Batman ’89 #4: I Wanna Have Some Fun

WOW!!! Just think, in some universe, this is actually “Batman 3”, or whatever it would’ve been called. Boy, I really wish I had a magic wardrobe that led there because watching this on the big screen would’ve been awesome!! But reading it in comic form is just as awesome! We all know the secret origins of all the Robins. Very well. We’ve read them in the comics, seen them in movies, watched them in the cartoons, read them in novels, and watched them again in animated movies and real-live TV shows. But this Robin is very different from any other origin you’ve ever read. We get more than the “parents die/go missing/never around=Batman adopts” scenario here. Author Sam Hamm delivers a story that is truly all-encompassing and every single issue of this series has been leading towards this. New, fresh, exciting, unique, and diverse are all words that describe this issue, as well as heartbreaking and scary. Hamm gives us a new take on a classic villain, and it’s actually something we’ve been waiting for for over 30 years. Was it worth the wait? I’ll let you be the judge, But the answer is yes, yes it totally was. 

And I gotta give another WOW to Joe Quinones, whose art is superb in this issue. Actually, it’s been superb in every issue, but it’s super-superb in this one. There’s a lot of things going on here, and a lot of different environments and Quinones captures all of them perfectly. The 1989 Batman movie that this book is based on, has a very specific mood about it. Practically everything about that movie was dark in tone, and that carries over here. Between him and colorist Leonardo Ito, they are successful in transferring that feel onto the printed page. Very well done!!