Review: the Arkham Asylum softball game in Alan Grant and Tim Sale's "Madmen Across the Water."
So it's recently come to my attention that some of you have never heard of this story where the Arkham inmates played softball against the inmates of Blackgate Prison. Because that totally, actually happened.
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Yeah, I had thought about mentioning it, but it hardly seemed to matter once I ended up having to cut Faustus entirely out of these scans. I wanted to talk a lot more about Faustus and what he meant to Jeremiah in this story, especially as he became the representative of Jeremiah's highest hopes and dreams before literally going up in smoke. Times like this I really wish I could post the whole stories without fear of getting in trouble, just because there's so much else to say and see! I mean, who knows what I might miss that someone else might have something to say about?
Gets better every time I re-read it. It's my favorite post-crisis Batman story besides YEAR ONE. Granted, some of the dialogue is hackneyed, but every time I re-read it I see new levels of ambiguity, like whether that woman Pyle falls in love with really was just acting in self-defense.
Honestly, I think that the vast bulk of the first fifty issues of Legends of the Dark Knight--and large swathes of the series thereafter, such as Going Sane--make it the greatest Batman series of all time. Coincidentally, I'm rereading old issues of Wizard where Jeph Loeb is patting himself on the back for building upon Year One with The Long Halloween, but the fact is that many writers in that series (including Loeb!) already DID, and did so wonderfully with stories like Blades. Personally, I don't think they get any better than Prey, but I think stories like Gothic, Venom, Blades, and Masks are great, great stuff. Of course, I still need to review Faces, with all my conflicted feelings therein, but LOTDK was still the showcase for some of the most ambitious and amazing Batman stories Post-Crisis, and no other series has quite been able to replicate that.
It's also one of the few stories I know of to actually make something out of Bruce's childhood idolization of swashbuckler or masked hero films. Sure that "Gray Ghost" episode of the cartoon was good, but actually making it so that Bruce idolized an out and out superhero just seemed too blatant.
Both stories tackle the same subject matter in different ways, with different things to say. That's fantastic. It's proof that there's always more to say about something even if someone else said something similar earlier, if that makes any sense.
You're absolutely right about Karlo, and I'm amazed that no one's really tried exploring that aspect of his past, and what it might potentially mean for Bruce. You have to imagine that his heyday was back when Bruce was at the right age, or perhaps even just a bit earlier.
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