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.

The Mad Hatter has killed Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend. You know: what’s her face, who you’ve seen in absolutely none of the other Batman books. Anyway, she’s dead, and Batman is pissed, and ready to take the Hatter out. So even while Alfred warns Batman via radio that he should take a minute to calm down before he proceeds, Batman has no time for that shit, and takes the Batwing directly to the Hatter’s headquarters to exact himself some righteous Batman vengeance. After Batman arrives, he has to fight his way through mind-controlled goons, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and some excellent Special Psycho Tea (which is a thing that, if someone tried to sell it to you in the parking lot at a Phish concert, you would instead wander off looking for the meth guy, congratulating yourself for saving your kidneys from harvest) before getting to the Hatter. And when he does, he has to make a decision as to what the appropriate price is for killing a love so deep and complete that Batman didn’t see fit to tell anyone else about it in any other comic book.

If it sounds like I’m making a little fun of this book, and the central conceit that makes up Batman’s primary motivation in it, well I am… but only a little. Sure, it’s a little weird that Batman is driven to this kind of enraged and relentless level based on a relationship that really doesn’t appear in any other Batman book at all, but it only stays weird until you stop to think about it for a little while. This is, after all, a comic book, and realistically, it really only needs to make as much sense as it takes to be satisfying on an individual comic book level. If people have been complaining for years that comic books are impenetrable to the normals because there’s too much continuity, well, here’s your answer: a series that generally only cares about what’s happening within that series. Pick up two or three issues in a row and you’re up to speed. There’s a cure to your continuity issues right there; so quit yer bitchin’ about the magic girlfriend that lives, you, know, up north. You probably don’t know her.

Besides, the girlfriend (her name is Natalya Trusevich, by the way) serves an important purpose, and that purpose is: how do you show Batman driven to the point of considering murder when you don’t have access to The Joker, or he ability to show Batman going after who killed his son (because Grant Morrison has dibs on that for Batman Incorporated), or the clearance to show grevious bodily harm to any of the inner Bat Family because every creator on the line has some kind of plan for each of them? Well, the girl serves that purpose, and serves it well, because this isn’t a story about some bimbo what likes Bruce Wayne’s hog, it’s about Batman, and how Batman would react to some stimulus that would seem to demand blood for blood.

And it is that reaction that sells this story. Writer Gregg Hurwitz takes the event of Batman’s imaginary girlfriend dying and he pumps the living shit out of it. Batman is simply brutal in his pursuit of The Mad Hatter, torturing and / or maiming Tweedledum and Tweetledee, and using simple, animal rage to fight through the effects of the drugs that Hatter blows into his face. This is not a story about Batman the World’s Greatest Detective, it is about The Dark Knight, which means we get pages and pages of Batman kicking ass, and it is just plain fun. I mean, sure, it all hinges on Batman and his terrible, crippling pain… but that’s kind of the strength of using this solitary girl as, really, a Maguffin: the only thing you need to do is accept that this girl meant the world to Batman in this series, during this story arc. If you can do that, then what Hurwitz has Batman do is powerful and makes sense. If you can’t well, the main Batman title is right over there. This month, Bruce Wayne isn’t Batman yet, and he’s flipping gangsters off. You can wait a few months for that guy to even become Batman, or you can just try to buy the dead girl conceit and enjoy Batman beating the shit out of people right fucking now.

And you can also enjoy Batman being forced to decide if he is willing to kill someone if the reasons feel right to any sane person. And sure, we all know that in a standard issue of a standard comic book, there isn’t a chance in hell that Batman is really gonna kill a guy, or even let a guy just die on his watch… but it is good now and again to actually see it. Sure, it is easy to dismiss this ending as a foregone conclusion, particularly if you can’t get yourself to buy Natalya Trusevich as a legitimate motivation… but if you can, and you can combine that with the fact that The Mad Hatter is written and drawn as barely human, and you find yourself with a powerful little moment of questionable morality where you not only wonder if Batman will allow Hatter to die… but you wonder if he should. And again: this effect will all depend on if you can make yourself believe in this girl and in Bruce Wayne’s feeling for her… but if you can, there’s a lot here to ponder and to enjoy.

And the final thing to tie it all together is Ethan Van Sciver’s art. Van Sciver works in a fine, crosshatched line, delivering fairly realistic visuals by way of a 90s filter. The overall effect is art that looks rally pretty realistic, but with a level of stylization that makes most of the book look like big old iconic comic stuff. The early double-paged spread of Batman running is frameworthy, with some interesting cape effects and gimmicks I haven’t seen before. Batman’s cape goes from flowing to ribbed and weaponized, and there is more than one panel where the action poses are just killer. Where the art does fall a little bit flat is in the storytelling – there are several panels where we’re shown things that ultimately are ever seen again, and that just don’t pass the “if I don’t read the dialog, can I follow what’s happening?” test. Further, some of the pages have non-standard panel layouts that seem to flow across the book’s spine and indicating a double-paged layout, but which really aren’t. So overall, we have a damn pretty book… but one that sometimes makes itself harder to read than it needs to be.

Batman: The Dark Knight #21 is a strange book, in that it requires one hell of a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader to even remotely work, because it is operating on the fringes and sidelines of the main Batman books. If you can’t believe that this girl you never read about in Batman is really so important to Bruce Wayne that it might lead him to kill, then this issue won’t work for you. But if you can turn your back on big continuity and just buy into this single story, and believe that Natalya Trusevich is really important to Bruce Wayne, they you’ll be rewarded with a violent, action-packed little tale that digs right down into how far Batman is really willing to go.

Batman: The Dark Knight #21 will never be a classic Batman tale, and it will likely never be reprinted more than in the initial trade paperback of this arc. But it is a good, solid, workmanlike Batman story, and one that is well worth taking a look at.