Climax
Credits: Denny O’Neil (writer), Barry Kitson (penciler), Scott Hanna (inker), Willie Schubert (letterer), Digital Chameleon (colorist)
Summary:
Jean-Paul refuses to relinquish the title of Batman. He taunts Bruce
by destroying his father’s portrait and then retreats to the Batcave.
Bruce digs up the hole he fell through as a child on the day he
discovered the cave. He confronts Jean-Paul in the Batcave and
manipulates Jean-Paul into following him back up the hole. In order to fit,
Jean-Paul must remove all of his armor. When dawn breaks, the light
entering the hole blinds Jean-Paul’s eyes through his night-vision
lenses. He realizes Bruce truly is Batman. Bruce allows him to leave,
wishing Jean-Paul well.
Review:
I only purchased one issue of “Knightsend” off the stands, and this is
the one. I imagine I wasn’t alone. If you were even slightly
interested in comics at the time, you knew about the massive Batman
event that been raging for years, and that this issue was the big Batman
vs. Azrael fight. Even if I missed virtually all of the build-up to
this moment, I still viewed this issue as a satisfactory conclusion
(not knowing that Bruce Wayne was still months away from truly
returning.) I also loved the art, which I thought had a strong Jim Lee
influence. That’s the only time I can recall linking Barry Kitson to
Jim Lee, but I can still kind of see it this issue. Somewhat realistic
figures, strong chins, battle armor, heavy emphasis on detail lines; it
also didn’t hurt that this issue had “Image coloring” as well.
Finally,
we’ve reached the actual conclusion. Yes, DC slaps “Knightsend” on the
cover of two more comics shipping at the end of this month, and the
final Knightfall
trade goes on to reprint the “Prodigal” event, but as for
Batman/Azrael, this is the end of the line. Thankfully, the creator of
Azrael and the architect of this event, Denny O’Neil, has stepped in to
bring all of this to a close. I can’t say that this issue is enough to
change my opinion of Azrael (a name he’s almost never called in these
comics, by the way), but he is far more tolerable in this chapter than
he has been for the past several dozen issues.
O’Neil
writes Azrael as an angry young man, lashing out in pain and desperate
to fill the loneliness inside of him. He’s not stable by any
definition, but he isn’t a raving loon,
which is all we’ve seen of Jean-Paul during the event so far. It seems
as if the other creators latched on to the concept of Jean-Paul being
brainwashed as a youth and couldn’t go anywhere else with it.
Brainwashed psychotically violent quasi-religious nut just isn’t a
strong enough hook for a protagonist who’s starring in around a thousand
pages of Batman comics. Azrael’s “insanity” became tedious ranting
almost as soon as the storyline began, leaving him thoroughly unlikable
for way too long.
I
think O’Neil understands that the appeal of the hyper-violent loner
vigilante comes from the wish fulfillment of the adolescent males that
make (or made) up the bulk of mainstream comics’ readership. An angry,
confused, powerful man lashing out at the world is an easy archetype to
mock, but I think it evokes a visceral response in readers at a certain
age. Some readers move on to material like Alan Moore’s Supreme,
rediscover old classics, or just abandon superhero comics altogether,
but a segment of the audience gets stuck at that point and can’t let go
of this stuff. Having Azrael represent that mindset does make him a
respectable nemesis for the traditional Batman, but think of how rarely
this dynamic was explored. It’s obvious early on that Azrael is a poor
replacement for Batman because he lacks even fundamental integrity, but
the stories rarely made a point deeper than that. And even if the
creators didn’t want to veer too far into meta-commentary, which is
understandable, Jean-Paul as a character never developed into much of a
leading man. As I said before, I can genuinely feel for the Punisher
when written properly, but this lunatic is often just insufferable. I
don’t know how well O’Neil fleshed the character out in the initial Sword of Azrael miniseries, but his work in this issue shows that there’s at least some potential for Azrael. (I make no claims of quality for the upcoming Azrael ongoing series. I remember the reviews on that one.)
Humanizing
Azrael and getting him in position to willingly give up the cowl is the
obvious mission of the issue, but O’Neil also does a lot of work
getting inside Bruce’s head. I think most people are now familiar with
the chestnut about Batman being the “real” identity and Bruce Wayne is
the pose. (O’Neil’s own work with the character might even be the
genesis for this thinking.) O’Neil has Bruce himself question if this
is true, as he realizes that he has perhaps been leaning on the Batman
identity as a crutch just as much as Jean-Paul. When Azrael screams,
“If I’m not Batman I’m nothing!” Bruce is forced to look at his own life
and ask if this is true. The use of purifying light in the story is a
bit “on the nose” of course, but I think it’s interesting to have Bruce
also look towards the light and question what place it has in his life.
You would hope that after this lengthy storyline DC could’ve firmly
decided just what percentage of “dark” they wanted in their Batman
comics. This issue leads you to believe that we’re going to be seeing a
more well-balanced Bruce Wayne in future, and that the dark, obsessive
Batman that the fans claimed to want has been displaced. That might’ve
been the plan, but by the end of the decade, we’ll see a Batman that’s
even more of a Frank Miller parody than ever. And then Frank Miller
actually does return, and…well, we don’t need to get into that.
