Battle for the Cowl

   I'm going to do the most unfair thing possible to a story: I'm going to criticize Batman: Battle for the Cowl for what it isn't. I'm not going to say much about the actual comic because of the advice my parents gave me regarding the options of saying something nice or saying nothing at all.

   We've seen a gang war before (War Games). We've seen "Gotham In Chaos!" before (War Games, Contagion, No Man's Land, and Knightfall, to name a few). We've seen Dick Grayson become Batman before (Knightfall, again). We've seen the inmates at Arkham Asylum set loose all at once before (Knightfall ... starting to see a trend). Everything about Battle for the Cowl feels insubstantial and reheated. Like leftover french fries.

   What we haven't seen much of lately, outside Morrison's uneven run on Batman, is any questioning about Batman's co-dependent relationship with Gotham. It's probably because I've been re-reading Gotham Central, a series that remains pretty much unmatched in its depiction of Gotham, but Battle for the Cowl felt to me as if it should have begun with a very different premise. What if Gotham was great without Batman? What if it was suddenly free of something and what if crime actually dropped? You can still throw in a ton of actions scenes as the various proteges debate the legacy of Batman and hunt down his rogues gallery. Hell, they probably couldn't be less artificial and disjointed than what we got (oops! sorry, couldn't help it).

   I guess I'm just saying that when a series that has only one tiny goal to accomplish - get Dick Grayson to change costumes - a goal that everyone sees coming, it would be nice to see it handled with less lethargy and rote plotting. It would be nice to see something more than a bad dance remix of the late 1990s/early 2000s.