May
02
2018
0

Batman #46 Review

Written by: Tom King

Art by: Tony S Daniel

Published by: DC Comics

You ever get on a strange Youtube train and it screws with your whole recommendation list? I’ve been listening to a lot of odd Celtic music lately, and now I can’t find the odd metal I usually review comics to. I prefer the odd metal for reviewing because it’s angry and I am angry and isn’t Batman kind of dumb again? Oh man! You don’t even know! Best stick around to know.

So our quick-and-dirty plot is Booster Gold did some time travel to try and show Bruce he’s got a pretty good life despite dead parents. Evidently Bruce with live parents makes for a really crap Gotham filled with terrorists and a crazy vigilante. Yup. Way better the other way. I can’t figure out how this went wrong at all.

Last issue was kind of fun though. I’m not familiar with Booster Gold, but I enjoyed him there. He had a good rapport with his snarky robot, and there was this genre-savvyness that worked pretty well. He treated the issue like it wasn’t real because in his mind, it wasn’t. With his time-traveling robot dead though, things kind of change. He’s still genre-savvy, but it’s a bit forced. He’s trying to call the shots like he’s in control, but as it turns out, his dead robot was right: Booster Gold is an idiot.

I don’t mind Booster Gold being an idiot. What I do mind is calling the ending about three pages into the comic because Booster Gold is too stupid to see it coming. I hate having to wag my finger at a protagonist and go, “You should know better!” but here we are.

Without the snarky robot, some of the humor doesn’t work as well, either. Booster is clearly desperate, so the forced snark works there, but this is an elseworld’s book plopped into an ongoing series. We all know there won’t be any real consequences to what’s going on. Bruce will eventually go back in time, watch his parents die–haha–and then be the Man Who Is The Bat. He’ll then marry Catwoman and that will be fun.

But this? This feels like filler.

That being said, the last page is hysterical. It isn’t supposed to be, I don’t think, but I had a good laugh.

Artistically, the book is great. Tony S Daniel does good work. No one is surprised. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Batman #46 is a very strange book, because for all its muster at trying to do something with meaning, we all know it won’t end with any. As a funny romp through a new idea, it’s also starting to fail. I like some of its style, and I like some of Booster Gold’s personality, but you cannot have a genre-savvy character miss the obvious. That defeats the purpose. Basically, I’m left wondering why we can’t just have our damn wedding already.