Batman Rebirth: Full Story

what's going on guys this is Rob if you guys enjoy my content make sure you hit the subscribe button and make sure you hit that little bell so you never miss out on my sexy voice so what I want to do here is have a discussion about Batman rebirth and what I'm hoping is that at the end of all this you'll have a good idea of where the series stands and how it expects to shape up going into the future of DC Comics so much like Green Arrow and the rest of the rebirth releases Batman draws on a combination of pulling the past and the present together however the difficulty of this concept comes in the idea that DC has never been straightforward about Bruce's past events in relation to the new 52 what I mean here is that where the rest of DC's lineup largely received clean cut reboots Batman's past continuity was left ambiguous with occasional references here and there including Batman eternal which saw the return of Thomas Eliot who referenced a pre flashpoint story hush while Barbara Gordon discussed her recovery after being shot during the pre flashpoint story Killing Joke to this end while this did offer the potential to maintain the canonicity of some of Batman's most iconic stories including nightfall on the whole the reader was left in a quagmire being expected to believe that everything from crisis on Infinite Earths to flashpoint all happened in a five-year window while not actually being told whether it did now where much of the confusion fell to the wayside in the face of scott Snyder's run with the introduction of the court of owls and the return of the Joker during death of the family and ingame as part of Snyder's multi-part epic the fact remains that even if fans weren't beating down the doors of DC for answers at the very least some measure of cohesiveness was expected to be forthcoming if for no other reason than to add death to Bruce Wayne's life experiences but while fans look to the idea of rebirth as a way for DC to provide the answers they were looking for instead the readers walked away empty-handed being left with a multitude of unanswered questions and a bit of confusion written by Tom King and Scott Snyder one of the biggest drawbacks of the issue is that we don't actually know whose hand is in the cookie jar while the book feels almost exactly like something Snyder would write Tom Keens name is still listed as co-writer leaving us to ask whether or not the book is an actual representation of what to expect going forward into the series but initially opening up with Alfred in the midst of tending the garden Wayne Manor is visited by the arrival of Duke Thomas in response to a previously extended offer to sidetrack for a second do Thomas was one of several heroes introduced as part of the we are Robin line of comics under the banner of DCU written by Libre Mayo and drawn by Rob Haynes and Carrie Randolph while it only spanned 12 issues the story focused on Duke Thomas along with a handful of other teenagers all of whom adopted the mantle of Robin and operated as vigilantes after being inspired by various members of the bat family receiving fairly high reviews but experiencing mediocre sales like many of DC's titles we are Robin was cancelled between the announcement of DC rebirth and the lead up to its launch at the beginning of June however focusing on the story the events contained within center are kind of truer Bruce Wayne's life as it progresses throughout the length of a week meeting with Lucius Fox on a Tuesday the conversation between the two is not of stupendous importance instead it follows a standard method of Snyder storytelling providing a bit of mortar between the bricks of Batman's events giving us some insight into his own personal life to this end with Lucius Fox recounting a conversation with Bruce's father on why Thomas Wayne became a doctor where Lucius founded a bit foolhardy and the definition of insanity by helping the sick while knowing they would only get sick again the rhetorical question is designed to highlight the necessity of Bruce Wayne being Batman and that while the criminals he catches always escape creating an endless cat-and-mouse game the cycle exists because it needs to if for no other reason than to keep criminals from achieving their goal and Gotham falling into disarray following this the story transitions to Wednesday with Bruce Wayne revealing to Duke that Gotham has been met with the return of calendar man a being whose life changes with the seasons meaning he dies in the winter is reborn in the spring and ages through the summer and fall with the cycle repeating itself now where this is really just background stuff with Snyder and King giving us something to read while we make our way through the comic the overall theme here is that Duke continues to stay along for the ride bringing him to the Batcave the purpose behind Dukes presence is revealed with Batman providing a home form in the wake of his parents insanity to sidetrack here during the events of Batman endgame and Joker's attack on Gotham with the Joker intending to reenact the death of Bruce Wayne's parents by using the parents of Duke the toxin Hughes had permeated their minds seeing them into insanity without an immediate cure where Bruce was able to rescue Duke and escape Dukes parents were left behind leaving Duke himself as an orphan using this as a jumping-off platform while neither King nor Schneider offer direct answer the implication seems to be that Duke is being offered a position alongside Batman that is akin to the Robin mantle but remains ambiguous with Duke appearing receptive to the idea this revelation is really the only standout part of the story in truth things essentially fall back into rank and file with Batman coming to the realization the calendar man had planted spores around Gotham which if released will kill everyone in the city now as far as I'm aware there's no real explanation available about these spores and it seems to be designed that way what I mean here is that because this rebirth issue appears to be written in the form of a week in the life of Bruce Wayne a place on the notion of every comic being an end of Gotham scenario and the idea that Batman is the only one who can save the day well the story does see Batman succeeding and destroying calendar man's machines as well as depicting his rebirth in the form of shedding his old body and emerging as a younger person the events shift their focus to a conversation between Batman and Duke with Bruce revealing that where Duke is concerned about calendar man returning and constantly thinking of new ideas their roles as heroes is to meet the challenge and comeback themselves equally more intelligent and capable and so with the story wrapping itself up this seems to reveal the shortcoming of the issue nothing really happens the comic makes no reference to Snyder's Batman aside from Dukes parents during the events of endgame it makes no reference to the supposed death of Bruce Wayne after in-game and Commissioner Gordon taking on the mantle of Batman and as far as I can tell the entire issue treats the events of DC U as if they never happened picking up almost immediately after the Joker's perceived death at the conclusion of endgame with Bruce Wayne taking Duke on as award so as we continue our discussion on DC rebirth for those of you guys that had a chance to see my episode of collecting coffee on Sunday the we had talked about how with Hickman's Fantastic Four and with those various videos being ongoing stories in the background of my regular videos then I was kind of experimenting with you guys I was looking to see how you guys would be receptive to having double videos almost every day and having stories in the background of our existing content on you know character discussions and different things like that and so what I want to do is I want to start paying a little more attention to DC simply because it really didn't make any sense to change from Marvel explained to Comics explained if I'm not gonna give DC some due diligence and to be honest I'm really just now getting around to reading a lot of the DC rebirth content but I'm absolutely loving Batman and so what I want to do is basically run over this story I guess the entirety the entire six-part series Batman I am Gotham we're gonna do one video over the course of this week or I guess one issue over the course of this week so you guys will get the full brunt of the experience and decide for yourselves whether or not you know Batman from DC we birth is something that you're interested in picking up but I am Gotham of course is the official start of Batman rebirth in DC Comics under the writing of Tom King now one of the big differences here is in the Batman rebirth number one issue that was basically kind of giving us a status quo and what it was telling us is that Duke Thomas a character who appeared as part of Snyder's run on Batman who was the leader of the vigilante group calling themselves Robins that he's basically been taken under the wing of Batman as the new Robin and so at this point he basically had several Robins of course the first was Dick Grayson the second was Jason Todd the third was I think Stephanie I'm sorry was Carrie Kelly followed by Stephanie Brown and then I think we got into Tim Drake but I'm like I'm not gonna swear that I'm correct about that chronology well Duke Thomas comes to us as the newest Robin and so this basically gives us a chance to see how Batman is relating to him now what we do here is we initially pick up in a flight now in terms of the people in this flight they're not extremely important for this first issue but it does give us some context right now we basically have Bruce Wayne and we have Commissioner Gordon talking to one another they're talking about how there was a raid on Fort Marshall but that somebody had basically taken off with a handful of rockets somebody had taken off with with weapons and the question was what what are they gonna do with them what's the big plan here but even then they're not really talking to you heavily about it and so it's just kind of like okay what what direction are things really going in here because Town Tom Kane Rob sorry Tim King is basically playing the the very slow road here he's playing the the very slow game so to speak but in the middle of their conversation Batman and Commissioner Gordon witnessed the plane being blown up after a rocket seemingly hits it from behind and so what we do of course we pick up with Bruce Wayne immediately taking off and he's talking to dude and what he says is I'm sorry he's talking to Alfred and what he says is he needs a plan to basically figure out what's going on with this plane and that's the basis behind in this particular comic this whole first issue is showing us the lengths that