Batman ’89 #1: You Ever Dance with the Devil..?

Some of us have been waiting a long time for this comic. Like thirty-two years and that’s probably longer than most of you reading this have been alive. That’s depressing, but I told myself I wasn’t going to drink tonight. Moving on, WHY did it take thirty-two years to get Sam Hamm to write (another) Batman comic, let alone one based on one of the most successful movies of all time? Well, let’s just be thankful he has, and let’s be thankful that he went the way he did. As excited as I was for this issue, I was really nervous that we were going to get “Batman 1.5”, something bridging the gap between Batman and Batman Returns but rest easy, what we get is about the farthest thing from that as you can get. Hamm tells a story that takes place in a Gotham that you would logically picture after the events of the 1989 Batman movie took place. Hamm brings up a pretty good number of plotlines that we wanted to see concluded in the movie, ones we thought we’d see, but never got to. His story revolves around the most glaring of them, and he sets it down a road that’s going to smash head-on into Bruce Wayne’s life. New characters are introduced, but it’s which ones and their place in this book that will surprise, if not outright shock you. Naturally, Sam Hamm knows the voices of these characters better than almost anyone, and it shows. You can hear the actors’ voices saying these lines, which are all in synch with the characters portrayed in the movie itself. Not only is this a dead-on-balls accurate follow-up story to the movie, but it’s also a really good Batman comic in general. That’s like two slam-dunks in the same play. 

Listen, we’ve all got to pitch in when it comes to artist Joe Quinones. Somebody needs to do his laundry, somebody’s got to cut his food, simply put we’ve all got to work together to protect his hands by any means necessary!! I first noticed his work on social media regarding this very book. I guess he had pitched this book to DC at one time and they passed, so he decided to show the work he’d done and when I saw it, my mind was blown. I’m guessing other people’s were too, because here I am, writing about it. Quinones could’ve been a set designer on that film. EVERYTHING on these pages looks like it fell off the movie screen and landed in this comic. My biggest worry art-wise was that the likenesses would either be too distracting or be too watered down so that nobody had to pay likeness rights. But he executes them perfectly. Everyone looks like they should and everything looks like it should. I was also a little worried that he’d give Batman’s suit an upgrade that wasn’t needed, but he kept it just like it was in the movie. He has a great way of advancing some things but keeping the nuts and bolts of Gotham City in a “timeless” era of the late ’80s. There are no iPhones, no earbuds, no parachute pants or zubaz that would immediately date the book. Overall, very impressive work by artist Joe Quinones.