Aliens invade Earth because they’ve got beef with Superman - who’s mysteriously vanished. After the Justice League fails to save the day, Batman and an unlikely team decide the only way to defeat the aliens is with alien tech - found in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Which has also mysteriously vanished. Nothing’s ever that easy, eh Bats - well, not if you want to fill eight pointless issues it isn’t!
Maybe it’s because of the success of Sean Murphy’s White Knight books being its own contained universe, along with Tom Taylor’s myriad standalones, that DC are doing more non-canon books, which category Batman: Fartress definitely falls into. Why do I suspect this? Because two famous characters are killed and Superman’s family history is retconned to align with that of a certain 20th century figure who famously had one ball, although that (probably apocryphal) detail was a long way from the thing he was best known for. So that’s lovely. Also, this isn’t a very good comic.
The story isn’t a bad one. Thinking about it overall, there’s a way to do this in half the space and actually be good. The problem is that it’s eight issues long and that’s way too much fat. The first issue is Batman dealing with the problems caused by the blackout in Gotham, and the second is the Justice League failing to stop the aliens, all of which could’ve been skipped over or summarised much more quickly.
Then Batman and his team go here, then go there, looking for the Fortress, and then there’s a lot of tedious deathtraps to overcome. It all goes on for much too long, particularly as most of it is uninteresting - there’s too much bloat in this book and boy does it make for a slooooow read. What makes it slower is Gary Whitta’s verbosity too - if you’re not a fan of reading massive blocks of text on each page, you might want to skip this one.
I’m not sure if this is a plot hole as I don’t know how his powers work but one of Batman’s team is the new Aquakid. He’s important because the Fortress is at the bottom of the sea and, as we all learned recently from OceanGate, subs can only go so far down before they implode. So Aquakid’s powers enable the sub to go waaaaaayyy deeper than OceanGate would’ve ever gone and the team begin the deathtrap run into the Fortress. But Aquakid gets knocked unconscious in the first fight - would that mean that the sub wouldn’t have been protected by his powers and have imploded? Hmm.
There are some things in this comic that made me smile though. Superman’s reasoning for not being present for most of the book was the equivalent of hiding under a pile of coats and hoping everything would somehow work out.
The characters being so stupid as to point out it would be really dumb to have a fight this deep under the sea in such a fragile environment - and then doing it anyway. Steven Seagal would’ve been proud of this level of plotting.
And the chef’s kiss finale that Whitta leaves you with: Batman getting superpowers suddenly off-page and basically saying he’s going to be the new, more evil Superman. So the moral of the story is: Batman is a psycho. Wunnerful.
The execution was abysmal - Gary Whitta is as unfamiliar with brevity as Ezra Miller is with sanity - but the bones of a good story were there underneath mountains of boring words. Darick Robertson’s art is dependably good (Batman’s mouth looked really weird in some panels though - hamster-ish) and you might get a chuckle or two out of Prez Luthor’s wackiness, or the idiocy of the third act’s revelations. But Batman: Fartress is most definitely not an entertaining or fun book. DC do it again!
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