Batman & the Monster Men / Batman & the Mad Monk

Batman & the Monster Men
By Matt Wagner, with Dave Stewart (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1091-5

Grendel and Mage creator Matt Wagner has had an eclectic but never disappointing relationship with the Dark Knight, and in 2006 undertook an ambitious year-long project to update two of the earliest adventures (from Detective Comics #31-32 and Batman #1 no less), implanting them within the fresh new milieu devised by Frank Miller in Batman: Year 1.

Originally released as a 12-issue limited series, Batman: Dark Moon Rising was divided into matching trade paperback collections with the first, Batman & the Monster Men, expanding on the Golden Age original by Bill Finger, Bob Kane & Jerry Robinson, introducing a welter of psychological and political tensions to boost the already deranged, doom-drenched atmosphereâ€¦

Law student Julie is daughter to one of the city’s most forthright and prestigious businessmen, but even Norman Madison is unable to maintain his pristine reputation and stay out of the greedy clutches of criminals like Sal Maroni and over-boss â€œThe Romanâ€ who truly owns Gotham.

The mob’s tendrils run deep into City Hall and the Police Department, and even maverick scientists like Professor Hugo Strange go to Sal when they need cash in a hurry with no questions asked: legitimate inquiries like â€œwhere are you getting your illegal medical supplies and chemicals?â€ and â€œwhy are you paying hush-money to attendants at Arkham Asylum?â€â€¦

But now a crazy vigilante dressed like a bat is hitting the gangsters hard and fast and often, stirring the entire dark metropolis into a cauldron of deadly nervous tensionâ€¦

Julie doesn’t care: she’s far more interested in uncovering the intimate secrets of her new and so enigmatic boyfriend Bruce Wayneâ€¦

The brilliant Strange has abandoned his chosen field of psychology to improve mankind through genetic manipulation, but his experiments are so costly. Luckily for him, he has never been burdened by ethics or scruples, and Gotham’s streets and asylums are filled with derelicts nobody will ever missâ€¦

He also regularly avails himself of Maroni’s high-end loan-sharking operation, but that is always a process fraught with peril and humiliationâ€¦

When a snooty debutante at a High Society shindig mocks the bald, short and myopic Strange – fruitlessly peddling his theories of genetic perfection to the idle rich in hopes of finding more enlightened sponsors than The Mob – she and her escort vanish later that nightâ€¦

Police Captain Jim Gordon – rumoured to have a secret working relationship with the Bat vigilante – is assigned the case when her arm washes out of a sewer. It’s gnawed and clawed and covered in brutish animal hairs which prove to be humanâ€¦ sort ofâ€¦

Strange’s frustrations mount when Maroni’s men pay a little social call to remind him his next repayment is due. He uses his latest setbacks, a trio of hulking hyper-thyroidal genetic failures with a taste for human flesh and hides immune to bullets, to avenge his honour and as a means of procuring the funds he’s lacking.

Following the thugs to a high stakes poker game, he and devoted lab assistant Sanjay simply let their manufactured brutes run amok and scoop up all the blood-soaked cash afterwards.

Maroni’s business is booming. Although deeply suspicious of the money Strange paid him back with, the loan-shark has no such problems with high and mighty Norman Madison, whose sudden business reversals have put him in the mobster’s pocket to the tune of 3 million untraceable, dirty dollarsâ€¦

Elsewhere, Julie is becoming increasingly frustrated by Bruce Wayne’s inability to keep an appointment or even turn up for a date, and Jim Gordon wonders what to do with a car filled with bizarre, exotic bat-motif weaponry left behind after the Bat-Man’s latest explosive clash with criminals in the streets of Gothamâ€¦

The Dark Knight doesn’t care: he’s obsessed with this cannibal case which somehow links rich women with slaughtered underworld gamblers and the near-completion of a stupendous, purpose-built automobile that will be the acme of his arsenal against crime…

After Batman pays Maroni a midnight visit the loan-shark bolts for the countryside and The Roman’s private hideaway. Left in charge, his brutish lieutenant puts the screws to Norman Madison and triggers the start of a nervous breakdown in the ashamed, guilt-ridden business leader, even as Batman traces the monster-men to a hidden lab and is ambushed by Strange.

