Wednesday, July 6, 2022

Review: Batman '89 #6

The final issue, once again published late, opens with Batman confronting Dent, picking up from the end of the previous issue. Dent sets off a bomb, knocking Batman out, as well as ripping half his mask off. With the half mask, Dent not only recognizes Bruce as Batman, but takes a photo of him just as Catwoman and Drake arrive to take Bruce to safety in the Batcave.  After Bruce regains consciousness, he has a heart to heart talk with Selina.  Drake hears on the news James Gordon's body has been found.  Meanwhile, Dent has a meeting with the corrupted politicians and Carmine Falcone. Dent kills Falcone. He also gets a visit from his old friend Jerome who threatens to turn Dent in. Dent kills him and Drake comes in.  Dent pays off Drake for saving his life earlier. Drake threatens to pulverize Dent for what he did, but as they fight into the street, Dent accuses Drake of being the one who killed Jerome.  A crowd holds Drake.  Dent then asks for a meeting with Bruce.  In the Batcave, the former allies meet where Dent tells Bruce he's working for him now or he goes public with the photo exposing his identity. Bruce offers a different deal: Harvey admits to working uncover for Batman to entrap the mob and dirty politicians, then gets surgery to fix his face and goes through psychiatric therapy, while Batman finishes taking out the remaining bad guys.  Once Dent resumes his position as D.A., Batman will retire.  Bruce tells Dent to let the coin decide which way it should go. But as Dent flips the coin, the giant penny in the Batcave comes loose (pushed by Selina), and knocks Dent over a pit, where he holds on as the wheelchair bound Bruce and Selina try to help him.  As they pull Dent up, he seems to get a sense of clarity, and lets go, dropping to his death. Bruce rages at Selina for interfering like this, as he switched Dent's coin with a two-sided clean one, so once he flipped, he would have picked the right thing to do.  They separate realizing they are too different. Bruce clears Drake of the charges by turning in Dent's gun. Drake also decides to go his own way, taking the code name "the Avenging Eagle".  Meanwhile Barbara Gordon gets a package Dent sent her, revealing the evidence Bruce is Batman, and Selina reaches out to her to form... the Birds of Prey?  And Bruce himself now uses Dent's coin to decide whether he should go out as Batman each night.

As with the last issue, this one has a lot more plot than the earlier issues, where nothing happens other than establishing characters and doing a lot of woke virtue signalling.  So much more plot in issue 6, that the panels for this issue are smaller, with more on a page than any of the previous issues.  And lots of exposition dialogue. Perhaps Sam Hamm could have better paced the story.  Overall, this issue, like issue 5, is better than the other four issues. However there are still a lot of WTF moments, like, not only killing off Jim Gordon, but establishing his age as only 58. Then there is the ending, where Bruce now uses the coin to decide if he is going to go on patrol as Batman.  This issue earns a B-.

In regards to Sam Hamm, there is definitely a mystery that needs to be solved.  This is the best he could come up with for a Batman story after all these years?  And it's not like he is overloaded with other writing projects or assignments. It seems like Hamm will go down in history as the screenplay writing equivalent of a "one hit wonder".  Batman '89 as a whole, earns a lackluster C, and serves as a cautionary tale: be careful what you wish for, because you might not only just get it, but it will probably be a disappointment. I can only hope Michael Keaton's return to Batman in The Flash turns out much better than this.

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