Best of this Week: Batman: Curse of the White Knight #4 – Sean Murphy, Matt Hollingsworth and AndWorld Design

A Darkness has fallen over Gotham. 

Jim Gordon has always been one of the most trustworthy police officers in the cesspool known as Gotham City. Under his tenure as Commissioner, he cleaned up Gotham PD as much as he possibly could, brought up great officers like Harvey Bullock and Renee Montoya and even formed a long lasting partnership with Gotham’s protector, Batman. His role gained him allies and enemies alike and he put his life on the line every day he out a badge on.

Unfortunately for him, his number came in the last issue when Azrael impaled him with his sword, leaving him for dead in an alley for Batman and the Gotham PD to see. This issue follows what happens immediately after.

Gordon is rushed to the hospital and the doctors do their very best to keep him alive. The shots are tense and heartbreaking as we get no dialogue except for the words of the flashback that occurs simultaneously. Barbara is frantic, pushing through Renee and Harvey Bullock. We don’t hear what she’s saying, but her pain is palpable. She doesn’t have the cool calmness she maintained as Batgirl, she’s just a girl terrified of losing her father.

As the doctors use their defibrillators, Gordon flat lines and Barbara doesn’t even acknowledge Batman as she runs into the night, tears in her eyes. Interspersed between the operation are panels showing a flashback between Barbara and Jim. It acts a bit of foreshadowing as Jim tells Barbara to fight back and hit harder after she tells him that a boy bullied her at school. These two scenes play out in perfect opposition to each other.

Murphy is really good at Panel to Panel storytelling and conveys the happiness and absolute destruction with little dialogue, body language and facial expressions. He wants you to feel the despair that Barbara feels. Pulling in close to Gordon’s short breaths as she bangs on the window in the background as he kisses her little forehead in the next panel, it’s almost too much.

Hollingsworth colors the operation scenes with cool colors, making everything seem sterile aside from the blood on Gordon’s chest. It’s bleak and lacks the warmness of the muted pink/purple hue of the flashback. Murphy also does his best to depict how much Jim meant to Barbara by showing her childhood innocence and happiness opposite the fear that she faces as an adult. Barbara is absolutely devastated by what happens to her father and later on, it will drive to her make a reckless decision that will change her life forever.

Tensions are high when the Gotham Terrorism Oppression (GTO) unit meets in the aftermath of Gordon’s death. Barbara blames Batman and calls him a coward for operating in the shadows while her father stood at the forefront. Dick Grayson wants to console her, but Renee tells him to stay focused and when he tries to question her authority, she snaps that Jim put her in charge before his death.

Bruce leaves in the middle of the GTO’s planning, frustrating Renee as she gets a taste of what Gordon dealt with for years. He goes to visit Leslie Thompkins who’s taking care of Harleen Quinzel after she’s given birth to twins. They converse and Leslie reveals to Bruce that she and Alfred had known about the journal of Edmond Wayne.

What’s interesting about this section is the manner in which they retrieved it. Shortly after Bruce had put on the cowl, Alfred and Leslie found a letter addressed to Bruce and Batman, telling them to go to the oldest part of Gotham. The scene is drawn and colored in a style reminiscent of what I think of when I hear Victorian Era England. There’s a lot of smoke, greys, muted colors and vibrant yellows from lamps and fire. The building they enter is very old timey and they meet someone surprising upon their arrival.

While his name is never stated, I believe the Librarian of the New Order of St. Dumas to be Jason Blood. He maintains Blood’s red hair with a white streak and his brazenness when speaking to Alfred and Leslie and his lack of care when Alfred  levels a rapier to his throat is characteristic of a man that has lived for centuries and the knowledge he has attained up that point. He tells Alfred to give the journal to Bruce when he thinks the boy is read and then he just suddenly disappears. Alfred and Leslie have been guarding the secret ever since.

While all of this is going on, Barbara tries to find anything she can about the man who killed her father. Dick tries to talk to her, flipping their roles from the first White Knight series. Dick was angry the entirety of that series, blaming Bruce for the destruction of Gotham City, but now Barbara sees what he was talking about back then. Murphy makes the decision to not have Barbara don her mask, but still wear the ears, signaling that she can no longer hide behind her mask while Dick still wears his.

She’s rapidly removing herself from the world of capes and cowls, saying it’s not working, while Dick reminds her that she chose this life, same as him. She gets a hit on the vehicle Azrael used and sets off after him. She removes the bat ears, heads to the armory, grabs a gun and almost takes a tumbler before Harvey Bullock meets her there. Their relationship doesn’t need too many words as both of them want revenge, not justice. 

It’s wonderful to see because there’s no pretense between them. Harvey wasn’t exactly the best policeman before he was under Gordon, but he eventually learned to respect his higher up. He became a better officer and person because of Jim, he’d obviously be in the same mindset as Barbara, knowing that there’s only one way for this to end. As they race off in the Tumbler, the background is colored in a beautiful shade of light brown, insisting that the fight is on and blood is boiling.

Dick informs Batman that Barbara and a tumbler are missing, so Batman tracks it and catches up to her and Harvey just as they’ve ambushed Azrael and his crew. Barbara levels a gun to Azrael’s head and cries tears of anger as she goes to pull the trigger. Batman wraps a grapple around the muzzle of the gun and rips it away before Azrael’s brain is scattered all over the street. The distraction of Batman’s arrival allows the rest of Azrael’s crew to get their bearings as they begin to shoot at the Bat and Harvey. Azrael lunges at Barbara. 

With fire spreading all around them, the next few pages are coated with an intense orange and the action is impactful. Harvey screams at Batman to shoot Azrael as he overpowers Barbara. Bruce stands there, not knowing what to do and drops the gun, going for his grapple again. His inaction, however, allows Azrael to knee Barbara in the spine, breaking it with an unsettling “CRACK” sound effect.

Batman retaliates in anger, pleading with Azrael to leave the rest of them out of the fight. Azrael responds by saying that God must have spared Bruce for this moment, for this fight and begins to turn the tables on Batman. He manages to cut the cowl off of Batman before one of his crew pulls him away from the fight, saying that they need to leave as one of their men is lost and they escape. In the aftermath, Batman walks out of the fire with Barbara, his facial expression giving it away that he knows he has utterly failed.

One of the best characteristics of this version of Batman is his inability to recognize or change his ways following his failures. He failed to see how his increasingly dangerous battles with the Joker were destroying Gotham City, he failed to see that his protegés were slowly losing their trust and faith in him and only got worse over time. He tries his best to change throughout this series, but he’s always stopped by his own mind. 

It was heavily implied that his aversion to firearms is what caused this timeline’s original Robin, Jason Todd, to be killed and now it’s cost Barbara her mobility. Batman doesn’t often face adversity this much, so it’s great to see him continually broken down by the circumstances that absolutely could have been prevented. On the flip side, maybe this is exactly what he needed to actually solve the problem of Azrael. Not by killing him, but by using his motivation and willingness to change as a driving force to defeating the Knight and the remainder of his order.

He can’t flinch in the face of danger, not anymore.