I’m in Brooklyn! Just a couple of swift crammed stink rides in a metal tube away from Gotham and good ol’ Bats and his never ending expanding shifting sands of a Bat crew. I think Batman would get a lot more respect and fist bumps if he decided to center his operations in Brooklyn rather than Gotham. My Mom has a place in Little Caribbean. While interrogating nasty criminals Bats would have to raise his voice a lot louder than his trademark growl ‘cuz they be blasting music all hours of the day around here 'I said, have you seen Fast Boi Booyaka Shot!?! CAN YOU HEAR ME'
Well, after the White Knight Red Riding Hood debacle last week I need to right the Bats ship. So I took a couple of Bat Books with me on the trip with one of them being this ‘One Bad Day’ thingamajig. It was a Tom King thingamajig which had me nervous. King on Everlasting Love=woo hoo. King on Bat/Cat=blaaarrrgh. I don’t know what this One Bad Day set-up is or how it relates to the amorphous blob that is the Bat Universe. One cursory glance at the inter-webs says it’s going to be a six issue series with a different villain and creative team every month. Oy. That just screams: Random Comic Continuity Mess. With each book being 8 bones that’s asking me to drop about 50 bux to experience a very long bad Bat day. That’s a lot to ask. So this first one better be frikkin amazing. You better lead off with Derek Jeter and not Luis Polonia or Aaron Hicks. You think ‘King’ of the Bat Dud can bring it? Okayyyyyy.
First things first, the art. Boom. Never heard of and don’t recognize the name of Mitch Gerads but I’m really loving what I see here. I will say that Bruce Wayne looks a LOT like Jon Hamm. And since Jon Hamm is doing Progressive commercials that have him flirting with Flo it kind of puts a minor stink on it. Why does Jon Hamm have to hock insurance? Why is Jon Hamm in my comic book? Is Flo here too? Is the one bad day a reference to the day Jon Hamm decided to sign on for hokey insurance salesman?
Okay, let me get ready for another Riddler script. Last Riddler I got was The Batman flick. The Riddler story in the recent Batman flick was mnyeh, right? I loved Robert Pattison, thought the story was nothing special. I think they could have redeemed the entire plot with a strong twist of an ending with him but Riddler turning himself in to watch his master plan play out from prison seemed completely out of character. Add in the fact that you got a glimpse of some random actor dude looking like Romero from Escape from New York thinking he’s the Joker and the movie just dropped down a Bat sinkhole. But this Riddler tale? Interesting.
So Riddler’s now deciding to be a brutal psychopath by offing a random guy on the street with no riddle attached to the murder; he just does it. In fact, most of this book is a whole lot of graphic brutality. Copious amounts of bloody panels. We get a head shot off, a shark heading for a guy’s blood who’s tied up and being tortured by Bats , a prisoner stabbing himself in the neck, a prison guard getting his fingers chopped off and five cops murdering each other in jail with guns…all by the halfway point. Yipes! Is this Black Label? No. Hmm. That’s a whole lot of violent violence getting violently vile.
The funny thing is you have allll this graphic bloody death and yet NO cursing. So you can show a guy spurting blood out the neck or fingers being sawed off but, fuck? Nooo, gotta keep the kids mouths nice and tidy. Here’s a fun game to do with this book, try to figure out if there’s an actual pattern to the symbols King uses to zap out curse words:
@$%#%% = Fuck or Son of a Bitch or God Dammit. Probably SOB.
@%#@ = Shit. That’s for sure.
@%@$ = Fuck. That’s about right.
@%@$ = Fucking. Seems like he needs an extra dollar sign.
@%@%= This is also fucking. Hmm.
Looks like King is just hitting the ‘Shift’ key and then randomly wiggling his fingers over the 2,3,4,5 keys to get a @#$%. Layyy-zeeee.
Throughout the book Batman pretty much does nothing but stand still while glowering with his eyes glowing as his cape drapes down over his shoulders. Here he is glowering and glowing in this panel. Now he’s far away and glowering and glowing. He just popped out of nowhere and he”s glowering and glowing. But guess what? It’s a really great story! King pulls it out. He Jeters the book! He was 0-3 and then came up in the bottom of the 8th and went oppo with a bases clearing double. We really get a unique slice and deep dive into the Riddler and his motives. The ‘I’m going rando’ approach really ups the ante and you get the same sense of empathetic madness that made Joaquin’s Joker so special.
I coulda done without all the excess violence and I don’t know that this is necessarily a ‘Bad Bat Day’ per se, but the stellar art and inventive back story really came together for me. Alright King, you get Konged on this one. Just, I dunno, let’s not cast Jon Hamm as Bats anymore mmkay? I mean what the @#@$@$@$%%?
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