Though Batman and Robin Vol. 2: The Gotham Cycle is the second of Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s three volumes on the title, it brings to a close the story he began with the first volume, Memento, and feels definitively conclusive. It’s just a guess but I imagine the third volume will be a lame duck done-in-one as we sometimes get when a writer’s tenure runs longer than the main story they had to tell (Batman Vol. 5: The Dying City is another recent example, proving this is not always a bad thing).

No matter. Johnson had a hard path with Gotham Cycle, at least with me as the reader, and he navigated it perfectly. Frankly, the whole of the “Memento saga” might serve as a lesson for other writers as to how to balance for Batman the realistic with the fanciful. If I have qualms about how Johnson writes Bruce and Damian Wayne’s relationship, it’s no more or less than I have for other writers on the characters, and at least here Johnson delivers a kicky whodunit.

[Review contains spoilers]

Johnson takes a big swing in Gotham Cycle, more so than he did in Batman and Robin Vol. 1: Memento, giving over space to both pages from Thomas Wayne’s journals and Damian’s graphic novel diaries. It is maybe too cute — conveniently, Thomas illustrated his journals, such to give artist Hugo Petrus something to do, and I’ve never taken to the “regular kid and comics fan” interpretation of Damian — but it’s certainly different, and that’s something. Further, Johnson does well taking Thomas' story of the paper boat and using it as symbolism throughout the story, without drawing such attention to it as other writers might.

With that heady kickoff, Johnson takes the story in two directions: one, Batman employs the Gotham Irregulars to try to find the missing Damian among the city’s hidden places, and two, Batman and French detective Katherine Lautrec seek Jason Blood and the Demon Etrigan on the possibility that Memento’s origins might be supernatural.

Though I grant Batman and the Demon have a storied history (a Brian Stelfreeze cover immediately comes to mind), this is sometimes when I take my leave, feeling ghost-busting best left to characters other than the Dark Knight Detective. But among other things, Johnson’s conception of Blood and the Demon is compelling — a meek Blood, frightened of something, and an Etrigan unusually helpful, even sympathetic to the plight of missing Damian, more like the noble medieval knights in his origins than the antagonist antihero he became later. I’m not sure who gets the Demon in DC Next Level, but this subdued approach might be an interesting change of pace.

It’s through saving the Gotham Irregulars that Damian reverses his earlier decision to quit being Robin, accepting it as one among many of his various identities. The Irregulars, of course, take their name from the Sherlock Holmes characters, the most overt example of Victorian/Holmesian influence on the story, which also includes flashbacks of young Bruce Wayne working with Scotland Yard and that Memento bears no small resemblance to depictions of Jack the Ripper. Not to mention the very distinct realm of Batman and Robin, where verily, perhaps historically, Robin is the Watson to Batman’s Sherlock.

That Damian should decide in the span of two volumes (really just a few issues) that he doesn’t want to be Robin any more and then that he actually does again is the most tiring part of “Memento.” That this is hardly the first time we’ve seen this is maybe a knock against Johnson — not only does it lack suspense, as Damian’s no more going to stop being Robin than that Batman will hang up his tights, but also that Johnson’s treading where other writers have gone before — but then again, indeed other writers have done it, so the fault isn’t Johnson’s alone.

Instead, possibly this is a flaw of the Batman and Robin title in general, that in the absence of other characters with whom to create dramatic tension, the tension is between the principals, even as we know neither will ever change (or are even allowed to, corporately) — Superman and Lois often have the same problem. And with the fight comes the reconciliation; Joshua Williamson’s Batman and Robin Vol. 2: Growing Pains had its heartfelt moment of Batman and Robin affirming their familial love, and so too does Gotham Cycle, and on and on. (A joke I might make: There’s more hugging in Batman and Robin than a night of ABC’s TGIF.)

But I was altogether taken by the conclusion of Johnson’s book, which yes, does see Batman up against a demon, but also reveals a variety of unexplained doings to be the work of an all-too-mortal collaborator. I never suspected Daniels but he’s wholly fair as the answer to the whodunit, someone who was present at all the old events same as Bruce and Lautrec. If Johnson had explained away all of Memento with “magic,” I wouldn’t be moved, but magic plus a whodunit, and that in retrospect the clues were laid all along, well, that’s the way to do it.

We don’t have series artist Javi Fernandez through all of Gotham Cycle, which is a shame, as I felt his moody, sketchy style helped sell the supernatural in the first book; if Batman’s going up against demons, at least let them look scary! Clearly Miguel Mendonça is drawing his heart out with a particularly bombastic page of Batman soaring to the rescue, cape unfurled, and also an absolutely terrifying demon baby, but where the art tended toward DC’s house style, it was less effective.

Again, I’m curious to see how Phillip Kennedy Johnson follows Batman and Robin Vol. 2: The Gotham Cycle with this final book. Maybe that’s Memento on the cover of Quiet Man, so maybe all isn’t said and done, but I doubt it? Either way, from Superman’s super-heroics to here, I’m not sure I’ve quite warmed to Johnson’s writing, but I certainly appreciate his range. Some point or another I’ll go back through his Future State work ahead of Adventures of Superman: Book of El, and I am looking forward to that. (We saw “gods of old” in Gotham Cycle but no Olgrun specifically, which I must say surprised me.)

[Includes original and variant covers]