Batman's goes to and this is one of the reasons why this is so cool is because Tom King doesn't leave us hanging Tom King doesn't suddenly just jump from one scenario to the other he takes us through every single step of the way and so one of the first things he does his Batman sends out an SOS to the Justice League specifically to Superman and - Hal Jordan because it would make sense to us as the reader that if a plane was crashing to the ground in Gotham City that Superman would get there in seconds in moments he'd be able to save the plane and everything would be fine if he wasn't able to do it Hal Jordan might be able to get there a little bit slower but he'd get there pretty fast and he'd be able to use his power ring to save the plane but what tom kean is basically telling us here is that or I guess he's providing an answer to all those individuals who asked the question if Batman encountered a scenario where it seems insurmountable that he can come out on top why doesn't he contact the Justice League and the response that out for it gives Batman is that nobody in the Justice League is picking up they're all busy off doing their own things they're fighting their own villains or dealing with their own own individual problems and they're just not available to help Batman and so this allows us to continue on with this line of thought that Bruce Wayne is gonna have to be the one to save this save this plane and so what he does is he starts talking to Duke and this again is really cool because this is not something that we see very often with Duke and Batman conversing what Duke says is that there is a time frame here that the plane is I guess that Batman have selves will have to drive in about a hundred 22 miles per hour that he will have to hit a hit of ramp so to speak or hit a bridge at a certain angle and then he'll have to take off and you'll have to jump from the the Batmobile and you'll have to land on top of the plane and so they're basically just working out exactly how this is going to happen and again this is really cool because usually even with Scott's letters Batman as great as it was usually he simply just jumps from one scenario to the other and the extent of detective work comes in the sense of Batman analyzing some little detail but we don't really see them going over the mathematical angles and all this really does is show us how smart Bruce Wayne is the Bruce Wayne isn't stantly just a guy that can put clues together Bruce Wayne is a guy who has you know mathematic probabilities statistics rattle around in his head and he's able to calculate those incredibly fast with the assistance of Duke and so what we do here is we pick up with Batman jetting I guess jetting out of the out of the Batmobile and landing on top of the plane and this is actually pretty awesome because he's talking to Commissioner Gordon then Commissioner Gordon again is basically driving under this plane trying to get to where it's going to land into the best of everybody's estimates including Batman himself that it's going to land in the the try corner yards and Batman's idea is to keep this from happening and the reason why is because if it did there are crowds of people there and the the loss of life would be insane if they all died and so what Batman's trying to do is he's trying to get the plane to land in the Gulf of Blackgate in a giant body of water that way the only individuals who who will be in any real measure of jeopardy are those on the plane and of course the goal of Batman is to mitigate as much of that as much loss of life as possible and so from this point it's really just Batman flying onto the plane landing on to it attaching you know different pieces of machinery attempting I guess attaching a little Jets and so on and so forth and the goal is to basically steer the plane in a direction toward will pass through two buildings and to effectively guide it even though it can't be controlled by conventional means now from where here we transition to the inside of a plane and this is one of the reasons why I think this thing is so cool because with Batman comics we largely just focus on Bruce Wayne the only real view that we get outside of his own perception of what's going on is usually from a villain like a villain is watching events unfold or Commissioner Gordon is watching events unfold and we see their perspective but we don't really get the perspective of average people of your average joes and so what happens really just this guy who's just freaking out I mean the plane is crashing the guys you know terrified rightfully so and he's basically saying like they're in Gotham City all they have is Batman you know it'd be better if they landed in Metropolis cuz Superman would have saved them instantly it'd be better if they landed and you know Coast City because how Jordan would have saved them you know or Jessica Cruz or you know any number of other factors you know Simon bass for example probably could have saved them you know but they're in Gotham City there's a man that flies over you know that the glides around is a bat what can he possibly do because he's just a regular guy at the same time he thinks that you know he starts saying things like maybe they deserve it because they're they live in a city full of criminals that have gone absolutely insane and so this isn't really design to point to some greater picture this is it really designed to point to some great big huge concept but somebody to show that different people react to situations differently and this just kind of gives us a bigger understanding or a better understanding of how regular Joe's deal with life and death in the face of Batman doing what he can to basically save their lives and so the result here is that while Batman is attaching various artifacts what he does is he starts talking to dude and this is one of the one of the ways in which the Batman story really starts to get cool this is one of the reasons why I think Tom King is doing such a great job writing Bruce Wayne's perception begins to shift away from complete confidence in the fact that they're going to be able to save the people on this plane to the possibility that he might die and the way that this happens is as Alfred is talking to Bruce Wayne and as Bruce Wayne is talking to Alfred what he says is or I guess what he asks is what his parents be proud now this is basically just kind of Bruce Wayne accepting his fate this is Bruce Wayne accepting the fact that he may not live here now of course we we switched to a scenario whereby somebody is watching or standing over the body of another individual and this person seems to seem to have been the one that shot the rocket that shot the plane down and this person is dead we don't really know who this individual is that's watching him the but the result is that we switch back to you know about Anne's conversations with Alfred and Batman's basically kind of getting his affairs in order you know he tells Alfred that if he doesn't make it that on the off chance that he didn't survive or that some event happened that would have killed him he prepared a guide so to speak you know a few words of wisdom for those individuals who were closest to him the members of the bat family and Alfred himself and he instructs Alfred to pass those those little bits of information on to those members of the bat family but he also says that if something happens to him that Duke should go train under the direction of Dick Grayson just because of the fact that Dick Grayson is as good of a teacher as Batman will be now this gives us perception of how Bruce Wayne views Dick Grayson we've always known that Batman viewed Dick Grayson with the utmost respect even though they've had their falling-out even though they've had their disagreements you know they haven't always seen eye to eye he was the first sidekick and he spent the most time alongside Bruce Wayne as Robin and over the course of dick Grayson's life he's even played the role of Batman you know a time or two and the result is that he is as good of a Batman as Bruce Wayne will ever be and this is really just Bruce Wayne confirming it and the comics we've seen this before you know but this is DC rebirth this is basically you know DC giving us a perception of what to expect going forward and so the you know Tommy king is effectively telling us it's not as though with DC rebirth all that history and all that you know importance all that you know the the relationship between Batman and Dick Grayson has just kind of gone away instead it's just as strong as it ever was and so as they are as his plane is appears to crash into the ground just before it hits or crashing of the water rather just before it hits the plane is lifted up from the water and Batman's initial thought is that it's Clark that Superman has come to the rescue but instead he's greeted by two individuals the man addresses himself as Gotham and the woman addresses her I guess he tells Batman this woman is Gotham girl that this is their city and that they're here to save it so as we pick up with part two of Batman with DC rebirth I was scrolling through the comments of the last video and somebody to ask the question what happened to the new 52 Batman and this is kind of an indication to me that not everybody is aware of what went on with Batman in the new 52 and so what I want to do is take I guess the first part of this video to kind of clear this up to make things easy to understand with its character because Batman can be a bit confusing when it comes to the new 52 so as we know in 2011 DC rebooted everything the new 52 was a line wide reboot whether you loved it or hate it that's that's what we got and what DC originally established was that it has only been 5 years between the time that superheroes first emerged and the start of the new 52 now with regards to DC rebirth the only thing we really know right now is that it was actually 10 years that were stolen from people's lives and that was all done supposedly at dr. Manhattan but again this is a very primitive story we have no real idea of what direction DC is going in with that and so that's that's really the only thing we know I can't really offer you any more info besides that but virtually everybody in DC Comics got a reboot the Teen Titans were rebooted you know Superman was rebooted Wonder Woman Aquaman the whole nine yards the only two characters who were not rebooted was the Green Lantern and Batman and that was simply because of the fact that the comics were selling so well they didn't make any sense to reboot him it was a classic adage if it works don't fix it and so with the character of Batman what DC did is they came back and they retold his origin story we got that in Batman zero year and it told us what was going on in the life of Bruce Wayne from