Batman: The Knight #6: The Way Of The Gun

Burce Wayne is at his best when he is presented as a man who is sensitive to nuance. Batman is defined by his intellect, by what he sees, and how he applies his knowledge to the world. This kind of intelligence cannot be trapped in the easy binary of conventional morality. Zdarsky is working in a visual medium, and that gives most comics writers an excuse to flatten difficult moral quandaries into easy, stark lines of black and white, but Zdarsky never submits to the tyranny of easy things, and he is willing to spend whole pages parsing questions until he exposes the marrow of their essences.

The question here is “Can anything but death come from a gun?” The answer is given by the close-up sight of a bullet wound, and the glazed eyes of a creature that was utterly innocent. 

This issue is small in scope: there are only three characters, and it all takes place in a snow-blank, isolated setting. This small cast and bleak stage lends the script a terrible intensity. It’s like a Cohen brothers movie, but one that is directed in their nihilist mode, unleavened by comedy. The plot is driven by the force of three very different characters clicking against each other until one of them shatters. 

I loved every second of it. 

Carmine Di Giandomenico’s art was brutal, focused, and as beautifully crafted as the script. Ivan Plascencia does astonishing things with red blood on white snow. 

Reading this book stopped my breath. I emerged from it with a gasp, as though I were drowning, or being born.