Review – Batman #38 (DC Comics)

Publisher: DC Comics
Script: Scott Snyder
Art: Greg Capullo
Release Date: 28th January, 2015

“I don’t know what to do. These are uncharted waters.”

Batman is always one step ahead. For the last couple of decades at least, the Dark Knight has been written as the ultimate chess-player, a man so smart and ruthless that he can make up for being a mere human in a world of meta-humans merely by planning for every eventuality.

In Endgame, Scott Snyder is blowing all that out of the water. The first chapter showed that preparation being tested when the Justice League turned up full of Joker toxin, but Snyder was only getting started, with each chapter dropping a succession of shocking moments, but he’s really outdone himself here.

With more and more citizens infected with the Joker’s insanity-causing poison, Gotham is in chaos as Batman searches for a cure. Instead, what he gets is more questions and very possibly, a revelation about the origins of The Joker. And it’s a bombshell.

Now Snyder has set this up very cleverly, in that it is a story being told to Batman and therefore the reader, allowing the possibility of an unreliable narrator. Similar to how he never conclusively stated that Lincoln March was Bruce Wayne’s brother, Snyder has dropped a nuclear bomb into the Batman mythos here. Seriously, if this is true, this changes everything. If it’s not? It’s still a masterful display of bravura storytelling.

Oh and just when you think you can’t take any more, Snyder saves one last jaw-dropper right for the end. It’s mindblowing stuff.

It’s not all the Scott Snyder show though, as Greg Capullo is on the form of his life here, equally at home selling the collapse of society perfectly with vivid scenes of crowd-disorder as he is on the tense talking heads shots.

Make no mistake, this is a dream team for the Dark Knight. Snyder and Capullo are leading the charge for one of the strongest runs the Batman title has had in a long, long time and this issue sums up everything that is great about it.

Sometimes, 5/5 just doesn’t seem enough.

INTERIOR ARTWORK
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