Silent Lucidity: Batman & Robin #18 Review

When DC leaked the news last month that Grant Morrison would be killing Damian Wayne in Batman Incorporated #8, the company claimed that the character’s death would resonate across the main Batman Family titles, despite Batman Incorporated existing, since the New 52 reboot, in some strange continuity bubble that seems to lie outside of the New 52, and based on some weird editorial philosophy where all major decisions are tagged with the phrase, “…but keep Grant Morrison happy.” In that spirit, one would think that, compared to the maintenance of continuity spreadsheets, last-minute story changes and line editorial late nights and headaches, it would be cheaper and simpler to just dump a truckload of peyote on Morrison’s driveway, but whatever.

My big question at the time of the reveal was: how exactly were the other Batman Family creators going to handle this event? After all, Batman and Robin’s battle against Leviathan from Batman Incorporated wasn’t exactly something that had been addressed in the other books, and it seemed like those other writers already had plans for upcoming story lines. Hell, before Robin’s death, Scott Snyder had announced he was embarking on a Riddler story in Batman before more recently announcing that instead he was gonna do a long-form Batman: Zero Year story focusing on Batman’s early years, and while Riddler might be a part of it, it at least seems like a change of plans.

But my biggest question, that I couldn’t address at the time without riddling the story with spoilers, was how this would affect Peter Tomasi’s Batman & Robin, what with the tiny detail that Robin’s name appears in the fucking title. And while other Batman Family titles have clearly just shoehorned Robin’s death into previously-planned storylines as an afterthought (last week’s Detective Comics simply mentioned it in a panel or two while Batman then went on his merry way attacking Penguin and Emperor Penguin as previously planned, and in this week’s Batgirl the death gets a page and a half before going back to Barbara’s fight with James Gordon, Jr), it’s gotta be hard to move forward with any previously-existing plans when one of the title characters is taking a dirtnap. You know, until someone kicks his carcass into a Lazarus Pit (and you know this will happen).

So given the early efforts of the Batman Family titles to apparently simply slot the fact that Robin is dead into existing story plans (Please note that I don’t know that this is the case. For all I know, Grant Morrison called a staff meeting with the Batman editors and creators a year ago and announced his plans over absinthe and some form of ritually sacrificed beast of burden, and it’s just the half-assed executions that make it look shoehorned in), I was half-expecting for Batman & Robin #18 to be a standard Batman story with maybe some weird-looking camouflage art to cover where Robin was supposed to be, and a headset quickly pencilled onto Batman’s head so it wouldn’t look like he was talking to himself like an insane person.

I was wrong about that. Instead, Batman & Robin #18 takes Damian’s death head-on, with the focus solely on Batman and how he is handling the event (short answer: badly), and makes use of a bold storytelling choice to make the reader empathize with Batman by almost forcing us to try to think about what we’re seeing in his reactions. Suffice it to say that, if Robin’s death in Morrison’s playground was a forced afterthought in some of Batman’s titles, it most definitely was not here.

This is where I normally summarize the plot of the book I’m reviewing, but that’s a little difficult here, as the book is simply about Batman all but falling apart in the wake of Damian’s death… and it is done in complete silence. No word balloons, no captions, no sound effects, nothing. We follow Bruce through Wayne Manor, trying to be stoic and putting away reminders of Damian while seeing him around every corner. We see Batman try to go on patrol, wind up in the place where Damian was killed, and react… shall we say, badly. We see Batman trying to lose himself in his work (and seriously overcompensating, by the way), before returning to the Batcave, finding something Damian left for him, and finally going all to pieces. That’s pretty much it…

…and it is, bar none, the most effective aftermath of a superhero’s death I have see since Peter Parker’s in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, and it is rendered all the more impressive in that Tomasi does it without a single word of dialogue.

On one level, it works because the silence mirrors Batman’s character effectively. After all, if you take a step back, Bruce Wayne does not deal with grief. The guy saw his parents killed in front of him, and rather than grieve, he made a lifelong commitment to fight crime. Batman doesn’t just give in to emotions, he hammers through them through action. So it makes perfect sense for Bruce to put away Damian’s things without a word (literally) and simply go to work, and work harder than we’ve seen him go in quite a while. So Tomasi’s choice to have Batman act rather than speak is a solid characterization choice.

But what further struck me was, by withholding any dialogue, Tomasi has given us a concrete example of a man acting while trying not to think. On a surface level, we see Batman going to the cave, suiting up and going to work like he always does, but by keeping us out of his head, both by eliminating his ability to voice his opinions or via the more common comics conventions of thought balloons or captions, we are removed by a degree. We see a man acting, and clearly hurting, but without his voice, he is literally just going through the motions. Compare that to Darth Vader shouting “Nooo!” (or “Do not want!” depending on your subtitles) and you decide who should have been given a pile of money by Disney.

And then there’s the seemingly contradictory things that Batman is doing through all of this. He destroys the scene where Damian was killed as if to eliminate the memory, and yet he pores compulsively over Damian’s belongings. He has erected the “Robin uniform shrine” in the Batcave that has been de rigueur since Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, but he covers and removes a painting of Damian from the mansion. Tomasi gives us Batman simultaneously trying to wipe out the painful memories, while still (literally) seeing Damian’s face everywhere. Using only visuals and actions, Tomasi shows us a guy roiling with contradictions, alternating between wanting to forget and being completely unable to – again, without a single written word. Tomasi’s writing on this issue is one hell of an accomplishment.

More than any mainstream comic issue in recent memory, Pat Gleason’s art, by necessity, takes center stage here. His style is generally simply-lined, and there are times when his stuff reminds me of Brian Bolland, and other when it looks a bit like Richard Corben’s. Either way, it’s not particularly stylized or over the top, but what it is is expressive. The alternating pain and rage are palpable on Bruce’s face, and there was one thing that really struck me: while most of Gleason’s facial expressions are drawn in fairly simple lines, in the single panel where Batman clearly makes the decision to destroy the site where Damian was killed, Batman’s face is loaded with detail. You can see every single muscle in his face and whisker on his jaw, simply roiling in pain, and the sudden change in style really accentuates the emotion of the panel. Further, Gleason condenses a night of Batman working in overdrive into a single splash panel, with Batman’s silhouette overwhelming the page with terrified criminals in the tiny “panels” delineated by the scallops of his cape, that I would pay real money for in Artists’ Alley. The only negatives? There’s a panel of Alfred where his eyes are supposed to be in shadow, where instead they are inked so heavily it looks like he’s wearing anti-nuclear glare goggles (but really that falls on inker Mick Gray), and the tightly-paneled page where Batman decides to wipe out Damian’s death site is so darkly-colored that it took me a couple of reads to fully decode it. But overall, Gleason really stepped up to the challenge of being the primary voice on this book. This is good-looking stuff.

I’m not gonna lie: I never liked Damian Wayne. I wasn’t upset at all by Grant Morrison’s decision to whack him, and I figured that his death would, at best, derail what was happening in the other Batman Family books. And in a lot of cases, that is true… but Tomasi and Gleason took the ball and ran with it. While I don’t care that Damian’s dead, these guys made me care that it has had an effect on Batman, and they did it without using a single word of dialogue. This is a good one, and one of the best you’ll “read” all week. Highly recommended.