the time his parents died up until the time he became Batman when Batman issue number one came out with a new 52 the issue with this is there was no explanation on his backstory there was no ever I guess no not really his backstory there was no explanation about all the stories that had happened before he was you know before the new 52 we didn't know if stories like hush had actually happened we didn't know his stories like nightfall if The Killing Joke if things like that had actually happened in the new 52 instead DC just left it open-ended and they're still doing that what DC says is none of the stories that happened in Batman's history before the new 52 actually happened unless they say they did and so during Batman eternal for example we saw the villain hush returned and DC established that the storyline hush did happen in the new 52 we had reference to the Killing Joke in the story of Barbara Gordon Batgirl zone line of comics and so we know that Killing Joke happened and we had actually seen reference to the events of nightfall when Bane broke Batman's back and that was referenced what DC is basically telling us is that whenever they reference a story from the for from before the new 52 dev store happened in the five-year window and so this Batman that we're seeing right now is the pre new 52 Batman it's just DC's kind of left it open as to whether or not the stories have happened before the new 52 actually took place I know it's a little confusing it's a little weird not really sure why they chose to do that but the best rule of thumb to take here is that unless an event like nightfall is referenced unless an event like hush or like The Killing Joke is referenced it's best to assume it just doesn't happen I know it kind of boggles the mind in terms of like all that stuff happened over the course of five years but you know it's you got to kind of go with it for what it is you know it's it's comics don't think about it too hard you'll make your head explode that's that's how I live my life when it comes to college but the fact remains that now that were painting that with issue number two in the last video we basically just talked about how Batman was in Gotham City it says normal rare and wear-and-tear where he's saving the city of course Duke Thomas is the new Robin to take the place of Damian Wayne at least at the moment anyway and and what's basically happening right now is we're continuing the event of the arrival of two characters that came at the end of the last video the first one referencing himself as Gotham and the second one being Gotham girl and so what we do is we pick up with kind of with with solomon grundy basically if those of you guys who don't know solomon grundy is i wouldn't go as far as to say he's DC's Incredible Hulk just because of the fact that he predates Incredible Hulk as far as I'm aware but he is one of the strongest characters in the DC Universe and he's a very intimidating foe but he always has a mantra that goes along with him and anybody this read DC Comics and is familiar with solomon grundy knows that mantra of course a mantra being born on a monday christened on the tuesday married on a wednesday took ill on a thursday grew worse on friday died on saturday buried on Sunday that's his thing and so while this is happening while solomon grundy is basically tearing a part of this statue in gotham city gotham girl and n gotham are both trying to defend it as best they can they're trying to I guess stave off Solomon Grundy and what this is designed to do what Tom King is basically showing us is two things the first is that Batman isn't necessarily against them being there but the second is that they're very inexperienced and we would expect this you know Batman has fought solomon grundy on a multitude of occasions and so one he knows the best way to deal with him he knows the best way to interact with him and he knows his weaknesses Gotham in Gotham girl they don't know this all they know is that solomon grundy is just a bad guy who's trying to tear things up and so what ends up happening here is of course Batman subdue solomon grundy by using his momentum against him now this is actually one of the funny things I was having this conversation with a friend of mine and he had read Batman edition number two and his thought was that Batman had actually picked up solomon grundy and of course the answer to that is absolutely not Solomon Grundy's way too heavy for Batman to lift this is someone just an example where Solomon Grundy's running a Batman Batman uses the momentum and flips him over on the ground but of course the solomon grundy is also someone that doesn't necessarily fear Batman but even if it's on a base level understands that Batman's not a guy to be trifled with and so what Batman does is once he hasn't pinned down of course he says that that your solomon grundy gets up it's going to hurt a whole lot more now this is where the inexperience of Gotham and Gotham girl come into play this is where Tom King tells us Batman isn't really against them being there of course what Batman says is that they were wasting too much time that in Batman's mind it's all a matter of calculations it's all a matter of figuring things out as all a matter of knowing what's going to happen within a reasonable time frame then he tells them that because they had wasted so much time because solomon grundy was moving so fast if batman had not intervened it would have resulted in the death of a homeless man at least we presume he's homeless um but we would have resulted in the death of this man and so what Batman says is he's been watching them but they've been doing the best they can to keep Gotham City safe and this makes sense Niki's Batman wouldn't simply allow just two people to show up in Gotham and start acting in a superhero fashion without keeping an eye on them even if he doesn't necessarily intervene he would definitely be aware of what's going on and that's what's happened here Batman's been watching them and he simply says they're doing good they're doing some very good things but the goal is to do better now he doesn't give them an actual idea of what to do on how to do better and this is kind of a funny thing with Batman because unless you were Robin Batman doesn't really you know take you under his wing and teach you everything step by step with Robin of course he does that because the Batman's mind Robin is designed to be his successor one day Tim Drake Dick Grayson Stephanie Brown Carrie Kelly Damian Wayne they're all designed to be successors or at least they were trained to be successors for Batman they all went off on their own individual story arcs and of course as we know Dick Grayson went on to become a Nightwing Tim great Tim Drake I believe went on to be read but we know that they've taken on their own identities but if the worst case scenario happened and that man died any one of them would be able to take up the mantle in his place especially someone like Dick Grayson but the issue here is that with Gotham and Gotham girl not being given a clear understanding of what it is that they're supposed to do they asked for it you know Gotham simply says if we're not doing what it is that we need to do in order to be effective superheroes for the city of Gotham then tell us what we need to do tell us how to be you know crime fighters tell us how to fight intelligently as opposed to just kind of being you know a broadsword swinging through the city of Gotham had bad guys and so what we do is we transition later and we pick up with Bruce Wayne when he is you know monitoring various footage radagast certain forms of footage that he has on Gotham and Gotham girl and in his mind it's kind of a tough situation and because he has largely been the sole protector of Gotham for quite some time he's had sidekicks he's had people that helped him but when it came down to it we as readers always look to Batman as the sole savior of Gotham City but to have two superheroes here who are for all intents and purposes more or less a version of Superman they may not necessarily be as strong but they fly they have you know super hearing and I guess ultra hearing you know they have a you know incredible vision and so on and so forth they have all the feats of Superman you know to a lesser degree and of a different name it's kind of a situation of is Batman really even useful here anymore if the time comes when they are trained to the epitome of what it means to be a superhero the time comes when they are as good as Batman in terms of being able to analyze the situation then being able to neutralize that situation then of what use would Batman be it would be as if Superman showed up in Gotham City and said he was going to start protecting it but at the same time he also realizes that sometimes he just needs help that with the incident of the plane that with the various asteroids and things like that with all the different threats that had faced Gotham City if they were beyond Batman's normal ability to take care of that Gotham and Gotham girl had done it they had basically you know they had saved the plane they you know you I guess diverted asteroid so on and so forth they were doing the things that Bruce Wayne couldn't do and in his mind it's a struggle because he's facing he's looking at these two and he's basically seeing the fact that he's becoming obsolete he's seeing a Gotham City that no longer needs him this is one of the reasons why tom kean riding is so cool because we don't really see this very often we see stories where Batman goes against overwhelming odds but we don't really see stories where Batman sits down and has to ponder the fact that he could be obsolete the fact that he wouldn't really matter anymore obsolescence I'm not really sure that's order now but I'm going to use it as a word I'm going to make it one if it's not but anyway without ffred showing up outfit of course you know Brees us back to earth he brings us back to you know the everyday life of Batman that's one of the great things about Alfred and the story is he always keeps us anchored to the present and he basically tells us that in Wayne Manor there was about 250 guests who were all there to see Bruce Wayne for a you know a Children's Hospital gala that they put together and this is just you know of course we don't really see Bruce Bruce Wayne go often do you know performing that gala cuz we don't really need to instead Tom Kean deviates our attention to building another plot building an upcoming set of events and what he tells us is that with Commissioner Gordon working over you know staying over for about two or three hours to do whatever it is that he does in the Gotham City Police Department that there is apparently a man who is down there waiting for him and when this man comes up to meet me