Problem Child: Damian: Son of Batman #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Don’t overlook anything. Spoilers will be hard to find in this amount of carnage.

I don’t think I’ve made it a secret over the years that I was never a fan of Damian Wayne. He was a mouthy douchebag who was designed to irritate, and usually delivered. He was a ten-year-old in all the worst senses of the word: impulsive, opinionated for no good reason, and often disrespectful to his family… and any person with the unmitigated gall to be disrespectful of The Goddamned Batman? He and I can never be friends. So I didn’t shed too many tears when his creator, Grant Morrison, had him whacked a few months ago.

The thing is that Damian was that much of an irritant as a ten (or so) year old, and everyone knows if you want someone truly insufferable, you need yourself a teenager. That’s when kids take their original irritating personalities and add moodiness, mopeyness and just general emo. They start listening to Joy Division (or whatever the 21 Century version of Joy Division is; I’m old and picked all my bands years ago. Do kids go through a Doors phase anymore? Or are they truly fucking hopeless and deserving of being written off? No, I don’t have children, why do you ask?), and they cut their hair all funny and they yell stuff like, “You’re not my real dad!” and “No I won’t get in your fucking van!” and “Who the fuck are The Doors?”

But Damian was safely killed before he could hit those difficult years… which clearly disappointed writer / artist Andy Kubert, because in his new book Damian: Son of Batman, he gives us not only a teenaged Damian, but one with a marked lack of adult supervision. And while that story is generally beautifully illustrated, it is also a little exposition heavy where it’s not needed, exposition light where it really is needed, and retracts an important plot conceit almost as soon as it’s introduced.

Batman and his teenaged son Damian are investigating a mass body dump on a fish-covered Gotham Dock when Batman finds a Joker Fish. However, rather than being filled with Joker Venom, this one is loaded with explosives, which apparently kills Batman. Damian then seeks out his mother and grandfather, Talia and Ras al Ghul, looking for help in hunting down Batman’s killer, only to be told that the League of Assassins will be severing its ties with Damian so he can take his place as Batman… to which Damian reacts as any teenager reacts when being told to do something. Damian returns to Gotham and keeps track of criminals who take credit for Batman’s death (in short: pretty much all of them), who amazingly start turning up dead… well, it seems amazing unless you’re Damian, who is killing them all. Despite the protestations of Alfred and an unknown mystery priest (well, unknown to anyone who’s never seen a picture of Jim Gordon), Damian prepares to head out and take out The Joker… when a familiar face arrives to stop him. That familiar face being Bruce Wayne. Meaning that I have no fucking idea what the hell is going on.

I’m gonna flip my usual review format and start by talking about the art, because it’s the biggest reason to check this book out. Kubert’s art is fine-lined and highly detailed, with a huge amount of detail in the fore and backgrounds. He really nails Damian’s facial expressions, from despair at Batman’s apparent death, to rage at being questioned, to dopey and empty while hammering food into his face while Alfred scolds him, just like any other Goddamned teenager. There’s not a ton of action in this book – there’s the opening explosion, and some single-panel depictions of Damian murdering a few of Batman’s rogues – but still Kubert manages to give himself a couple of solid iconic splash pages of Damian posing… but then there’s this splash on page one:

Jesus, just look at that page. When I saw it, I was fairly certain that I was witnessing Robin in the middle of a massive stroke. I showed it to my co-editor Amanda, who said, “That’s not the expression of someone having a stroke. That’s the face of the man getting unexpectedly blasted in the shitter. And look at Batman behind him, with that fist extended toward Damian’s hips and that expression of angry exertion on his face? You are witnessing a hate fucking in progress, dude.” Either way, generally I dug the art in this book a lot (and I liked that it was printed on non-glossy paper; maybe I’m just old school, but I prefer my comics on regular paper like that), but that image is one weird way to open a miniseries.

Storywise, well, we’ve got some problems here. I’ll start with some of the mechanisms: Kubert has us spend a bunch of time with Damian and the al Ghuls, with everyone spitting out a bunch of exposition on Damian’s origin, from Batman’s tryst with Talia in the Son of The Demon graphic novel through his becoming Robin. Which is fine, if not utterly necessary for anyone who’s been reading Batman comics for the past few years… but there isn’t exposition where it counts. For example: we open this story seeing Batman getting blown up by a Joker Fish… so why is Damian going around killing other criminals? The only indication that it might not have been The Joker who dropped the fish was a little comment by Batman saying that Joker is usually more deceptive just before the explosion (which could just as easily have been a comment saying that he’d be more deceptive unless it was a deathtrap), so why go after anyone else? Sure, you could argue that Damian doesn’t believe that Joker would be so obvious and is going after other possibilities, but the “confessions” he uses as leads don’t match the M. O. of the murder. Now, I could buy that Damian’s just a homicidal prick who is lashing out in grief, but it doesn’t make a lot of logical sense.

And that’s not the only thing that makes sense. Based on the confessions, clearly the general public knows that Batman is dead, and based on comments by the priest, we know that the general public knows that Bruce Wayne is dead… but no one has made the connection that they’re the same guy? I mean, we see Alfred and Damian having breakfast like nothing’s happened, and Damian’s using the Batcave with impunity, so Batman’s secret identity clearly isn’t common knowledge, and that doesn’t make any sense at all. If Batman’s body were found, everyone would know that he was Bruce Wayne, and if Bruce Wayne were reported as killed, why would anyone know that Batman was also dead? It just doesn’t track if you think about it more than ten seconds.

And then there’s the final turnaround of Bruce Wayne apparently showing up alive at the end of the issue. It was a genuinely unexpected plot twist, and it put me in a place where I really don’t know what might be happening next, but it also really took the wind out of Damian’s whole rampage deal. And maybe that’s the point; we spent this whole issue seeing Damian acting erratically and homicidal, with plans that don’t make any sense upon even a cursory read, so maybe this is all to show him as an arrogant prick, and then tear him down and build him back up to become the Gunslinger Batman everyone remembers from Batman #666.

The problems is that we’re gonna need to see the complete package before we know if that’s Kubert’s endgame or not. Based just on this issue, we’ve got unexplained motivations, misplaced exposition and plot holes you could drive a Tumbler through. But on the plus side, it is, one strokeface aside, wrapped in one damn good looking package. If you’re a fan of Andy Kubert’s art, Damian: Son of Batman #1 is worth picking up, but it’s worth picking up in the same way Batman: Odyssey was worth picking up if you were a big Neal Adams fan. Enjoy the art, but try to ignore what the kid is doing and why. Actually, that’s good advice for dealing with any mouthy teenager.