After seven issues of one shots that dodged the main story (though most were still pretty good on their own terms), vol. 11 starts off with the issue I’m sure everyone was waiting for! Batman breaks out of the dreaming machine and walks through Arkham beating up everyone in his way. It’s a genuinely cathartic experience to see Batman thoroughly dominate everyone in front of him -- physically, mentally, and even both in a couple cases. Writer Tom King and artists Mikel Janin and Jorge Fornes knew that ...
After seven issues of one shots that dodged the main story (though most were still pretty good on their own terms), vol. 11 starts off with the issue I’m sure everyone was waiting for! Batman breaks out of the dreaming machine and walks through Arkham beating up everyone in his way. It’s a genuinely cathartic experience to see Batman thoroughly dominate everyone in front of him -- physically, mentally, and even both in a couple cases. Writer Tom King and artists Mikel Janin and Jorge Fornes knew that they needed to deliver an issue where the title character scores a definitive win and they do it with style here.
That need is only partly due to how things played out in the previous volume. The real reason they needed to give Batman a win at the start of vol. 11 is because he spends the rest of it losing. His relationship with Gordon and the GCPD is in tatters, while he winds up falling out with the rest of his Bat-family here. That part feels like the most plot-forced thing in this volume, unless King is planning some misdirection to be revealed later on. It all leads up to Batman, tied up on a horse, heading out into the desert for some “family time” with one of the last people he ever expected to see back in his life. Which, and this is the volume’s biggest failing, King doesn’t really dig into the relationship between the two characters here as much as he should have.
While that may sound like a huge bummer to read, it didn’t quite click that way with me. That’s mainly because in explaining Bane’s master plan, King actually makes it feel like the villain struggled to break the Bat this time. Rather than just be an unstoppable Venom-fueled train of pain, Bane actually had a master plan that he’s been working his way through for these past ten volumes. So even if it was painful to see Bane hand Batman his ass here, I felt I had to respect what he went through in order to make that happen. It’s a great buildup for “City of Bane” as I want to see what the strongman has in store for his vision of Gotham. (After it hits paperback, so all the volumes in King’s run will look good together on my bookshelf.)
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(This volume also collects another one of those “Batman: Secret Files” anthologies to pad out the page count. None of the stories in it are terrible, but only the opening Andy Kubert-written story with the Joker is a standout.)
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