Commissioner Gordon now what he says is that he is the person that sent solomon grundy free now our initial thought or at least my initial thought when I first heard this was that maybe this guy was just some kind of you know villain mastermind that with him drawing some kind of a blade that he was actually going to kill Commissioner Gordon uh I would have found that hard to believe this early in Tom King's run but that was my initial thought is that's what he was entertaining to do instead he doesn't tell us that the what he tells us is that his name is Bob Castro that he served in the military but the reason why he said solomon grundy free was because of Solomon Grundy's extreme strength and that he had been warned that the monster men are coming now we don't get anything more than this from this guy Bob Castro and the reason why is because Bob takes the knife and he stabs himself in the neck with it and kills himself now this is really kind of cool here because in a lot of Batman's stories we usually have like the one you know the exposition the one point where the guy comes in and says here's everything you need to know about events that are coming up instead Tom King doesn't do that he's very Zak sir I'm sorry he's very Scott Schneider in that way then the sense that he's kind of building up to a major plot thread and we just sort of have to read things in order to understand what all's going on but what we treat what we do here is we transition back to Bruce Wayne at the gala and Bruce Wayne receives the bat-signal and so while he is spending time with what appears to be a very attractive woman he basically takes off he leaves and the result is that he ends up having somewhat of a conversation with Duke Duke of course you know carries on the conversation a bit with Alfred but in the end he says that because of the bat-signal because of everything that's going on that he basically needs to leave now this is one of the other cool things too is he gives us some insight in how he views Gotham and Gotham girl we as readers know that Bruce Wayne has a very hard time trusting anybody in fact he trusts nobody and even says that that he doesn't trust Alfred now this is a lie we know that Bruce Wayne trust Alfred with his life in fact is you know Alfred's been such a long part of Bruce Wayne's history that unless you're reading all-star Batman you have no reason to distrust Alfred I'm not going to spoil that at the moment if you haven't read all star Batman you definitely need to go check it out but the fact remains here that you know Bruce Wayne says that he does not trust Gotham and Gotham girl now it doesn't mean that he thinks they're bad it's simply that he's waiting to see what goes on he's playing it smart he's playing the long game and this is this is a hallmark of Bruce Wayne he always does that whenever he encounters anybody new he always plays a long game he always waits to see what's going on to see what their motives are before he really begins to extend any measure of trust of them in fact we've been seeing that with Superman with the pre new 52 Superman living in the new 52 continuity during the son of Superman story that I went over the Bruce Wayne says flat out that they don't know him they don't know that version of Superman they know the other version of Superman who died they fought alongside him but they don't know this pre new 52 Superman and so they don't really have a reason to trust him but they will so because of the fact that he has done everything he can to prove that he's legitimate guy much like this with Gotham girl and Gotham you know when they show up at the bat-signal Jim Gordon is initially afraid he's like what in the world is going on here you're not Bruce Wayne you're not Batman and Batman simply says don't worry about it they're with him and so what is up happening is Jim Gordon basically tells them what all's taking place you know what all is happening that there was a man who showed that you know killed himself after he claimed that there that the monster men were coming and he initially asked Gotham and Gotham girl do they know anything that's been going on strange anything that would indicate that you know there is a there are some kind of enemy force that are showing up in Gotham City now of course Gotham and Gotham girls say no and and Batman says no he doesn't know either but they all sort of reference the the instance where the rocket was shot at the plane and the person who had shot that rocket had also committed suicide and so what this seems to indicate is that perhaps there's a series of events that are unfolding this indicates that maybe all these individuals work for the monster men but in some form or fashion they seem to be tied in to the concept of the monster man and they ended up committing acts in their own name now what's really cool about this too and these what we're gonna see what the end of the story is if I were to hazard a guess and of course you know not spoiling anything you know just sort of live in the moment to sort of live in right now if I were to hazard a guess I would say well maybe it's because of the fact that all these individuals are these these people are part of a larger plan they've been assigned tasks and they're carrying these tasks out but whatever the case may be in the end that man basically bails out without any of them knowing this is such what's really cool and again this kind of points to the inexperience of Gotham and Gotham girl you know Commissioner Gordon is used to Batman just vanishing up in smoke just disappearing and going off to do his own thing Gotham and Gotham girl are not used to this not only that despite their abilities they can't find Batman anywhere now the Wii U's comic book readers know that this was most likely due to the fact that Batman has honed his skills in such a way that he can avoid Superman if he wanted to but the fact remains here that with him vanishing this is just kind of Batman being Batman is not really designed to be an extremely important moment it's just designed to be something a little funny something a little interesting you know - for us to get a bit of a laugh out of but the fact remains that what we do here is we switch to another location oh we initially pick up with a guy who's not really named and this man is simply just answering questions he's shown images of his face where he's scared where he's happy he's sad and he's angry and he's being asked are you scared are you happy are you sad and are you angry and each time he replies yes professor and what we learned is that he's actually talking to professor Hugo Strange now this is not the biggest part the biggest you know kind of the story reveal here is that Hugo Strange seems to be working in accordance with the United States government and Amanda Waller of The Suicide Squad and so this is just one of those instances were the plot thickens where things become a lot more complicated and so what we'll do is we'll find out in the next video of course where this line of thought is leading us to and yeah it's pretty cool so far like the story is actually pretty interesting so as we continue our discussion on Batman rebirth but we pick up now with I am Gotham part 3 now when it comes to multi-part story arcs they're usually three issues or more and there's a reason for that odd numbers are more often chosen than even numbers but you know with DC they tend to stick with six issue story arcs but regardless of the circumstances everything's done in sets of three the first two issues are done to sort of set up the story the second I'm sorry the third and fourth issues are designed to effectively enhance or to add existing information and the fifth and sixth issues are designed to conclude everything and with issue number three Tom King begins the process of reviewing the backstory of Gotham and Gotham girl what we do is we pick up at some point and the relative past not too far but at some point in the past again we're not given a definitive date here and we just know that it was probably a decade or so but during a time when a family was basically leaving a theater this was very indicative of Bruce Wayne's experience and in fact when I first picked up the story I thought that it was a retelling of Bruce Wayne's origin which seemed a little strange because the boy was older than Bruce Wayne was when his parents were killed but much like that scenario this family is heading down an alleyway why they chose to head down a dark alleyway I don't understand but they chose to head down an alleyway in the midst of walking down this alleyway the most you know predictable scenario happens and they're held at gunpoint now where the father steps in and tries to protect both his wife and his son the man is basically subdued the father is almost immediately subdued and the result is of the gun again has turned to the mother and eventually the son but Batman steps in here and Batman basically saves the life of this family now for Bruce Wayne this is a big deal because this is effectively a repeat of the scenario in which he lost his parents and this kind of situation resonates more with Bruce Wayne than any other kind of situation despite the things that the Joker does that Clayface to face the penguin so on and so forth they're usually part of a bigger scheme in the county book realm they're part of a bigger ongoing set of events in in Gotham City but things like this that depict a family being held at gunpoint in the same fashion as Bruce Wayne's family when its parents died this strikes a chord and Bruce Wayne immediately lashes out but for Batman this is also a chance for him to be the person that wasn't there when his family died and this is what he does you know as this husband and wife and son as they're basically consoling one another having survived the encounter Batman tells them that it's okay to be scared they're going to be scared for quite some time that everybody gets scared for one reason or another but the important thing is to learn from that fear to learn to fight fear and to go forward a stronger person now of course what we know is that this young boy was basically Gotham and the young girl presumably his sister who we'll find out here in a little bit is Gotham girl now the connection between Gotham and Gotham girl and the events that we just went over is revealed to us when we switched to Robinson Ville and Gotham City now with regards to Gotham as a whole this is one of the big myths no MERS Gotham is largely considered to be a singular place in and of itself Gotham City does have suburbs but it's still considered to be heart of Gotham in and of itself and so what we find is that the parents who had been held at gunpoint are meeting with a man from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and what