Batman: Damned #1: And There Was Also a Story

In any great – and I mean, truly great—mystery, a simple whodunit? is insufficient. While the case at hand often drives the narrative events, the question of what the story is really about always seems to linger. Often these types of mystery narratives employ a tragic hero on a journey to learn more about themselves through working the case, and if there is a better tragic detective in literary history than Batman, I haven’t encountered them yet. Azzarello has often in his career written characters and stories along these lines; he thrives on tales where the big picture stays slightly out of focus until some crucial moment down the road when every dot connects into a twisted piece of modern art. Azzarello even warns readers that the story is not all it seems by having our narrator, Constantine, bluntly announce himself an unreliable narrator.

For these reasons, reading Batman: Damned #1 can present itself as a scattered story, difficult to follow and perhaps even more difficult to predict (although fellow Comic Watcher John Jack and I have a running theory that seems viable). If you aren’t familiar with some of Azzarello’s other work, the writing here can feel somewhat cumbersome, and to an extent, I agree, but I have learned over the years to stick with it because the payoff is usually well worth the price of admission.

Even if you struggled with the writing, however, the absolute stunning quality of Lee Bermejo’s art should propel you through the story with a jaw-dropping pace. From the muscle and sinew details of Deadman to the foreshadowing image of a dead bat, Bermejo’s museum-quality art is something sure to resonate with almost any fan of comics, regardless of any full-frontal exposure.

On that topic, what a curious double-standard we find in comics fandom. While there have been movements regarding the hyper-sexualization of women in comics, the medium still is rife with strangely proportioned female characters placed in obviously provocative poses to prey on the rampant hormones of a fan-base that was dominantly in their early teen years in the early 1990s. The two panels that featured the flaccid cartoon penis were not sexualized other than by their simple existence, and in fact seem to play directly into the narrative, as we progress to see a naked and vulnerable Bruce Wayne afraid of his own Shadow.