trace of his existence or her having the child? Really?

Some readers in the years before the reboot complained about Batman being perfect, mocked him as the “Bat-God.” We now seem to have gone the other way. Since the reboot, we‘ve found out that:

1. Batman missed the entire existence of the Court of Owls, even telling people they did not exist.
2. Batman missed the fact that at least twice, as seen in Nightwing and All Star Western, people from Gotham were killed by people in owl-themed costumes, and managed to not connect it to the “urban legend” of the Court of Owls.
3. Batman (and Nightwing) missed the fact that the Haly circus was a training and recruiting ground for assassins for years.
4. And all the Bats managed to miss Thomas Jr.

I don’t need my Batman to be perfect. I find perfection boring to read about. But how does the “World’s Greatest Detective” ™ manage to miss all that?

If the Black Glove events happened, which they presumably did since apparently RIP and Dick’s time as Batman still happened, then presumably the part where the Black Glove faked all the pictures to make it look like Thomas and Martha attended all sorts of orgies and sex parties happened as well. If at no other time, then after that, wouldn’t Clan Bat have put the lives of the older Waynes under a microscope to disprove these lies? But no, no one knows about Thomas Wayne Jr. Except somehow, Thomas knows who he is. So…. Who told him? Your not born knowing your parents’ names, and if staff at this hospital knew who he was, then again, there’s a paper trail that somehow the Bats all managed to never find.

I think Scott Snyder has some interesting ideas. I think he can write great stories. I really feel this wasn’t one of them.