they're telling us is that after the incident whereby they had been held at gunpoint that the boy named Hank had basically become obsessed with Batman to a degree the word that Tom Kane chooses to use here is enamour'd but the evidence seems to contradict that the evidence says otherwise with all the various news clippings and all the posters and all the pinups and so on and so forth it seems as though Hank has developed an obsession with Batman as a concept in addition to this while his younger sister was not present at the robbery because she was at a friend's house in the end the experience that Hank had basically rolled over onto her and as she sort of became just as obsessed as he did with the idea of overcoming her own personal fears now Tom Kings being a little thin here with regards to you know the relationship between a brother and sir in terms of how one's experiences impact the other we could really just kind of take it at face value that in some former fashion he had basically reached out to her and he had informed her of her experience or I guess of his experience and how it changed his life but the fact remains that his sister Claire became just as obsessed as he did or it seems to become an assess as Hank did with regards to Batman and so this basically shaped his life and it shaped her life that Hank began going around and committing as many you know good deeds as he possibly could volunteering different things like that that he began weight training he began exercising pushing his body to the peak of a physical experience that that both Clara and himself began to experiment with you no forensic evidence began to read about you know science as much as they possibly could and this is really just designed to say that instead of them you know having some sort of guide to take them through their own experiences instead they followed the exact same road as Bruce Wayne that Bruce Wayne taught himself a lot of the things that he knew he also traveled around the world to gain a lot of these experiences but he taught himself a lot of the things that he knew and the result is that he is he proved himself to be a formidable combatant and take on the Batman mantle and full force much like Bruce Wayne Hank and Claire have done the exact same thing and in fact light Bruce Wayne traveling around the world they did the same they won't ever cease they did you know some work in some very dangerous areas and this went towards expanding their view of the world but also how harsh humanity can be and how important it is to stand up for what's right to do the right thing in virtually any circumstance now the connection between pink and you know Claire with regards to why they're being questioned or why their parents are being questioned by the FBI comes into focus when Tom Kane shifts the argument and what he does is he begins adding the FBI agent asked questions about money transfers now this is not usually something this handle by the FBI this is usually handled by the IRS so it's a little fishy but the fact remains here that if there's criminal issues involved well then the FBI would begin to involve themselves in the events and so at the very least the FBI is kind of poking around and asking the question why there's two new superheroes in Gotham and where they came from but what the parents of hanging Clair say is that at some point while they were overseas they got a request to wire a large amount of money no reason was given but because they were their parents and they were concerned for their well-being but also because Hank and Claire had been extremely charitable people on how they live their lives there didn't really seem to be any concern that anything nefarious was happening and so they transferred the money and then I guess a few months later Hank and Claire appeared in Gotham City as heroes who effectively had the same power as Superman now again miss FBI agents is kind of poking around or at least a person claiming to be an FBI agent it's just kind of poking around trying to get a lay of the land and trying to understand everything that's going on but the end result here is that we're getting somewhat of a mysterious backstory we're not getting all the information and so before anything else is revealed the FBI agent effectively leaves and as he gets into his car we realized that he's using the alias of matches Malone which is also a name that Bruce Wayne uses and so in effect Batman's poking around at the history of these two individuals trying to find out where they came from now in truth I wasn't really expecting this I actually thought that it was probably some kind of a henchman of a villain or something along those lines but this makes sense this makes perfect sense you know with Batman basically doing his research kind of hunting around behind the scenes it would stand to reason that he would go as far as to look up the heritage of these two people and to find out where they came from but it also gives a little bit of perception when it comes to Bruce Wayne as we talked about in the last video Bruce is not a very trusting person when it when it comes to anybody to be quite frank of course the vehicle that he was driving was not an actual car instead it was basically a housing for his for his bat motorcycle I'm not sure exactly what it's called you know the bat wheel I guess I can't remember but is basically you notice that this is just a multi-faceted depiction of the deception the lengths that Bruce Wayne will go to to get the information he needs it doesn't necessarily make him a bad person it's just that at times it's necessary for him to be duplicitous in order to gain honest answers and so what we do is we switch to Clair and Hank who are in the middle of old a bridge that seems to have collapsed and while Batman is racing and trying to get over there in order to keep things you know in order in order to both monitor Hank and Claire to make sure they're being heroes effectively as well as do what he can to ensure the safety of those bystanders we also see that while he is able to do this that the entire situation is being monitored by Hugo Strange now as we talked about in previous video Hugo Strange is a well known you know villain of the Batman landscape but he usually uses his experience or his knowledge for the purpose of manipulating other people but he's really one of these villains as kind of the hidden hand you know it's usually a circumstance just like this where it turns out that he co strange was behind everything and so while the bridge is saved I guess the bystanders on the bridge are saved the old wall things seem to come to a close eventually Claire and Hank are met by the arrival of psycho-pirate a villain capable of manipulating the emotions of virtually anybody he comes into contact with and so the question becomes what direction are things taking now so as we continue our discussion on Batman rebirth what we do here is pick up now with the aftermath of psycho-pirate seemingly causing Gotham to go insane and for those of you guys who are just now joining us in this series who may have just stumbled across this video DC rebirth is a line of comics written by DC designed to basically take what worked before the new 52 and blend it with the new 52 and with characters like Batman he's kind of a weird quagmire of course we talked about this in the in the last video but Batman didn't really get a reboot per se in the new 52 instead it was just kind of up in the air whether or not his continuity had stayed intact and we were just sort of left to our own devices you know stories like hush like nightfall like The Killing Joke they weren't considered part of Batman's continuity and the new 52 unless they were referenced and so we didn't really get any solid ground we were really just kind of walking on quicksand when it came to his backstory but the fact remains that as part of DC rebirth writer Tom King had introduced two new characters the first was Gotham and the second was Gotham girl now in the series up to this point they had basically saved the plane that was preparing to crash into a river and Batman was trying to keep the plane protected trying to keep the plane from crashing but ultimately he was unsuccessful and he was even facing his own death the process but because Gotham and Gotham girl seem to have powers that made them almost identical to Superman and Supergirl they were able to save the plane and by virtue of that save you know however many hundreds of people now but what the series had done up to this point it is it basically given us a view of Batman in terms of how he sees Gotham and Gotham girl and in his mind he had done a little bit of back search you know a little bit of investigation into their history we saw that in last video where he had gone to talk to their parents and it had been Batman himself who had inspired them we didn't know exactly how they became Gotham and Gotham girl but we know that Hank was in a situation much like grill you know Bruce Wayne's parents were by Hank and his parents were walking out of a theater they head down a dark alleyway they were held at gunpoint but Batman showed up and saved the day after that Hank had become obsessed with Batman and his obsession had spread to his sister Claire and the result was that the two of them had basically become great humans you know great people they had gone on humanitarian missions they had done as much research as they could with forensics they had basically become their own variations of Bruce Wayne and the result was that after some set amount of time that wasn't really given to us you know they had borrowed money from their parents and then they had really manned gotham girl with superhuman powers and so what this does is it picks up again with the last issue where the villains psycho-pirate had showed up under the control of dr. Hugo Strange and had used his powers to seemingly drive Gotham insane now to say this psycho pirate has powers is actually a misnomer now probably shouldn't have said that psycho pirate to the best of my knowledge and this is where you know Tom Kings not absolutely clear here psycho power can be a bit confusing in the new 52 he was infected with the virus giving him you know some measure of psycho I guess you know psionic mind abilities by Brainiac but in the pre new 52 continuity he was just a guy who was really good at manipulating people's emotions um you know Tom keen doesn't really give us any definitive explanation on which psycho-pirate that we're talking about you know it could very well be that it is the you know pre new 52 or it could be the new 52 it could be one version wearing the costume of the other we don't really know all we do know is that he manipulated the emotions of Gotham and this is shown to us when Gotham had gone on a