Batman Battle For The Cowl #3
******* SPOILER WARNING ******** I’m gonna talk about who the new Batman is. If you are trying to live under a rock, and you don’t want to know, then don’t follow the jump.******* /SPOILER WARNING ********
Comes now the final chapter of Battle For The Cowl, the book that’s put my beloved Bat-mythos on hold for about five months building up to this week. This week we found out who would be the new Batman. Now the wait is over, and… well, now I know, I guess. The particulars can be argued with, and I have to say that it didn’t end as spectacularly as I would have liked. But it worked, and I enjoyed it.
Several things were true about this from the beginning:
1) The whole point was to introduce Dick Grayson as Batman, not to do too much else.
2) The series was action-heavy, since it was a showcase for Tony Daniel, who is an inexperienced writer but an accomplished big-action artist.
I had a bit of a problem with the last two pages. I honestly found myself fuming at first over what I thought was just a failure in storytelling. By the time we get to the end, we really aren’t 100% certain who the new Batman is. That would have been a big failure indeed.
But then I thought about the thoughtbox convention. DC has built up a great system of color-coding and watermarking their thoughtboxes so that we can easily tell who’s talking. Thinking about it, and re-reading the first two issues, the logic of the story became clearer. Each issue is entirely thought-boxed by a single character. If I’d paid attention to that before reading #3, I would have seen that it was inevitably Dick who would end up as the Bat.
While the story is a little simplistic, there is a story going on below the main narrative. Yes, in a nutshell, Tim finds Jason and is nearly killed by him before Dick (with Squire and Damien’s help) saves the day. That by itself doesn’t take 84 pages. But on another level, each chapter is one of the principal characters making his own case for donning the Bat-tights.
And by the last sequence, we’re being shown Dick’s acceptance in a fairly subtle way, with the small change in both design and color to the thoughtboxes. It’s still Dick, but it’s not Nightwing anymore.
(For the record: the most mind-blowing use of this technique I’ve ever seen was in Morrison and Johns’ DC Universe #0 before Final Crisis, where they actually managed to bring Barry Allen back from the dead without using either words or pictures. Go read it again and you’ll see what I mean.)
As in the previous issues, there’s some clunky dialog in places, and he gives in to the temptation of poster-ready group shots here and there. The Dick thoughtboxes have a few turns of phrase that don’t seem like him, and Damien continues to be grossly miscast as a slacker fuckup.
But give Daniel credit for pulling something off that many bigger names can’t. He has told a well-designed story, stuck to his guns in terms of tone and character, and delivered it all without delays.
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