Non-Doomino Effect: Batman: Last Knight on Earth #1-2 and The Batman Who Laughs #4-7

Because of work trips and other general busyness, I fell behind on virtually every comics series I was buying, which then impeded my ability to get back on a weekly schedule. These Non-Doomino Effect entries will be an attempt to chip away at the stack so I can get back to the normal routine. Today, it’s Batman: Last Knight on Earth #1-2 and The Batman Who Laughs #4-7.

Scott Snyder’s run on Batman from The New 52 was one of my favorite runs of all time. I loved the horror element he brought to the book, and both of these series have been fantastic.

Batman: Last Knight on Earth reunites him with Greg Capullo, who is great, but still — for whatever reason — seems content being a blatant Todd MacFarlane rip-off. This series is so far probably best described as a Batman take on Old Man Logan. Society has collapsed, the bad guys have won, there are all sorts of spectacles to express the extent of the damage (such as the hills they’re walking on being the cloak of the fallen Spectre) and it’s up to Batman to save the day.

As I mentioned with DCeased, I usually don’t care for Elseworlds / What If stories, but this is done well enough that I’m digging it and very much looking forward to the final issue (I think it’s just three issues, anyway). This would probably be perfect if not for the JRJr cover.

Speaking of people wounded by the cruel laughter of others, that leads me to The Batman Who Laughs #4-7. I was keeping up on this series before my summer derailed me, and I was totally digging it, but the story was dense and twisty enough — and Jock’s art is often ambiguous enough — that I frequently kept putting the later issues aside because I felt like I didn’t have the attention or patience to dedicate to them.

I’m glad I finally sat down and finished this series, though. I wasn’t a huge fan of Metal, even though I admired its attempts to tie together a lot of threads from throughout the years. So even though this was a Scott Snyder book, I didn’t have a lot of emotional buy-in to this, given that The Batman Who Laughs came from that event.

Ultimately that didn’t matter much, though, because this series really just boils down to being a Batman vs. The Joker story, with the added bonus of being a Batman vs. Batman story. Other than a few cameos from the weirdly immortal-or-whatever Joker (another thing I didn’t really care for from Snyder’s Batman run), this felt like an otherwise straightforward (in a good way) cat-and-mouse Batman story. Solid stuff.

BONUS FOOTNOTE: I had seen all the “Year of the Villain” stuff with the Batman Who Laughs all over it, and therefore thought “This series probably won’t have a satisfying ending if the Batman Who Laughs is still out and about” but I was wrong! I felt like this series ended just fine — it was just the pivot out of this series that was lame.

I picked up Batman/Superman #1 a few weeks ago, which spun out of this series and picked up the fight against The Batman Who Laughs; I figured that new series must include an intriguing story of how The Batman Who Laughs escapes and launches his new evil plot!

NOPE.

Even though (SPOILERS) The Batman Who Laughs #7 ends with The Batman Who Laughs captured and securely imprisoned, and then plugs that the story continues in Batman/Superman #1, he’s just out on the loose in that issue, with no mention of how that happened. Lame. I have no intention of continuing with that series.