Comic Book Review: Batman Unseen #1 and #2
October 24th, 2009Categories: Comic Book Reviews, Sam Christopher
By Sam Christopher
Batman Unseen is a stand-alone five-issue miniseries billed as an untold tale of Bruce Wayne as Batman (might as well keep those fires burning—he is coming back) written by Doug Moench (Dracula Lives!, G.I. Combat, among thousands of other things) and drawn by Kelley Jones (Batman, Sandman) in which Bats meets the Invisible Man. The story begins with Bruce worrying over the loss of an intimidation factor as The Batman. When Batman first hit the scene he was all darkness and shadow; criminals were almost always too cowed to even fight back, as “The Bat” was often seen as a supernatural figure. That was, of course, the whole point of the costume in the first place, and the reasoning behind the “criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot” tagline that always popped up in any origin story for The Caped Crusader. But at the time of this story, a little while into his career as a crime fighter, as Bruce himself puts it in the story, “Too many thugs have survived the encounter. Bragged about it in prison, spread big talk on the streets.” This idea is reminiscent of a story in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, a story from the ‘70s where Bruce is taking a bunch of kids camping and the talk turns to what Batman really is, mostly from the kids’ perspective. There’s one kid, though, who lives in a tough neighborhood and actually knows someone who’d been busted by Batman, but that crook made out like Batman was this 30-foot-tall demon in order to make himself look good for getting captured. But this is the opposite of that. Crooks just aren’t as scared of Batman anymore, which makes everything Bruce does harder. What he used to accomplish through pure fear on the part of his opponents now requires a physical effort. One on one isn’t that big a deal, but if there’s five or six bad guys… He may be Batman but he’s still just a man.
Enter the Black Mask—although Bruce doesn’t know that yet—who sends two henchmen, Gerald Moss and the man known to us only as “Homolka” (which may be in honor of the actor Oskar Homolka, who played, among other roles, Krull in William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus) to find out-of-work biochemist Dr. Nigel Glass. Glass was apparently working on an invisibility formula when his research was deemed infeasible and he was unceremoniously fired. Somehow, The Black Mask has heard of Dr. Glass’s work and, deciding that no one being able to see him is better than the face he has, offers to set the bitter scientist up in a lab and pay him pretty much whatever he wants in order to acquire the serum. Moss and Homolka are then basically facilitators/babysitters, as Glass goes about his research and experimentation unaware of his benefactor’s true identity.
Moench has always been an excellent writer and his use of parallels in order to tell two stories that are really one here is right on the beam. The villain being The Invisible Man, of course, is an obvious story point but Moench has also tied that into Batman by reminding us that the Caped Crusader’s effectiveness as a character is based as much on what other characters can’t see as what they can. And Jones’s art gives this story the “film noir” look it needs. These two creators have collaborated on a fun story so far that looks it could easily have appeared in Detective Comics in the ‘70s.
Buy Batman Unseen and Other Comics from TFAW.com
Batman Unseen is a stand-alone five-issue miniseries billed as an untold tale of Bruce Wayne as Batman (might as well keep those fires burning—he is coming back) written by Doug Moench (Dracula Lives!, G.I. Combat, among thousands of other things) and drawn by Kelley Jones (Batman, Sandman) in which Bats meets the Invisible Man. The story begins with Bruce worrying over the loss of an intimidation factor as The Batman. When Batman first hit the scene he was all darkness and shadow; criminals were almost always too cowed to even fight back, as “The Bat” was often seen as a supernatural figure. That was, of course, the whole point of the costume in the first place, and the reasoning behind the “criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot” tagline that always popped up in any origin story for The Caped Crusader. But at the time of this story, a little while into his career as a crime fighter, as Bruce himself puts it in the story, “Too many thugs have survived the encounter. Bragged about it in prison, spread big talk on the streets.” This idea is reminiscent of a story in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, a story from the ‘70s where Bruce is taking a bunch of kids camping and the talk turns to what Batman really is, mostly from the kids’ perspective. There’s one kid, though, who lives in a tough neighborhood and actually knows someone who’d been busted by Batman, but that crook made out like Batman was this 30-foot-tall demon in order to make himself look good for getting captured. But this is the opposite of that. Crooks just aren’t as scared of Batman anymore, which makes everything Bruce does harder. What he used to accomplish through pure fear on the part of his opponents now requires a physical effort. One on one isn’t that big a deal, but if there’s five or six bad guys… He may be Batman but he’s still just a man.
Enter the Black Mask—although Bruce doesn’t know that yet—who sends two henchmen, Gerald Moss and the man known to us only as “Homolka” (which may be in honor of the actor Oskar Homolka, who played, among other roles, Krull in William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus) to find out-of-work biochemist Dr. Nigel Glass. Glass was apparently working on an invisibility formula when his research was deemed infeasible and he was unceremoniously fired. Somehow, The Black Mask has heard of Dr. Glass’s work and, deciding that no one being able to see him is better than the face he has, offers to set the bitter scientist up in a lab and pay him pretty much whatever he wants in order to acquire the serum. Moss and Homolka are then basically facilitators/babysitters, as Glass goes about his research and experimentation unaware of his benefactor’s true identity.
Moench has always been an excellent writer and his use of parallels in order to tell two stories that are really one here is right on the beam. The villain being The Invisible Man, of course, is an obvious story point but Moench has also tied that into Batman by reminding us that the Caped Crusader’s effectiveness as a character is based as much on what other characters can’t see as what they can. And Jones’s art gives this story the “film noir” look it needs. These two creators have collaborated on a fun story so far that looks it could easily have appeared in Detective Comics in the ‘70s.
