Review: Batman: H2SH Vol. 1 hardcover (DC Comics)

All right, I get it. Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee’s new Batman: H2SH is wrong-headed about every opportunity it has to be.

I … didn’t hate it?

If you’re a BFOCE (Batman Fan of a Certain Era), a lot of the problems with this book are old hat. I could go back and read Batman: Murderer/Fugitive and it would have very similar troubles, but I could dismiss those as artifacts of the time — we know better, we do better. H2SH doesn’t have quite that excuse — it’s written, of course, in the here and now — and were this the kickoff arc of Matt Fraction’s new ongoing Batman run, I might feel differently.

But it’s six issues of Loeb and Lee that struggled even to see publication, letting alone that the Bat-titles have just gone on ahead without it and that we even saw Nightwing and Batman hugging it out and making up over in Dan Watters' Nightwing. I struggle to feel much ire over a book that so clearly ought have zagged every single time it zigs to the point of hilarity and then was immediately disavowed, and to an extent then the bad decisions fall away for me versus the parts that worked.

[Review contains spoilers]

If we take just as our premise the following, I think we have the makings of a decent Batman story: “Hush manipulates Batman into saving the Joker’s life … but who benefits from the trouble it brings?” That is, indeed, our first issue, a surprisingly gory — and therefore satisfactorily fraught — issue in which Hush tortures the Joker and then leaves clues for Batman to find him, while a Jeph Loeb mystery looms in the background: someone is trying to say something through these actions, but what are they saying?

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Extend it through to Batman having to drop the Joker on Leslie Thompkins' doorstep, Leslie herself struggling to save the Joker, and the whole moral quandary (reductive or not) as to whether Batman should just let the Joker die. The meta-trouble starts, then, if not at the moment Red Hood Jason Todd breaks into the Batcave to try to kill the recuperating Joker, then at least when Batman grabs one of Jason’s guns and fires at his head.

It is one in a string of character assassinations that occupy the remaining issues, a cacophony of bad decisions: Batman with a gun; Jason crazed and reckless; Damian teaming up with Bane, the man who killed Alfred Pennyworth; that Batman engages in fisticuffs with Nightwing and Batgirl Barbara Gordon, including drugging Barbara such that she relives the Joker’s Killing Joke attack; and that anyone is actually arguing at all that Batman should have let the Joker die.

It put me in mind of Batman #600, that first chapter of Batman: Fugitive (following Murderer), where Batman and Nightwing knock the stuffing out of one another. In and of itself that was an exercise in putting to bed the “loner Batman” persona who didn’t need or want anyone’s help, often written unintentionally to the point of ridiculousness; something like today’s wholesome Batman: Wayne Family Adventures is a real repudiation of that, that shows how far we’ve come. This here in H2SH is so much a relic of the past, so obviously wrong, that I can’t take it seriously enough to be mad.

It’s especially easy to note that Loeb doesn’t write for DC all that much, that maybe Last Halloween didn’t quite live up to its predecessors, and decide that what’s wrong here is an indication of a writer not up with the times. But, too, is it possible Loeb doesn’t know that Batman with a gun is a controversial image? That Bane is really the one person Damian ought not be teamed with? Surely Loeb does; the book acknowledges the latter shortly after Damian and Bane make the scene.

H2SH, if nothing else, purports to be a mystery. And what I see so far is characters acting very specifically contrary to how they ought — Damian, paired with Bane; Batgirl, who faults Batman for not letting the Joker die. In the end, Batman is pushed to the point where his enemies, his rogues, become his allies and his family his enemies. It is maybe just disastrous writing — writing a character against type on purpose in serial comics is hard; writing a character against type in serial comics when your artist is Jim Lee and your second part may not arrive for years is masochistic — but hold out with me just the barest hope that something else is going on here.

For all the rogues gathered above and below — Joker, Penguin, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze, Bane — where, oh where, is Harvey Dent?

I’ll mention I don’t think there’s much value in comparing Lee’s art now with Lee’s art from 20 years ago. If we might expect some consistency from the heads of our writers, expecting no difference in an artist’s hands is particular folly. There are times here where Lee is top of his game — those Joker fish, the conversations with Leslie and Catwoman, Damian dragging Batman behind him on his bike — and then other times — Batman crashing through a funhouse mirror — where I wonder if Loeb is giving Lee enough direction.

Ultimately, each of H2SH’s chapters are named with chess themes, and we’re told early on — though it took me right up to the reveal to get it — that chess isn’t Hush Tommy Elliot’s game, it’s Ra’s al Ghul’s. It would have been something had Loeb handled the grand return of Ra’s, thought dead by most since Batman: Shadow War, but it’s Talia instead (for now, at least) that’s the apparent mastermind behind it all.

Obviously there’s no small amount of “why”s to explain (someday, hopefully), but I was relatively satisfied. Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee’s Batman: H2SH is a mystery, yes; we’ve been getting clues, to an extent; and in the end there’s a solution to the mystery that’s reasonably discernible from the clues. If we take the thrilling beginning, pair it with a cogent enough end, and wave our hands at the silliness in the middle, is it possible we actually have a Hush sequel?

The worst part is, we may never know the answer.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.75