Drugged and thrown to the gargantuan monstrosities, the neophyte avenger faces his first battle with foes more and far less than humanâ€¦

Battling with Herculean passion and demonic cunning, the Gotham Gangbuster barely escapes with his life and awakens in his own bed with Julie tending him. She clearly does not believe his hastily concocted explanationsâ€¦

Hard on the heels of his ignominious defeat by the masked madman, Strange is visited by Maroni’s flunkies who wreck the lab but inspire an intriguing thought. The Batman was clearly a perfect genetic specimen, far better than the human detritus he has been working with. Moreover, in his escape the vigilante left plenty of blood and other genetic material for the experimenter to play withâ€¦

Gordon is under pressure too. New Police Commissioner Edward Grogan knows of his connection to the vigilante and is leaning on the only incorruptible cop on the force, but the Captain is not prepared to hand over the Batman – yetâ€¦

Things come to a head when Sal’s boys put the squeeze on Madison by threatening his daughter Julie whilst Strange, having modified a fourth macabre monster man with Batman’s DNA, sends them after Maroni, still sequestered at the Roman’s fortress-like estateâ€¦

By the time the vigilante arrives in his breathtaking new â€œBat-mobileâ€ the slaughter is in full swing with Maroni’s army of thugs smashed, scattered or eaten, and the terrified Norman moments from grisly death. However the bat-garbed creature of the night is even more formidable, trouncing the human thugs and bestial colossi with an astounding array of gadgets and devastating martial arts attacks.

With Maroni beaten and the hulking horrors put down, the Batman tells the shell-shocked businessman to go home, where all Madison can recall is that the grim, terrifying agent of justice knew his nameâ€¦
Â© 2006 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

Batman & the Mad Monk
By Matt Wagner with Dave Stewart (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1281-0

The concluding volume of Matt Wagner’s reinterpretation of two of Batman’s earliest and most iconic triumphs features a classic duel with the Dark Knight’s most obvious antithesis.

A flamboyant, supernatural vampire to combat the grim, steely rationalism of this hero was an obvious conceit when Gardner Fox conceived it in 1939 (Detective Comics #31 and #32 – frequently reprinted as in Batman Chronicles Volume 1) and here Wagner proves that it still has great merit and impressive cachet.

Following on from Batman and the Monster Men with the sub-plot of Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend Julie Madison and her tragically flawed and rapidly destabilising father, this subtle blending of archetypal gothic fantasy and modern Goth sensibility saw a mysterious cult leader moving into the upper and lower echelons of Gotham society, recruiting thugs, seducing the glitterati and killing at a whim.

After losing a tussle with a slinky cat-garbed jewel thief, Batman, still bleeding, thrashes a quartet of cops intent on crippling honest Police Captain Jim Gordon. Elsewhere, former business leader Norman Madison is becoming a paranoid recluse, obsessed with bats and expunging his sinsâ€¦

The bat vigilante has stumbled upon another bizarre case to distract him from his meticulous campaign to dismantle the criminal empire of Carmine Falcone – â€œThe Romanâ€ who has ruled Gotham for decades.

A serial killer is at work, draining men and women of all their bloodâ€¦

Unknown to the broken financier, in the aftermath of the monster men attack Batman ordered Sal Maroni to stay away from the Madisons: a fact he neglected to share with the victims. Now when the shattered, repentant businessman tries to pay off the loan-shark, he is forcibly ejected. Dirty money and unexpiated guilt shredding his soul, Madison is driven to even greater acts of desperationâ€¦

Batman meanwhile is covertly working with Gotham DA Harvey Dent to bring down Falcone, but soon distracted by another bloodless corpse. His subsequent savage investigations uncover a new phenomenon: a cult called The Brotherhood of the Eternal Night which numbers Gotham’s richest citizens, worst criminals and even street level gang-bangers amongst its scarlet-robed ranksâ€¦

Soon Julie too has fallen under its sway. Seeking help for her clearly crazed father, she had consulted the organisation’s founder Niccolai Tepes, who swore he could grant her father peace. By the time she sees boyfriend Bruce again Julie is oddly distant and has two neat puncture marks in her neckâ€¦

Maroni is also in deep trouble. When he refused to take Madison’s money, Norman tried to give it directly to Falcone. Three million dollars is nothing to The Roman, but he hates anything that makes ripples or causes undue attention in his townâ€¦

Still in the first year of a mission to end evil in his beleaguered city, the keen-but-inexperienced Batman is at last forced to ignore his instincts and prejudices and simply accept the impossible facts. Gotham is threatened by a horror out of fairytales and the Batman must adapt his methodology to purge the insidious fiends sucking Gotham dry in both figurative and a most literal mannerâ€¦

This is a spectacular, moody yarn; a magnificently illustrated clash between darkness and even greater supernal blackness, blending Batman’s signature iconography with the venerated gothic mythology of vampires, paying proper respect to the triumphs of the past whilst reverently refreshing them for the modern reader: a classic Batman that everybody can enjoy and should.

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