In Detective Comics #1086, the Orghams kick their plan to take over Gotham into yet another gear as Batman and his allies, both heroic and villainous, strike back.
Detective Comics #1086 main cover by Evan Cagle
Title: “Gotham Nocturne: Act III – Crescendo, Part 3”
Writer: Ram V
Artist: Stefano Raffaele
Colors: Lee Loughridge
Main Cover: Evan Cagle
Variant Covers: Javier Fernandez/Dave McCaig, Seb McKinnon, Sebastian Fiumara (1:25 incentive)
Release Date: June 25, 2024
This comic book review contains spoilers.
Batman, sporting his new bloody Batsymbol on his chest, beats up dozens and dozens of gang members in an ancient trainyard on his way to meet Two-Face. Using his tiny sound wave speakers, Batman rids Two-Face of the azmer demon, so Harvey can take over again. He apologizes for not understanding the struggle against the azmer and asks for Harvey’s help against the impossible Orgham forces.
Three years after being dragged out of her Joker’s Daughter persona, Duela Dent rents from a kindly old couple in Gotham. Joker sits next to her on a bench and tells her he’s microwaved one of her landlord’s cats to frame her, then leaves her his old mask of his face (from the n52 Detective Comics run).
Jim Gordon gets data on the Orgham’s mysterious plans from his daughter, Oracle, and gives it to Commissioner Montoya (obviously, this story happens on a completely different timeline from the main Batman book).
Batman gives the Ten-Eyed man the same data, looking for patterns.
The Orghams plan to set loose the disenfranchised on the streets of Gotham, led by a Shadow Angel taking the place of Prince Arzen.
On the rooftops, Batman meets with Nightwing, Cassandra Cain Batgirl, and Azrael, recognizing the false flag attack by the Orghams on themselves to paint themselves as innocent responders when they take over Gotham officially. Batman leads his family to fight for Gotham’s dark soul.
Duela reclaims her mission as Joker’s Daughter, murdering her kind landlords brutally, and putting on her old mask as Gotham burns.
Batman and Harvey meet face-to-face-to-face. (credit: DC Comics)
With three issues following this until the end of his run, Ram V adds multiple new elements to the story as it builds to its climax. The mysterious Shadow Angel, yet another Orgham villain with unspecified origin, powers, and motivations, arrives and seems to look a lot like Prince Arzen (but can’t be because Shiva stole his body and gave it to Talia to dunk in a Lazarus Pit a few issues ago). Ram V also drags Joker’s Daughter in from her peaceful retirement. Plus, the Orgham’s have an additional new plan that Batman, Oracle, and the Ten-Eyed Man are trying to predict. This is all while the Orghams launch a false flag attack on themselves, so they can appear like they are responding to a threat when they take over the city. All of these new elements are completely confusing.
Shadow Angel perhaps was set up by the Orgham Queen’s mysterious plan last issue, but again, with so many Orgham villains having no origin, powers that have no definition, and no motivation whatsoever, adding another villain only adds to that frustration. Joker’s Daughter, last remembered in the new 52 where she turned the stomachs of so many readers, is dragged into Joker’s plot against both Batman and the Orghams in yet another stomach-churning, disgusting way. Microwaving a cat to incite a girl to murder people who have been nothing but kind to her is very characteristic of the Joker, but it’s also the kind of thing that is designed to make the reader hurt and disgusted without any recourse. It’s the kind of thing that’s best done at the beginning of an arc so there can be processing and justice. Instead, it’s just thrown in as another escalation of plotlines when the plotlines we already have don’t make sense.
The Orgham’s secret new plan seems to exist just to give Oracle and the Ten-Eyed Man something to do, without having any stakes we actually care about. And of course, the Orghams launching a false flag attack no doubt has wonderful Nazi parallels, but since they already held a public execution in the middle of the city, and talk all the time about how they control the city, having another plan to take over the city again is absolutely bizarre. Add to that the use of extremely complicated symbolic figures like JFK and Gandhi, a gratuitous repetition of Morrison’s “Hole in the world” imagery from the end of Batman Incorporated Vol 2 (far surpassed by Vol 3 by Ed Brisson recently), and you have a book that is trying to say something serious about the world, and crime, and the oppressors and oppressed, but instead get something that runs purely on vibes and falls apart at the slightest breath of careful reading.
A few things stand out as positives. The writing of the established characters, from Jim Gordon to Azrael, continues to show that if Ram V weren’t obsessed with the Orgham plot, this could have been a strong series. The excellent art of Steffano Raffaele also remains a stunner, and it’s nice to see the maintaining of single artists per issue. However, these minor positives don’t outweigh the consistent unnecessary frustration of the plot and main villains.
What About the Backup?
Title: “Habeas Corpus”
Writer: Alex Paknadel
Artist: Lisandro Estherren
Colors: Patricio Delpeche
One of Two-Face’s boys called Stumbles betrayed him and killed another gang member in a gun-buying operation. Two-Face argues with himself about killing Stumbles, imagining a court of law and his old principles. Harvey gets Two-Face to flip for it, and the clean side lands up. Two-Face orders Stumbles banished instead of killed and rounds up his entire gang to go to war with the Orghams.
I really struggle with the sympathy this comic is attempting to arouse in me for characters like Duela, Stumbles, and Two-Face. The sympathy is good to remember the darkness in all of our hearts, but the idea that because they faced hard choices and abuse it’s okay that they murder others is completely unpalatable. It leans towards the idea that Batman has more sympathy with his villains than with the people he’s trying to protect that seems to be one of the main ways The Killing Joke has pushed his character.
That extreme rejection of the story’s apparent moral point aside, Paknadel’s writing is nicely deployed. The internal conflict and lawyer’s setting is fun to see deployed in a Two-Face story, and the tension leading to Harvey’s final decision is very nicely handled, and dovetails well into the main story, as these backups often have been.
The art by Lisandro Estherren, however, is very messy and unappealing. One could argue that it may be intentional – similar to artists like Eduardo Risso or Denys Cowan, Estherren may be capturing the ugliness of the Gotham underworld – but it seems unnecessarily off putting. Fans of Batman: The Animated Series may appreciate the design similarities that Estherren puts into the Harvey side of Two-Face, however!
Evan Cagle’s main cover shows Batman wrapped in his cape as bats made up of Joker smiles fly away – a clever way of hinting at the growing Joker menace in the book. Seb McKinnon’s variant paints Batman in a cemetery beneath a stone angel, a very emotional and lovely image, though the connections to the main story are much harder to discern (if there are any). Veteran artist Javier Fernandez’s variant shows Batman fighting gang members with bar codes on the backs of their heads, a very visceral scene compounded by the glaring red and orange lighting. Sebastian Fiumara once again provides the 1 in 25 incentive variant, this time a statue of Batman defaced with Joker graffiti – another nice nod to the rising Joker plotline in the story, though the cover lacks a lot of Fiumara’s stylistic flourishes.
Editor’s Note: DC Comics provided TBU with an advanced copy of this comic for review purposes. You can find this comic and help support TBU in the process by purchasing this issue digitally on Amazon or a physical copy of the title through Things From Another World.