tear and basically killed 27 soldiers now his sister Claire is left behind and she just keeps repeating the same things that she's scared that she's very scared and of course this is a byproduct of psycho Pyrus manipulations once he latches on to a person once he latches on to a being regardless of who that being is and where they hail from in the multiverse once he manipulates their emotions that manipulation stays intact unless someone with sufficient ability is able to remove those manipulations now of course that man being what he is there's been different circumstances where he's been successful in doing it and where he hasn't been successful in doing it it really just kind of calls for what the story needs it to be but what is up happening is we show up right as we transition to to the rooftop of another building and we find a guy who's standing on the building and seems to be in the process of committing suicide now the Gotham shows up behind this guy and and basically you know it seems as though he's going to talk him down but Gotham keeps repeating the same thing I can fix this we can fix this it's the same thing being said over and over and over again but the guy says no the guy says that no this cannot be fixed that the monster men are coming and this is this is a weird situation here because what we're gonna find at the end of the story is that not everything is what it seems when it comes to the realm of the monster men but the result is that this man has some kind of a device on his phone and when he presses the button to activate it it blows up the building now this seems I guess has revealed to us to basically be a flashback in the mind of Claire and this tells us exactly what was happening right before psycho-pirate showed up with Hugo Strange and manipulated Gotham and so in yesterday's video when we had simply just picked up with Gotham and Gotham girl in a building that was you know immersed in flame we didn't really know exactly what was going on this is we just tells us that but what we do know is that Claire had been taken back to the Batcave presumably at the request of Batman where she's being cared for by both Alfred and Duke Thomas now this is kind of a funny thing here and I really like what Tom King was doing with this with Duke Thomas and one of the things that I've kind of missed spoken about so far in the series is that Duke Thomas was supposed to be a Robin which is sort of ironic because I covered this in Batman in my Batman rebirth video Duke Thomas is not actually supposed to be a Robin that was a mistake that I made in the previous videos Duke Thomas is a character they're just being groomed to be someone presumably taking the place of Batman that seems to be the common idea here I don't recall whether or not Batman had actually stated that and in Batman rebirth I'm pretty sure he did I think you just said we said that Duke was being groomed for something else but the overall theme here is that Batman especially with the events that had transpired this far and the ion awesome series you know Bruce Wayne is coming to the conclusion that with everything that's happened up to this point with quarter vowels night of vowels with the return of Joker in death of the family Batman in game the Bruce Wayne's kind of coming to grips with his own mortality that it seems as though he's basically losing his grip on Gotham City itself and the result is that someone needs to be able to step up and take his place and even if that's not the case Bruce Wayne also recognizes that he's not immortal he's not gonna live forever you know he is going to die at some point Anton then even if Dick Grayson is a great superhero he still got Bludhaven to take care of neo Damian Wayne is forming the Teen Titans you know Tim Drake is off doing his own thing basically every member of the bat family has their own situation to take care of but Duke doesn't have that Duke was introduced during Scott Snyder's run of Batman he is a character who led the you know the we are Robin team he's basically kind of groomed himself to a degree to be the new Batman and then Bruce Wayne's just sort of taking the next step and giving him the official training so to speak but what's interesting about this is that Duke basically relates to Claire again she keeps repeating the same thing that she's scared that she's scared and it's kind of funny that that dude doesn't really pick up on this but in his mind this is really just a girl that's experienced a very traumatic event but what Tom King also does here is he seems to set up a possible romance between Claire and Duke Thomas basically having Duke Thomas you know comfort Claire as best you can and then presumably this may or may not lead to a relationship the reason why I say that is because in comics it's usually some kind of traumatic event that leads to a relationship between two characters either that or just they kind of start out as enemies like you know like Green Arrow and black Canary did and then they become you know they and they end up in a relationship later on down the line but it's their trials and tribulations that strengthen that relationship of course and again this could just be wishful thinking because I love the character of Duke Thomas and do Thomas needs a girl so I figure what better you know care do to have than a newly turned superhero basically you know add to the existing bat family as someone that can fight alongside Duke Thomas and so what we do is we transition back to Gotham and you know Gotham is again continuing this rampage talking about how he can fix things and it's just sort of tearing you know doing things apart but Bruce Wayne shows up Batman shows up and says look everything you've done up to this point you killed 27 soldiers no you cannot fix the you know but what Bruce Wayne also does is he gives us his official view he gives us an official exposition on what he thinks about Gotham this is cool because it's something that we haven't seen before we've seen him poking around we've seen him doing investigating but this is basically the conclusion that he came to when he first met Gotham you know Gotham and Gotham girl had saved that plane from crashing into the river and Batman realized that they can do things that he can't they're basically Gotham City's own Superman he had looked to them as possibly the next step and what Tom Kings seemed to be doing or at least in my mind anyway as I was reading this is if Duke Thomas is being groomed for a replacement for Bruce Wayne then Bruce Wayne himself looked at Gotham and Gotham girl as you know kind of attacked on addition to that an unexpected you know an unexpected way for him to basically bolster the continuation of the bat family they kind of continue the legacy going forward but the result is that Batman says that despite the fact that he looked at both Gotham and Gotham girl ask people that could have saved Gotham City in a way that he couldn't in the end Gotham killed 27 people and it basically seems as though he is officially a villain or in some former fashion a villain that's that has ulterior motives or simply just lost his mind became drunk with power now one thing to point out here is that Batman does not know about psycho pirate and Hugo Strange in the equation in his mind he simply just stumbled onto a circumstance where 27 people were killed the word I am Gotham was written in blood and so Batman simply went by the evidence that existed at hand but once he and Gotham begin to get into an argument once they begin to you know to discuss it I guess you know debate with one another ah what dozen happening is of course Gotham takes off after this joining the Batmobile and Duke chimes in to Batman stating that he's found a pattern you know among these soldiers that were killed and what he says is that their dog tags when the numbers are rearranged when the numbers are you know when the when the pattern is discovered the number comes out to be 24 and what is up happening as Batman puts two and two together and realizes that you know this basically adds up to Task Force X now the way this ties into Task Force X is actually really really cool and this is one of the things that I like about Tom King because he basically expands on the clandestine nature of the Suicide Squad but he's also or at least also seems to be leading up to the Justice League versus Suicide Squad event which would be the first major crossover of the DC rebirth line of comics but what he says or what Duke says is that after cracking the code he came to realize that the unit in particular that was killed was the 24th unit of a military you know military group and the 24th letter of the alphabet is X and so what Batman ends up doing here is coming to the realization that X stands for Task Force X which is the other name that's the official name for the Suicide Squad and so what he ends up doing is he basically travels to where Amanda Waller at least we travel to where Amanda Waller is located and she's essentially talking to a military general now what's really cool about this is you know Amanda Waller in this bunker and this military base of thereat is actually below Gotham City itself and it's the last place we would expect to find her to be quite honest you know with Amanda Waller in the new 52 we would have expected to see her in the field but this is what's so cool about DC rebirth is that it gives us the old Amanda Waller that we're used to before the new 52 and so she's the office worker but she is cold blooded I like to think of her as the mob boss of the DC Universe in the sense that she's a person you don't cross you know she knows all the right people she's like the j edgar Hoover you know she's got info on everybody and those individuals that she wants to stay in power stay in power and those that she doesn't want to stay in power do not stay in power and so while she's talking to this military general the guy says that it's impossible for Batman to find them you know that they are you know miles below the surface of Gotham City Batman will never think to look for them in Gotham City he's got soldiers he's got huge military-grade doors that Batman can't penetrate but all of that's wrong and the reason why is because Batman is there Batman managed that way to make his way and now we're not told how Batman got in there and in truth we don't really need to be told right now someone because of the fact that it just adds to the to the cool aspect of Batman it adds to the fact that Batman can go where he wants when he wants how he wants and there really isn't anybody that can stop him plus it just kind of adds to the mysterious nature you know of the Caped Crusader as we know him but you know after he begins talking to Amanda Waller we learned that from her perspective the Gotham City has been