Batman: War Games, Act Three: Endgame

 

By various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-84576-122-7

Spoiler Ahead! Have you reviewed the other volumes of this storyline?

Rather than put you to the trouble of looking up the review of the previous volumes, please allow me to quote and paraphrase: Batman has training scenarios in place for every eventuality. One of them, in which he posits a takeover of all criminals in Gotham by his own undercover agent, has been activated by his current assistant Spoiler/Robin the Girl Wonder, leading to a gang war and general bloodbath. As the chaos ensues, sadistic mastermind Black Mask hijacks both the plan and Spoiler, whom he tortures near to death. He also kills Batman’s agent Orpheus and takes his place. All of Gotham is under fire and when the Dark Knight tries to take control of the police force. No longer an “Urban Myth”, Batman is now the focus of both police anger and public attention…

This volume of War Games serves to clear up and set the scene for another restart of the Batman Family, and I’m not going to reveal too much in case you want to read it yourself, but I will say that any new audiences that this kind of event garners – at least in Graphic Novel terms – must be supremely indifferent to many of the big thematic revisions touted in the periodical origins of the eight related series that make up this book. So nobody believed in the Bat and his buddies before this? The criminals certainly did. So he works outside the law now? Didn’t he always, at least, since the last time he didn’t? So some of his cast don’t survive? Nobody major – and who stays dead in comics?

I so wanted to be upbeat here. Individually many chapters from the forty or so assorted comics professionals working here are very good. It’s the marketing policy that falls down. The shouting of “milestones” and “turning points” and “major changes” never amount to anything and the illusion of change is just that, when looked at with the perspective of a little time and distance.

Wouldn’t it be better to get all these wonderfully talented creators to concentrate on simply producing good stories as they do in the course of their regular assignments and quit this relentless chasing of the cross-over cash cow? There could still be compilations and collections, but they’d have entertainment as their main concern, not traffic and continuity management. Don’t all these great characters and jaded readers deserve that at least?

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