In The Bat-Man: First Knight #3, the titular hero confronts The Voice’s dastardly plans for Gotham in an explosion that rocks the city – and the world!
The Bat-Man: First Knight #3 main cover
Writer: Dan Jurgens
Artist: Mike Perkins
Colors: Mike Spicer
Main Cover: Mike Perkins
Variant Covers: Tyler Crook, pulp cover by Marc Aspinall
Release Date: May 21, 2024
This comic book review contains spoilers.
The Voice’s henchmen relay the panicked news that the Bat-Man and Jim Gordon captured his chief enforcer Johnny the Whip. At Wayne Manor, Bruce in his Bat-Man suit contemplates his father’s gun when Julie Madison walks in. Shocked at discovering Bruce’s secret life, she pleads with him not to use lethal force with the gun. Bruce opens up to her, and they make love. She wakes the next morning alone in bed. She finds Bruce has burned his father’s guns and is dissecting one of the zombie corpses. He tells Julie he’s going to fight the monsters from Blackgate with a new chemical weapon.
At the hospital where Johnny the Whip is being held, Bruce meets Gordon and the sinister Blackgate Warden Shelby, and they discuss the situation.
On the movie set, Julie and her gay costar (who she is dating as a shield for his sexuality) talk about her relationship with Bruce.
Bat-Man gives Gordon his new gas weapon against the zombies in Gordon’s office.
At the hospital, a zombie abducts Johnny, while Bat-Man follows The Voice’s men on top of their car.
Rabbi Cohen is protected from antisemitic gangs by the brothel owner’s muscle.
Suddenly, explosions rock Gotham! Warden Shelby tells his dreams of ruling Gotham to his subordinate DeBesso, but Bat-Man interrupts, accusing Shelby of being The Voice. Shelby denies it, and Bat-man realizes that it’s actually DeBesso. He follows the villain to his underground lair, where DeBesso injects Johnny with the zombie formula. Bat-Man fights the zombies and DeBesso, discovering that the prison guard’s dream is to take over Gotham City and to push America further into isolationism, to avoid the carnage of another World War.
Gordon uses the gas to destroy the zombies attacking in the wake of the explosions, while Rabbi Cohen fights the fires at his synagogue, and Bat-man drops anti-zombie gas from a biplane. The Bat-Man leaps from the plane as it crashes into a tower, then fights DeBusso in a graveyard. DeBusso tries to inject Bat-man with his zombie serum, but Bat-Man forces him to inject himself, which combined with the anti-zombie gas, destroys him.
Bat-Man meets with Rabbi Cohen as he cleans up his synagogue after the conflagration, and the Rabbi hopes that his protector can find peace. Bat-Man replies that he cannot have peace but will fight for the peace of everyone else in Gotham.
The Bat-Man: First Knight #3 by Dan Jurgens, Mike Perkins & Mike Spicer. (Image credit: DC Comics)
Dan Jurgens and Mike Perkins bring their 1940s tale of the Bat-Man to an explosive ending, tying most of the threads they started in The Bat-Man: First Knight #1 up neatly and leaving room for more stories with these versions of the classic characters if the series sells well. All in all, it’s an okay effort. Jurgens continues to provide his textured 1940s dialogue, punctuated by pungent slang, marred slightly by cursing seemingly only present for ratings. The scenes are almost luxuriously self-contained, rarely rushing into each other in typical comic book compression, as Jurgens uses his hefty page count to its full advantage. However, this leads to a bit of a feeling of halting pacing, as there’s a lot of stuff that shows off character and period detail – you can almost hear the tinny trumpets and flowing fiddles of a 1940s movie score under the scenes – but doesn’t really move along efficiently, accomplishing multiple tasks at once. You could argue that such inefficiency, such showing off of the craft of writing and art are the point of a Black Label book – but the characters themselves don’t quite have the depth to hang such weight. The closest we come in Jurgens’ original character of Rabbi Cohen, whose compassion towards all he meets in Gotham is quite moving – but he still doesn’t quite transcend his noble two-dimensionality into the complexity of a Leslie Thompkins or similar figure.
There’s also a sense of well-executed-but-perhaps-over-trodden ground in First Knight. The characters run through their paces well, but nothing really new appears thematically or character wise. After complaining about overly radical takes like Brian Azzarello’s Batman: Damned or John Ridley’s I Am Batman, it might seem a bit hypocritical to also complain when Jurgens is completely faithful to the core of Batman’s character and the characters of his supporting cast. But despite the careful quality of Jurgens’ dialogue, there just isn’t a real freshness to each scene. You can see how each plot point comes from a classic source or sources – from the romance mirroring Batman 1989, to the Bat-Plane mimicking Batman: Year One, to the multiple “Batman disappears while Gordon is talking to him” scenes. None of it is bad, but it doesn’t really scratch any itches for this Bat-reader. Thankfully, Jurgens shows a lot of restraint and avoids making his first Black Label story also a Joker story. That being said, its faithfulness to the core of the characters and ideas does mean it serves as a perfectly serviceable Elseworld, sitting on the shelves for fans who want to know what a modern take on the original period of Bat-Man might look like.
Mike Perkins’ art continues to provide dark, shadowy noir for fans of 1940s detective and crime films. The colors by Mike Spicer wash Gotham in dark greys and blues, punctuated by the glowing explosions and gory reds of the zombies. Though characters’ faces sometimes struggle to maintain consistency from panel to panel, and anatomy is sometimes a bit overly contorted or stiff, Perkins continues to make the book stand out from the typical Batman art, while also avoiding the overly plastic feel of some painted artists like Lee Bermejo and Alex Ross. The action and violence is quite nice, and the few romantic scenes have a solid emotion to them, even if they feel a bit tacked onto the story. All in all, the collected issues of The Bat-Man: First Knight continue to offer something extra in the way of art. Though not spectacular, it’s consistently good and often impressive.
Mike Perkins’ main cover presents our cast of characters in a film-montage format, framed by the silhouette of the Bat-Man – very movie-poster! Tyler Crook’s zombie poster has a Two-Face quality, lit half in blue, half in red, but is kind of an overemphasized minor element of the story. Marc Aspinall’s pulp novel variant shows a classical painting style Bat-Man standing on a burning tower, with stately print title and trade dress promising “Red-Hot Adventure” – quite appropriate!
Editor’s Note: DC Comics provided TBU with an advance 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.
