The Batman's Grave Review (Warren Ellis, Bryan Hitch)

Gotham’s latest nutter is a Power Rangers-cosplayer calling himself Scorn and he’s got an army because he’s a Batman villain. Which means Batman gotta punch ‘im. For twelve bloody issues!

I mostly love Warren Ellis’ books (the man himself - ehh, not so much, particularly in light of recent, um, things), and, while he’s written some Batman comics in the past, he’s never tackled a full-length storyline before, so I was excited to see him teaming up with Bryan “Never Met a Dutch Angle I Didn’t Like” Hitch for this 12-issue maxiseries, The Batman’s Grave. And it’s underwhelming, mostly quite boring stuff, unfortunately!

The story itself turns out to be wholly unremarkable. Scorn is just another ordinary dude with conveniently absurd hi-tech/training, for no other reason than plot, with a grudge against the GCPD. He’s a character we’ve seen Batman face a hundred times before (normally he’s called Deadshot). Batman’s journey to finally punch Scorn doesn’t warrant 12 issues - but I’m sure DC knew that combining Ellis and Hitch with Batman meant that they could string along fans for that long, so they did. They were right but still, up yours DC.

Which is why Hitch is given free reign to draw numerous extended fight scenes that add little-to-nothing to the overall story but certainly add to the page count! Watch Batman fight nobodies like the Eater of Faces, Colonel Sulphur, Dr Karl Helfern’s Scorn goons, more Scorn goons in Arkham Asylum, Scorn himself a couple times, and more Scorn goons. Throw in tons more splash pages, lots of pointless dialogue, and pages like an entire page of Batman walking past a bus stop because his Batmobile got blowed up.

The book is essentially 80% filler for what is a feeble, instantly forgettable story. Ellis tosses in a lot of convoluted elements like hypnotic drugs and serial killer murders and the takeover of Arkham but it’s just loud nonsense to distract you from the nothing-to-it plot and the villain’s eye-rollingly flat motivations. No idea why this is called “The Batman’s Grave” either - like a lot of this book, it fails to connect to anything halfway meaningful.

That said, I liked the way Ellis wrote Batman’s thought processes for getting into victims’ heads and he wrote the funniest Alfred I’ve read in some time. Some of the lines that made me laff:

Bruce: You work in the manor all day and you spend all night in the cave. How do you even do that?
Alfred: I am habitually ripped to the gills on very fine cocaine, sir.

Bruce: I may not buy people out of a life of crime, but I’ve been developing that approach.
Alfred: Because I have nagged and shamed you.
Bruce: No.
Alfred: I have owned you, sir. Confess it.

Bruce: I should call the police and tell them there’s a shot man on my floor and the butler did it.
Alfred: Sir. Young master. You wouldn’t grass on faithful old Alfred to the rozzers, would you? Not ALFRED. (slurps whiskey)

The scene where Alfred shoots an intruder with rubber bullets is great, especially when Alfred keeps returning to shoot the unconscious intruder again and again to make sure he doesn’t get up! Hitch draws him like David “Pink Panther” Niven too which is perfect.

Hitch’s art is brilliant as it usually is. While too much of the book is extended wordless fight scenes between Batman and whichever easily-defeatable foe is standing in front of him, they’re well choreographed and great to see. It’s just I don’t think people want to see so much of this when they pick up a Batman book - they want something to read, not half a book full of Batman fight scenes! The excessive Dutch angles are a weird stylistic choice and some of the designs for Batman’s gadgets are awful. In one scene he’s flying what looks like a robot’s turd (made up of wheels and lights) and the Bat-hound drones looked horrendous!

While the art is good and Ellis’ wit translates well through Alfred, The Batman’s Grave is overall an overlong, bloated, meandering, and completely unmemorable book - a disappointing effort from such a talented creative team.