That Jean-Paul Valley should still be swinging his flaming sword some 30 years after the character first made the scene, and in a new Sword of Azrael miniseries no less, is one of those wonderful reminders that nothing ever really goes away in comics.

Writer Dan Watters' Batman: Urban Legends series on Azrael was great, buffeted by the art of Nikola Cizmesija; Watters' next work with Azrael, Arkham City: The Order of the World, with art by Dani, is a horror masterpiece that I highly recommend. In comparison, Sword is neither so new nor so scary, delivering mostly what we’ve seen in the previous and sometimes stretching to fill all its pages.

That said, Watters is not only bringing together disparate DC pieces from a variety of places, he also ties Azrael for the first time to the core of the DC Universe in very smart ways. If perhaps we might also look at this and think Azrael hasn’t changed much in 30 years, we can also see ways in which Watters is updating the concept for the next 30 years.

[Review contains spoilers]

For all the 1990s excesses that Azrael Jean-Paul Valley represented, I think it’s worth noting that even 30 years later, this character just had the coolest costume. If having a bunch of straps coming off Azrael’s cape doesn’t make much sense, artist after artist has used it to great effect, including here variant covers by Christian Ward, Derrick Chew, Azrael co-creator Joe Quesada, Jorge Corona, James Stokoe — heck, even Walt Simonson gets in on the action.

And I say “1990s excesses” — what was essentially Punisher by way of Batman — but in fact among the most compelling things about Azrael is that Jean-Paul, when not being mind-controlled or manipulated, is actually this bookish guy who’s pretty mild. That’s the brainchild of Dennis O’Neil, who wrote Jean-Paul in his subsequent series as knowing a lot about fighting, incidentally, but not a lot about life. In the most recent Sword, we see this reflected in Cizmesija’s thin-lined art that sometimes reduces Jean-Paul’s face to Coke bottle glasses, a strong visual distinction from the unstoppable Azrael assassin.

I also thought Watters and Cizmesija worked brilliantly together at the end of the second chapter, telegraphing the humongous reveal in the third. As Jean-Paul descends into Azrael’s hidden memories, I thought, “They sure are channeling some Jack Kirby vibes here”; I was not prepared, an chapter later, to see etched depictions of Orion(!), such to establish that the Order of St. Dumas has been creating Azrael warriors all this time with the help of an abandoned Mother Box(!!).

It was satisfactory when O’Neil created the “System,” as it’s called, to be explained away with standard comics hand-waiving — the Order trained its assassins with mystic something-or-another. But Watters' addition of a Mother Box gives Azrael resonance beyond just the Batman family; it’s the kind of thing that would have been useful to have established when Azrael was out in space against Darkseid in Justice League Odyssey. Watters separately uses some concepts from Ram V here, and Watters next writes Azrael within Ram V’s Detective Comics. It would be all the more interesting of Azrael got a nod in Ram V’s subsequent New Gods series. (Not so far as Vol. 1, at least.)

From Ram V’s Catwoman, Watters returns the villain Father Valley, as well as Vengeance, daughter of Bane, from James Tynion’s Joker series, creating a small Azrael-verse from what had been disparate elements. He makes a convincing argument for why Vengeance, born as a weapon but exerting her own free will, shares commonality with Azrael; Father Valley is related to Jean-Paul but it was never clear why Ram V created an Azrael-adjacent character for Catwoman, and it makes much more sense for Watters to have finally brought the two Valleys together.

On one hand, Watters' conception of Azrael is a bit too Hulk-like for me, as Jean-Paul frets to himself about letting the monster out; the paradigm isn’t different than back in the 1990s, but the similarity didn’t seem so overt. On the other hand, there’s a surprising amount here of Jean-Paul making friends of enemies, both Father Valley and Vengeance, that I thought distinguished Azrael very succinctly, the hero who by dint of himself demonstrates we are not defined by our upbringing nor by our worst impulses.

I noted when I read Watters' first Azrael story (collected again here at the front) that it was more explicitly religious than I perceive DC to usually be comfortable with, at least outside Vertigo. Though Sword steps back from some of this — mostly using the all-purpose “God” this time instead of “Christ” — I thought Watters still included some interesting nuance. There is the scene where Azrael uses a request to pray as a feint to escape a captor, demonstrating the trappings of faith becoming less sacrosanct to him and more practical. Watters also pens well a twisty sequence where Father Valley seems to be comparing Azrael to Adam and Eve, having gained knowledge of his creation and therefore becoming closer to God, before Valley shifts his tone to taunt Azrael with a darker interpretation instead.

As mentioned, when we get into Sword of Azrael’s final chapters, there’s a few pages by Nikola Cizmesija and/or Pablo Collar that run a little thin, just one or two panels across a couple of pages, a few beats more action than the scene really needed. That is balanced, to be sure, by pages and pages of other good work, both regular ol' Jean-Paul Valley and the wild feathery many-eyed Azrael creature. I’m glad that Azrael has a champion in Dan Watters; I don’t see much more from the pair besides the Detective Comics backup, but Watters still impressed me with Arkham City and I’m interested to read his Batman: Dark Patterns miniseries.

[Includes original and variant covers, character sketches]