Review: Dark Victory

It's been a busy couple months at the Payne home, but I haven't forgot you, dear reader.

It seems that my love of Batman is well known and understood by my family.  A couple weeks ago, we celebrated Christmas in Texas with my parents, John and JaNae, and Dan and Christina.  Dan and Christina gave me and Kate a special edition of Arkham Asylum, a famous Batman comic book.  When Kate saw it, she giggled, presumably because receiving a comic book as an adult is funny (and awesome).  A few minutes later, I opened a present from Kate: a different special edition of Arkham Asylum.

It's nice to have a thing.

And speaking of that thing, I thought I would get back into the groove of blogging by reviewing another Batman book: Dark Victory.

Dark Victory is another collaboration between Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale.  It follows directly after the events of The Long Halloween, which I reviewed a couple months back (Warning: Long Halloween spoilers ahead).  I'll start with the art.

he art is really fun.  There are, of course, lots of good "Batman is totally bad" pictures.

 There's lots of fun shots of the bad guys:

 Lots of the big blocks of color and shadow that I liked so much in Sale's other books.

 The art includes lots of empty space, often representing the empty lives of people in the pictures.

The last thing I'll point out about the art is how in several places, the main character is very small in the room.  Batman is seen as a tiny smudge in the corner of a courtroom, or Catwoman is barely visible in the shadows of the morgue.

All in all, I love the art, but it is very similar to Tim Sale's other work that I've already talked about, so there's not much to say there.

Dark Victory takes lots of the events and themes of Long Halloween and makes them take the next logical step.  For example, after Harvey Dent's betrayal at the end of Long Halloween, Bruce and Jim Gordon are left feeling lonely and suspicious.  Bruce sums it up nicely:

“I realize now that the burden of ridding Gotham CIty of the evil that took my parents’ lives… must be mine and mine alone”

This feeling of loneliness and isolation gives Jeph and Tim license to revisit the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne and explore Bruce's deep feelings of abandonment.  There is some beautiful, dream-like black and white art in the flashbacks.

Jim Gordon's obsession with catching the Holiday Killer during Long Halloween led him to neglect his family, and as a result, Dark Victory shows him alone after his wife left.  It is hard not to make this entire post about how heartbreaking Jim's story is.

He looks tired and beaten.

He looks alone

And that's what the title means, at least to me.  In Long Halloween, the good guys won, but in Dark Victory, we explore the costs of that victory.

We see those costs in very overt ways, like Jim losing his family, but also in some more subtle ways.  There are, for instance, callbacks to the iconic rooftop scene from Long Halloween where Harvey, Gordon, and Batman meet to discuss the killer, but this time, Harvey is conspicuously absent from the image.

The theme of "trusting is hard" is a good backdrop to both introduce new characters, and flesh out some old ones.  Alfred has a larger role, and is much more fun.

 Selina Kyle is back, and her relationship with Bruce continues to be complex.

And we get the introduction of Robin.  Robin is a tricky character, because he is, at his core, an annoying kid.  But, given the story, Robin fits nicely.  He allows us to explore more of Bruce's trust issues after being betrayed by one of his only friends.  He also parallels Bruce's own story, which allows for some nice symmetry.  We see Bruce's parents die:

And we see Dick's parents die:

We see Alfred raising Bruce:

And we see Alfred raising Dick:

It's really good.

This is getting long, but I really liked this book.  I would definitely recommend it, with the one caveat that you should read Long Halloween first to get the full impact.