Batman: Gotham Nights #3
Written by Michael Grey
Art by Ryan Benjamin, Richard Friend and Alex Sinclair
Lettering by Troy Peteri
Published by DC
‘Rama Rating: 4 out of 10
The Batman can have a little colonialism, as a treat, in Batman: Gotham Nights #3. Continuing the “baddie of the week” theme from the previous issue, writer Michael Grey pits our Dark Knight Detective against Poison Ivy this round, who has been killing “high-value targets” in the world of industry and deforestation. But while Ivy’s mission is painted as “evil,” the whole affair is rendered rather tone-deaf as the whole story takes place on the land of an indigenous people who are largely caught in the crossfire either way. Batman does nothing more than uphold a predatory status quo here, and it leaves quite a bad taste in the mouth after reading.
Fortunately the artwork does what it can to prop up the weak script. Penciller Ryan Benjamin, inker Richard Friend and longtime Batman colorist Alex Sinclair, while getting caught up in the tangle of the script’s portrayal of the indigenous population, deliver a pretty solid set of Batman visuals, especially when he squares off against Ivy’s amorphous vegatative powers. A little good drowned out by a lot of bad, Batman: Gotham Nights #3 is a mixed bag this week.
To its credit, however, Batman: Gotham Nights #3 looks really great. There still hasn’t been a for real stand-out visually in the DC “Digital First” line as of yet (though Clayton Henry’s Flash makes a pretty strong argument), but Gotham Nights #3 is classic Batman action all over. Thanks to the classic broodiness that Alex Sinclair’s colors bring to the issue, the whole of the story feels appropriately dark and shadowy. Even the lit interiors of a gala tent, set up on a freshly cleared crop of the Amazon rainforest have a pulpy sketchiness thanks to the synergy of Benjamin’s pencils, Richard Friend’s tight inks, and Sinclair’s moody colors.
The trio’s energy becomes even more apparent once Batman and Poison Ivy start to fight. Framed in largely one-color or theatrically set dressed backgrounds, the creative team deliver a pretty rousing showdown between the two, peppered with plenty of gadgets, pitched character blocking, and Swamp Thing-like displays of power. One highlight is when Ivy deploys a wooden exo-suit pulled from one of the few forested areas still left in the area. Batman has to counter quickly and precisely, leaping across the panels to deploy a countermeasure directly to Ivy’s brain, visually depicted with a sudden shock of neons and photo exposed like filters giving the issue a quick jolt of Silver Age psychedelia. When it’s all said and done, nobody will ever call Batman: Gotham Nights #3 a bad-looking comic.
But it’s with Michael Grey’s script where things start to fall apart. For starters, Ivy’s mission of killing industrialists in service of reforestation is… honestly kind of hard to root against in today’s day and age. Of course there is the baseline moral objections against wanton murder, which Batman should obviously stand aganist, but in terms of a responsible stance, it’s hard to imagine Batman trying to fight aganist the repopulation of the rainforest. There is also the prickly matter of the whole story taking place on the cleared land of an indigenous population, complete with a largely silent representative of said population who is wielded like a sort of Chekov’s Moralizing Gun throughout the narrative. Discerning readers can probably see the dramatic intention of the choice, especially as Grey textualizes the cleared and non-cleared portions of the land as a sort of theater of operations in the fight. Ivy can pull from rooted ground, but can’t on cleared land.
And some of the details even hit throughout the script. Another fun detail is how Batman discerns how Ivy is carrying out the killings (she enchants their bodyguards and wipes their memory!) alongside the fun “technobabble” he uses to explain Batman’s new Ivy-centered gadgets. But all the details in the world can’t distract from the weird colonialist bent the story operates with throughout — an element then further exploited with a button that Bruce Wayne will be “buying some land” in the area now. We are probably to assume he is talking about the cleared land and it’s implied he plans to leave it to grow, but it can’t help but read as a very white savior kind of beat.
You have to take the bad with the good sometimes, and that’s very much the experience of Batman: Gotham Nights #3. While it looks great and contains a smattering of good moments, it can’t overcome the problems and implications of its setting and use of indigenous cultures. Perhaps maybe it could have with a defter hand or some judicious edits, but for now Batman: Gotham Nights #3 stands as a weird blip on the DC “Digital First” radar.