Batman, Volume 1: Failsafe Review (Chip Zdarsky, Jorge Jimenez)

SPOILERS

The Penguin is dying and, with his final act, frames Batman for his seeming-murder. This brings about another unexpected consequence as news of Batman’s “killing” activates a dormant robot called Failsafe who is designed to step in when Batman goes too far and stop him - permanently. How will Batman defeat an unstoppable robot version of himself?

With the dismal Tynion age of Batman thankfully over, Chip Zdarsky has stepped up to the role of the main Batman series writer. Considering he wrote the Marvel Batman, Daredevil, for quite a while, and to some acclaim, I was hoping (but not really expecting) his Batman run to be half-decent - and, like his overrated Daredevil run, it’s turned out to be unfortunately underwhelming stuff.

Failsafe is basically a rehash of Mark Waid’s celebrated (and also vastly overrated) ‘90s JLA storyline Tower of Babel wherein Batman is revealed to have secret plans to take down each member of the Justice League, if he needed to. Failsafe is the plan to take down Batman, when he needs to be.

So it’s a lot of boring recriminations from characters like Superman (“How could you?” etc. etc.) and a lot of boring action as everyone comes at Failsafe and, of course, fails to take it down, while it plows through everyone like the T-1000 knockoff it is.

Zdarsky makes another callback to another famous Batman storyline: RIP. I get that some people (wrongly) don’t like this storyline or Grant Morrison’s Batman run overall but I loved it and I liked seeing the wonderfully bonkers Batman of Zur-En-Arrh make a return. This is the backup identity Batman has that comes into play when he’s attacked psychologically. And I love that Zur-En-Arrh, because he’s so much like Batman (because he IS Batman), also creates a backup in case he’s ever compromised - so Failsafe is a backup of a backup, which is brilliant. It’s so Batman.

That said, Failsafe is too much. So he’s deployed if Batman kills but he can cause untold damage, potentially leading to more death, in the process of killing Batman? I’m talking about when he essentially turns Gotham into a warzone, ostensibly to lure Batman out of hiding, but which can’t have been damage-free to innocent people. That doesn’t make sense, does it? It feels like Zdarsky went too far in trying to make his debut on the main title as BIG as he could.

The space scene was really interesting - completely insane and very silly, especially in how it ends, but, y’know, it’s Batman. And I liked that the storyline wraps in a way similar to how RIP begins. Jorge Jimenez’s art is fine - I’m not crazy about it but it’s of a solid standard for Batman.

Also included are the backup strips, also written by Zdarsky. Catwoman and a robot executor for the Penguin’s will, imaginatively called The Executor, hunt down Penguin’s surprisingly many children and potential heirs. The other backup is about Zur-En-Arrh meeting the Joker. Neither are very good and both are pointless though I liked Leonardo Romero’s Darwyn Cooke-ish art on the Zur-En-Arrh/Joker backup.

The premise is clever, the scene in space is fun in an over-the-top way, the art in general isn’t bad, but I wasn’t that taken with the near-constant brainless, consequence-free action that comprises most of this book and the backups are rubbish filler. Zdarsky doesn’t write Batman poorly but he doesn’t write him well either and his Batman feels as unimpressive as Tynion’s without adding much to the character’s canon. I’m hoping the series picks up though and we’ll see better Batman books down the line but Failsafe, for me anyway, is a fail.