a very tumultuous place for quite some time and again this is basically you know DC grabbing a combination of the new 52 and the pre new 52 continuities again with that man it's a little finicky here but you know what we're told is that after you know the court of owls event the night of owls now the Batman in game the return to the Joker you know death of the family all these different events are to take place taking place it it basically sent Gotham into a tailspin of chaos and what seemed to be destruction and the result is that for Amanda Waller's point of view this city basically needs to be saved the issue here is that when Hugo Strange and when psycho-pirate had been assigned to Task Force X you know as part of Suicide Squad they hit abandon their mission and they had basically taken to Gotham City and that psycho hired himself had manipulated the emotions of of Gotham and sent him down a direction of insanity Amanda Waller had sent those military personnel to try to corral psycho-pirate and he goes strange back in you know back you back to the Suicide Squad but because they're villains and they do what they do they ended up having Gotham killed those soldiers anyway now it just seems as though what Hugo Strange a psycho pirate want to do is just bring down Gotham City they just want to instill a whole bunch of violence you know chaos different things like that but the result is that Amanda Waller turns to Batman and essentially says that he's going to help her bring down Hugo Strange and cyber pirates and well because of the fact that one Batman wants the city saved and to Amanda Waller will not abide people who abandon their role in The Suicide Squad she will have them killed if it comes to that and so what's also really funny about this this is one of the things that I really love about the pre new 52 Amanda Waller is she simply says that she's only going to help Batman do this if Batman says please and this is what's so cool about this because Amanda Waller is literally telling Batman like you have to ask me to help you you know not because formalities but because I just feel like seeing you beg and that's what's so cool about this is because you don't screw with Amanda Waller and and it's just it's super cool you ask any DC fan you know about Amanda Waller and they'll tell you by leaps and bounds that number one it's the Amanda Waller from the Justice League TV show that was the best one that justice Lucar TV show that was the best version of her character but to you know the pre new 52 Amanda Waller in the comics was probably the best depiction of course she doesn't have fans for the new 52 and it really kind of goes back and forth but you know what we also learned is that where Batman believed that it was 28 pure I'm sorry 27 people who had been killed Amanda Waller actually says was 28 and this is when Batman realizes everything that's going on or at least realizes you know there's a little more going on here that he thought there was and he ends up traveling back to the home of Hank again we had talked about that in a last video when Batman had gone to interview Hanks parents to find out who he was where he came from what his background was and what his motivation was for becoming a hero and what we find is that when Gotham had gone through and killed those 27 soldiers that there was actually 28 but one of those soldiers had survived and had gone back to the home of Gotham and had basically killed Hanks parents and so when Hank realized what was going on he went back to his home as well and found this soldier in the middle of you know his parents murder and the result is that you know Hank is basically freaking out he's losing his mind and Batman tries to talk him down Batman tries to says no you can still turn back you can still stop this you can still set things back to normal but Hank basically throws Batman's words back at him and says no you cannot fix this you can only make it worse and instead he kills the soldier cast Batman aside and then takes off with the intention of destroying Gotham City now again we're still you know we're a couple issues away from the conclusion of this story so we don't really know the bigger picture here at the moment we don't know if there is a much bigger role that he goes strange and psycho-pirate are playing here we simply don't know if they just want to destroy things we don't really know everything that's happening but what we do know is that this is going to lead to a pretty significant battle so as we continue our series on Batman rebirth we pick up now with Batman I am Gotham the conclusion now something that I want to point out here is there is a sixth issue and that sixth issue does have an epilogue but the issue here is this epilogue leads directly into I am suicide and so what we'll do is we're actually going to postpone that sixth issue and when we get around to the I am suicide story arc then we'll use that six issue to kind of jump off because what it'll do is it'll allow us to link both this I am Gotham story and the I am suicide story for the new readers who are coming along at that point in time but for those of the guys who were just now jumping on board who were just now catching up with my video on Batman I am Gotham we talked about how in previous videos Gotham City was met with two new Hugh two new superheroes calling themselves Gotham and Gotham girl now we didn't really know who these heroes were or where they came from we know that Batman was trying to keep a plane from crashing into the river he was doing the best he could to keep that from happening but in the end Gotham and Gotham girl were the ones that basically saved the plane and so from Bruce Wayne's perspective he didn't initially trust them but because his I guess their first impression on him was that they were acting as heroes he decided to let them continue without challenging them and basically learn more about him and this is what he did he actually went to their home and once he figured out who they were and began digging into their history and what he learned was that when Hank was a child the name of the guy Gotham a hank had basically encountered that man when Hank and his parents were held at gunpoint by a robber in the same fashion that Bruce Wayne lost his parents and seeing what was going on Batman had intervened and he had basically saved the life of Hank and his parents but because of this Hank had become obsessed with Batman now something to point out here is that Bruce Wayne's interaction with Hank wasn't necessarily long it was simply that Bruce had said that the paint that what he was feeling at the moment was was fear and that it was okay to be scared and because everybody gets scared but the difference between being a hero and being a coward is that heroes deal with their fear they come to grips with their fear and so Bruce Wayne had basically inspired Hank and Hank himself had recited this mantra over and over again that is okay to be scared but he should always face your fear and had used this mantra to both inspire his sister Claire to join him on a journey of bettering themselves and this was done in a multitude of different ways uh Hank and Claire had you know basically trained themselves in physical combat Hank and Claire had expanded their minds when it came to forensic science they had traveled the world to become volunteers in a different I guess a multitude of different facets they basically that are taken the same kind of self training regimen that Bruce Wayne had taken when he became Batman and so the result was that during this time they had reached out to their parents for a large sum of money and for reasons unknown or through a means that we didn't fully understand it was never really explained to us they emerged some months later with superpowers now while we're still not told exactly where those powers came from in this issue what we are told is exactly how it works then what happened is that in the last issue because of the fact that Gotham had manipulated by psycho-pirate a villain that had the power to manipulate the emotions of people the psycho-pirate had basically screwed with Gotham's mind and ended up putting him in a situation whereby he had an irrational hatred for Gotham this was August Gotham City this was compounded by the fact that one of the guards one of the soldiers that Gotham had killed had gone back to the home of Gotham and murdered his parents and so because of this this these manipulations sort of fed in on themselves to where Gotham had a hatred of the city and then he had a hatred of the people in the city because one of them killed his parents he didn't realize that he was the cause of his own problem and so the result here was that he began travelling back to Gotham City in order to lay waste to it and Batman had intended to stop this but because of the fact that Gotham had fought Batman directly the Batmobile was destroyed and Bruce Wayne was left several miles outside of the city without an immediate means of return and so what he does is he asks Alfred to basically intervene on his behalf to buy some time now of course personal he doesn't actually expect Alfred to fight as Batman just because of the fact that Alfred does not have the combat skills to pull that off but he is successful in buying time he approaches Gotham and claims to be Batman but because Gotham has various powers he immediately seized this Bluff but in the time between when Alfred was bluffing and when Gotham calls it Batman shows up and so Alfred takes off and heads back to the Batcave and Batman and Gotham end up in a battle that basically stretches across the city of Gotham now Batman tries to reason with Hank here he tries to tell him tries to talk him down say hey look Randy can't be tear it here in the city up we can solve this emotional crisis that you're having but Gotham is so entrenched in his anger and so entrenched in his rage that he just can't let it go now during this time because of the fact that Gotham had killed those soldiers his sister Clara basically watched the events unfold now Tom King is not specific here when Claire was when Claire was found by Bruce Wayne she was basically just kind of sitting in the corner in a fetal position basically saying that she was scared the reason why I say that Tom King isn't really clear on this is because we don't know if if her fear was a byproduct of you know cyclop Harris manipulations or if it was because Gotham was kind of her backbone he was the the guy you know the brother that kept her grounded and kept her confident and strong but the result is that while Gotham girl was taken back to the Batcave and put under the care of both Duke Thomas and Alfred she's watching the events unfold both on the news and through various you know camera devices the Batman has