In this review of Batman #159, Batman attempts to save the Joker while receiving an unexpected visit from an old partner.
Batman #159 main cover by Jim Lee (DC Comics)
Batman #159
Written By: Jeph Loeb
Art and Main Cover: Jim Lee
Variant Covers: ANDY KUBERT, GABRIELE DELL’OTTO, JULIAN TOTINO TEDESCO, JIM LEE, JOE QUINONES, MICHAEL CHO, SIMONE BIANCHI
Page Count: 32 pages
Release Date: April 23, 2025
This comic book review contains spoilers.
Batman #159 opens with Batman rushing the Joker to Leslie Thompkins’ Park Row Clinic for emergency care. Batman injects him with a serum to induce a medical coma, and Leslie stitches him up but says he’ll still require round-the-clock care. Bruce takes him back to the Batcave to monitor him and study his brain signatures, but he is ambushed by his former partner and rival, Red Hood, AKA Jason Todd. Jason attempts to kill the Joker and knocks Bruce out. When he finally comes to, his car and the Joker are both missing.
Meanwhile, the Riddler meets with Barbara Gordon and Dick Grayson at the Gotham Clock Tower and offers to help take down Hush.
Analysis
Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee continue their Hush revival with Batman #159, an issue as simplistic as it is confusing. In the years since the original Hush storyline, there have been several status-quo-altering changes that Loeb now has to reckon with, since this story takes place in the mainline DC continuity. Most notably, the resurrection of Jason Todd and the subsequent decades of development between him and Batman. His way of handling this is to mostly ignore everything that has happened since the original 2002 storyline.
Batman talks about Jason Todd as if he has barely interacted with him since Clayface impersonated him in the original Hush over 20 years ago. He says, “Tommy has brought out this piece on the board before. This feels different. This time my attacker moves exactly like the real one would… I thought we had made amends.” It’s a truly bizarre way to have Bruce talk about his surrogate son, with whom he’s maintained a tumultuous but complex relationship over the past few decades. It’s as if Jason’s only relevance to Bruce is through his connection to Thomas Elliot, a character he has barely crossed paths with in recent years.
Even more bizarre is the way Jason talks about the Clayface impersonation incident as if it just happened: “I know all about how Clayface impersonated me. Games you played with Tommy Elliot. Like tonight.” I don’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about here. For those who don’t remember, Jason worked directly with Hush and Clayface to mess with Batman in the original Hush story, which is clarified in Batman Annual #25.
We don’t know precisely why Jason wants to kill Batman and the Joker yet (besides the obvious), but does this feel familiar to anyone else? Loeb has regressed Bruce and Jason’s character development back twenty years to retell parts of Batman lore that have already been successfully digested by the comic-reading public. We know everyone liked the end of Under the Hood when Batman tried to stop Jason from killing the Joker, so why don’t we just do that again? The climax of this issue is a beat-for-beat retread of Batman #650, which DC has done so many times now. Not only that, but it ignores the hundreds of stories told between these characters in the years since. Can Jeph Loeb really be doing something so transparent?
The original Hush felt like a blockbuster movie that brought in all the elements of Batman’s world: his past, his relationships, his love life, his identity. It paid off decades of storytelling and was full of huge elaborate set pieces like the opera house and the Daily Planet. So far, this is to that what those straight-to-video Disney sequels from the ’90s were to the classic originals: a handful of the same elements inside a cheap, hollow replica of what made the original special.
I could go on about how Batman is taking the Hippocratic oath with the Joker to absurd and obscene levels, but I would risk sounding as repetitive as DC. Instead, I think I’ll just ask what’s going on with the Riddler. If you’ll remember, at the end of the last arc he weighed maybe 120 lbs soaking wet, and now he looks like Dave Bautista. Clearly, Jeph Loeb doesn’t care about continuity — he’s ignoring most of the last 20 years of comics. I know Jim Lee has always been really excited about continuing the mainline Batman book from 1940, but it really is pointless if you have no connection or awareness of its current iteration. This would’ve made much more sense as a standalone non-canon sequel to the original story.
Jim Lee shows a slight improvement from last month with a few cool panels of a grizzled, chin-stubbed Batman. Although perceptive readers will notice his now self-aware tendency to obscure the character’s feet whenever possible is back. The angles are still awkward, and the character poses are robotic. Little attention is given to the subtle character intricacies that set his best work apart. The focus is on the full-page splashes like Batman in the ‘Thinker’ position on page 10 or Batman and Jason pressing guns to each other’s heads near the end. The connecting panels offer no more than what’s necessary to get to the big stuff. This is early-’90s Jim Lee, for better or worse.
Scott Williams’ inking in Batman #159 is anything but precise, playing into the looseness of Jim Lee’s more-is-more style of linework. Alex Sinclair’s coloring does this issue no favors, with the brief flashback panels being a notable exception. We see a very brief reprise of the wonderful watercolor flashbacks from the original Hush storyline with a depiction of the moment Leslie Thompkins came across a recently orphaned Bruce Wayne. They’re not Jim Lee’s best drawings, but they still provide a nice reprieve from the issue’s incessant and largely nonsensical action. Ditto the red, black, and white dream sequence of the Joker killing the Waynes.
But these moments aside, I found the color choices for Leslie’s clinic and the Batcave relied on cold, washed-out shades that gave off a pedestrian malaise. It’s as if the Joker’s pale skin permeates entire pages with whites, light greens, and greys. Even the unmotivated red backgrounds during the Batman/Red Hood fight at least provided some much-needed contrast to amp up the stakes.
Final Thoughts
Batman #159 remains a disappointing and confusing follow-up to the original 2002 storyline. The characters are reduced to their most primitive iterations, and even the art is unexceptional.
