Batman and Robin #23
Written by Judd Winick
Art by Guillem March and Andrei Bresson
It hasn’t been that long since Judd Winick wrote Batman, I mean, both Dick and Bruce made appearances in Justice League: Generation Lost and Power Girl, then there’s the Red Hood movie that they released not too long ago, which Winick wrote. Then there’s also his post Battle for the Cowl stint on Batman before Tony Daniel took over writing duties. Why is this worth mentioning? Because these were all well handled uses of the Bat, far better in my opinion than his run which actually returned Jason Todd to the DC Universe as the Red Hood. Had these issue been announced a year or two ago, I might have been wary, heck, I was wary that Judd was writing Generation Lost, and that wound up being one of my favorite stories of the last few years. Judd has come a long way as a writer, so long as you can ignore his Green Arrow work, and this is his return to a character he brought back, who hasn’t exactly been well taken care of since.
I speak of course, about the aforementioned Jason Todd. For all the hype and perceived importance of his return from the grave….there hasn’t been much mileage. The initial arc was interesting up until the horrendous reason for why he was brought back, and if you ask me the DVD version is the canon reason (Lazarus Pits instead of Superboy Prime). But what about since then? Bruce Jones run on Nightwing is in the realm of “never happened”, Countdown was just as bad and almost completely retconned upon ending, then we have his armored Batman look from Battle for the Cowl where he was a villain just because they needed one, and then the last time was Morrison’s run with him earlier in this title….wait, no, there was a Jason Todd miniseries that I completely forgot about. So where does Judd’s return rank?
My personal favorite, actually. This isn’t whiny Jason, or directionless Jason, this is a Jason who comes across like a cross between a jailed Matt Murdock and the Punisher, and…it works. The premise is that Jason has been transferred out of Arkham and into an actual jail, his identity is known simply as the Red Hood. Nobody knows his real name, or that he was Robin, nothing. There is no information on him outside of his Red Hood identity, which makes sense if you think that Bruce would wipe the identities of himself and his closest crew from being id’d via fingerprints. It’s clever, and it puts over Jason’s ability to keep his own mouth shut, which in turn establishes his own cunning. It would be easy for him to be a loud mouth, or to try and make things hard for Bruce, but that’s not him. Jason isn’t crazy, he’s just not very nice. He’s a killer and he has no shame in admitting it, but that’s obviously the hurdle to overcome with the Bat family. He raises a valid point about not belonging in the nut house when he’s perfectly sane, and while the Bats know he’s planning something, they just can’t put their fingers on it.
Jason’s time in real jail isn’t anything like HBO’s Oz, I mean, there’s a shower scene, but let’s be honest and note that you never see a prison scene without the shower. Half Baked had a shower scene, hell, I played Mafia 2 for the 360 last month and that game had a prison shower scene. It’s like it’s all that anybody thinks of these days when it comes to putting over “prison”. ANYWAY, Jason in jail is pure badass building as the only thing seperating Jason’s actions from those of, say, Frank Castle in jail, is that Jason makes his kills look like suicides, or uses other prisoners to take the blame one way or another. He’s clever, he doesn’t draw the attention of the prison staff….which is promptly established as being the hugest dumbasses on the planet via Batman (not his words). Do I think they go a little overboard with putting Jason over? Maybe to a degree, but he’s hardly seen as a credible source of any threat in the Bat universe, so building him up as a manipulative badass is decent enough character rehab.
The art leaves me split, mainly because each of our pencillers only does half of the issue. Of the two, March is far superior, but when just handling the scenes with Jason Bresson does a nice job as well. Red haired Jason I’m actually a big fan of, he doesn’t look like the evil twin of Dick Grayson anymore and that’s a damn good thing. March’s Batman looks pretty cool, Bresson’s….not so much. The styles clash quite a bit, but it’s not the worst looking issue. Bresson keeps the tone in the Jason scenes, but his Batman stuff leaves me wanting, and I’ll be honest….I’d be happy if the next issue was March on his own. Splitting the art ten pages to each artist works better when there are two different artistic styles split amongst different kinds of scenes. If one artist was doing the prison scenes, and another was handling the Batman scenes, I could understand that, but what we got isn’t anything as clean as that.
This is a really solid issue, and while I’ll admit that this book is going to be in major need of consistency soon, if this entire arc lives up to the first issue I’ll save the complaint for after. Jason in prison is one of the cooler ‘character in jail’ sequences I’ve read, and I feel that Winick takes it in the right direction as he draws the issue to a close. In one issue he’s managed to give Jason enough character rehab to get me to care, and to come back for more, and….that’s something that hasn’t really been done before. Believe it or not, I’m not a Jason Todd fan. At all. I have, quite literally, never cared. Now though? I wouldn’t be pissed if he died at the end of the arc, but I also wouldn’t want to miss an issue. If this full arc stays with us with Jason as the main character, I think it could wind up being one of the more interesting non-Morrison Batman stories in recent history.
Overall?
8/10
