I Am Batman #1, from DC Comics, provokes another view of the Batman character, as another man fills the Batshoes and battles the bad guys.
Jace, the son of Lucius Fox, is secretly enhabiting the Bat brand. His computer tells him that his new suit is “done and printed”. This is not your Grandma Moses hand-stitched replica. Rather, it’s a heavily reinforced hitech-over-armor skin to wear, a second skin, a masked layer between Jace’s best intentions and the evildoers of Gotham.
It’s the future state of chaos, where the Magistrate tracks all masked people, so there needs to be a mixed strategy: stay off the grid while wearing the newest battle wear. Oh, no car, not helicopter, no Batpup.
Writer John Ridley does his darnedest to sock us with groovy dialogue, to amp up the antics, to dramatize the darkness. The dialogue works extra hard, overtime. Slang, street, cadences colliding. Ridley shines a light into the situations where the new, anonymous Batperson Avatar Mimic appears. “I Am Batman”‘s not wanted, and outright disrespected. A pox on him.
Artist Olivier Coipel pours on the visual heat. The poses are electric, the fights are acrobatic and adversarial. It’s aerial, it’s brutal, it’s lit like the Fourth of July to the tune of the Fifth of Beethoven. The orchestration of the drama is fun and exhilarating; what can you do with a vigilante who is hated and reviled and revived?
Explosively vivid colour choices by Alex Sinclair, letters by Troy Peteri. Plenty of variant covers to choose from.
DC Comics, I Am Batman #1, $3.99 for 22 pages of content. Ages 13+
Newsdesk