We’re living in a particularly uncreative era for art where a great deal of what’s being produced by the big companies is an endless raft of unwanted prequels, sequels, spinoffs and remakes rather than imaginative original stories and challenging ideas. So here’s another useless prequel: Batman: The Knight!
Haunted and forever traumatised by the loss of his parents as a kid, Bruce Wayne vows that his experience never be repeated again by becoming a bat-themed vigilante. But how did he gain the skills - the pieces of his armour - to become the Dark Knight?
Perhaps a better question would be: who cares? Because, with most interesting characters, it’s not how they came to be who they are that makes them compelling but what they’ll do next. Go forward, not back - those are the stories I want to read.
We really don’t need to see him bare knuckle boxing in Gotham, travelling the world, learning martial arts in the Himalayas, detection skills in Paris, shooting in Canada, etc. You could literally just show a panel or two of these things in a larger story and the reader gets it - we can fill in the blanks ourselves. He trained for years to get these skills. Of course. We’re not dullards.
Chip Zdarsky tries to enliven the story occasionally but his efforts fall flat. Bruce and Henri Ducard investigate a serial killer, Bruce and John Zatarra fight a demon, Bruce and Ra’s Al-Ghul sword fight topless for the zillionth time, Bruce and his friend Anton - is he good or evil? None of it was remotely intriguing to me. I kept waiting for there to be a point to this book but it failed to appear. Bruce falls for a cat burglar in France - gasp! That’s why he likes Catwoman! No. Catwoman is hot. Bruce didn’t need to have had a thing for a cat burglar-type in his youth to show us why he fancies her later in life.
I can understand why DC puts out books like this. Year One is a consistent high seller for them and they’re maybe hoping the next Batman origin story will be this generation’s Year One - that’s why there are so many Batman origin stories (not as laughably many as Superman, but close).
And even though origin stories exist, including an entire line of comics exploring the early years of Batman’s career called Legends of the Dark Knight, I can’t point to a book that exactly tells you how Bruce learned the skills (maybe Scott Snyder’s All-Star Batman? I’ve forgotten most of that terrible series at this point). But then Batman: The Knight (such a bland title) proves why a book like that didn’t previously exist: it’s dreary to read and irrelevant.
Batman: The Knight isn’t horribly written or drawn - it’s competent (if charmless and forgettable) on both counts - but I’m giving it the lowest rating because I was never anything but consistently uninterested in what I was reading. Year One remains the best Batman origin story and it made its enduring mark in just four issues - brevity is indeed the soul of wit. The Knight drones on for ten unremarkable issues and leaves no impression behind.
A little mystique goes a long way - you’d think the publisher of The Joker would understand that but I’m probably overestimating DC’s grasp of its own intellectual properties. I’m paraphrasing Chekhov who said “If you want to bore your audience, tell them everything” - I was thoroughly bored as Chip Zdarsky told me everything about how Batman came to be.
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