around Gotham City and so in the midst of this conflict because Gotham City's being laid waste to in such a capacity Duke tries to reason with her you know Duke tries to talk to her but she doesn't really want to do any of that she doesn't really want to talk to anybody and so what Batman says is with everything being as chaotic as it is because of the fact that he cannot handle Gotham on his own he tells Alfred to get ahold of the Justice League and that's exactly what happens in the intervening moments when things are kind of going chaotic when Batman's holding off Gotham as best as he can the Justice League shows up here of course we have the pre new 52 Superman we have Wonder Woman we have Barry Allen we have Jessica Cruz and Simon Baz the Green Lanterns of Earth and cyborg and Aquaman now what's really interesting about this situation is the Justice League is a formidable force in and of themselves I mean they're really the the cream of the crop when it comes to DC's earthbound superhero team and of course with regards to Superman sometimes Wonder Woman and especially Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz you know some heroes who operate beyond the planet Earth who have the potential to operate beyond the planet Earth we would expect them to easily be able to subdue Gotham but this is not the case Gotham not only power overpowers a Justice League he overpowers Superman now this is important because it's this this is basically Tom King telling us how powerful Gotham is in the new 52 the new 52 Superman that we saw when the you know reboot first launched was weaker than his pre new 52 counterpart but when the new 52 Superman was killed and the pre new 52 Superman took his place we saw the stronger of the two Superman emerging this Superman that we see here is the pre new 52 Superman he's the strongest version of Superman you know in the post-crisis on Infinite Earths continuity and Gotham is easily able to overpower him now we didn't initially know what the basis behind this it was simply because his powers were just that much more advanced or if there was something else going on but this explanation is given to us by virtue of Claire of Gotham girl herself and what she says is that they basically bought their powers now again we're not given you know an explanation on where these powers came from in this story or where they bought them from we're simply just told that they bought them and that the powers they bought were super-strength you know invulnerability ultravision but the use of these powers and the limit of their powers was relative to their life and what I mean here is they basically sacrificed years of their life for higher levels of power and so there was no limit to how how strong they could be there was no limit to how strong Gotham girl or Gotham could be there was no limit to their invulnerability there was no limit to you know how well they could see to their ultra vision but the higher they took their powers the more years of their life they would lose and so if they wanted to be an ordinary citizen they could live for decades if they wanted to be like Superman they would have to sacrifice a few years of their life but if they wanted to be godly in terms of powers they would only have a few hours to live and so what ended up happening here is Gotham has basically pushed his powers to the brink he has pushed his powers to the extreme to where they're at their highest levels or seemed to be of the highest levels that his life can withstand to the point that he has maybe minutes you know half an hour something like that left to live and so what Claire says is that because his power is so extreme he seems effectively unstoppable and there really doesn't seem to be a way to beat him and his goal is to effectively destroy Gotham City and so what Batman does is he steps up here and offers himself to Gotham and saying that you know that psycho-pirate was allowed to you know commit his acts because he hadn't been killed by Batman that autumns parents were killed because Batman didn't get there in time and so he's basically mating making himself the victim here Batman would rather Gotham kill him did wipe out Gotham City at the same time were given a little bit of a narrative between Claire and Duke & Duke says that you know Batman's mantra is always it's okay to be afraid but you have to face your fear now this strikes a chord and Claire because from her perspective this was not a quote that you heard from Batman it was a quote she heard from her brother Hank who of course got it from Batman and so this is again basically you know clearing up the the discussion earlier about how we said where Tom King wasn't really clear about you know Gotham girls saying that she was scared this seems to indicate that Gotham was kind of her backbone he was her foundation for the confidence that she had and the result was that this was rooted in the idea that Hank would constantly comfort her in saying it's okay to be afraid but you have to face your fear the result is that once she learns that this was basically Batman that Batman was the one that had inspired her to become a superhero by virtue of inspiring Hank she immediately takes off to confront her brother and so for a fraction of a moment in order to basically keep from killing herself Gotham girl puts her powers to the extreme and in the process of doing so ends up killing her brother and that effectively wraps up the story you know that that sort of brings things to an end to be honest with the guys this is kind of this this story was kind of interesting to me um it really seemed like Tom King was using this as a platform to introduce a new superhero in the form of Gotham girl uh you know I enjoyed it for what it was I felt like the the you know the the conspiracy of the three Joker's really should have been the first story arc to kind of bring us in but it also feels like that would be a trump card and just because that's the one thing that a lot of people are really looking forward to a lot of people want to know about the history of the three Joker's the conspiracy of the three Joker's and maybe it would have been introducing that in the beginning would have just been too soon you know maybe it was something better suited for two or three story arcs down the line which seems to be what DC is going for all right so continuing our discussions on DC rebirth we pick up now with Iams suicide I kind of Miss the old intro like so what I want to do here is have a discussion about I am suicide this is actually really cool this this story is you know Tom King and Hum King due date this guy's kind of crazy um you know with vision he it was crazy good with I am Gotham it wasn't really hitting the mark but I am suicide I'm impressed I mean this is this is a good story this is this is a really really solid story and I think it really speaks volumes to the way that he uses characters right because in comic books there's all different kinds of characters out there and a lot of people use them in a lot of different ways but the mark of a really good storyteller is a person who could use a character in a way that was just never really you before a way that maybe you know we never really thought to use them before and what I'm talking about here is actually the relationship between psycho-pirate and Bane and we'll actually get to that here in a minute but what this does is this gives us a little bit of a rehash with regards to Bane's origin story in DC rebirth now I do have a video on the origin of Bane as part of DC rebirth and you guys are welcome to check that out you'll find a link down in the description but again it really just kind of refreshes us that main basically spent a large majority of his life and Santa Prisca prison he escaped for a while but it also confirms the events of nightfall in Batman's continuity now this has been confirmed already I mean Bane had already reappeared I think it was part of Batman eternal um I know that was hushed but I actually never really read through Batman eternal I'm just kind of going on some of the videos that I think Betty made but with Batman's continuity I actually want to talk about this for a second because a lot of people have expressed confusion on where things stand with Batman's continuity it can be a bit confusing but so in the new 52 launch because remember the DC rebirth event is basically still the new 52 continuity when new 52 launched Batman got you know a retelling of his origin in the form of really you know Batman zero year but the question a lot of fans had is if according to new 52 it's only been five years since superheroes first showed up on the scene then what does that mean for Batman's history what does it mean for events like nightfall and if it's like death the death of the family and The Killing Joke and all that kind of stuff and DC basically said well everything in the history of Batman happened in five years is so it really you know is strain credulity um DC rebirth has actually come back and said well it's actually ten years not five but we still have yet to see how DC rebirth will expand into the overall larger DC continuity and how it's all going to come together so again there's a lot of questions that exist there and there's a lot of things that still need to be answered but at the very least again this kind of reminds us that Bane is a guy that did fight Batman he did break his back during nightfall and so the two of them do have history together more so than that psycho-pirate is not just a villain like that Ennis that's why I say things are kind of cool here now we don't know if this is Roger Hayden or if this is Charles house Ted I think it is um this is I was actually talking to Sal and I was talking to Joel about this and the weekly pull chat because we were true I was trying to figure it out I was like which one is it is it you know DC's never really said and it doesn't really matter in particular I don't think but historically speaking psycho pirates always been a guy that had the ability to manipulate the emotions of others to basically make them feel certain emotion so he can make a person feel fear he can make them feel anger you know happiness sadness so on and so forth but he was always a guy that did this for you know his own particular crimes or maybe he would go against some super powerful being or something like that and this story Tom Kane basically turns him into a drug and it's really really cool because Bane is literally just kind of recounting you know going going back in and more or less giving psycho-pirate his backstory and talking about the pain and torment that he feels over the course of the failures that he's had in his life you know when he was basically forced to live and in Santa Prisca because of his father's actions you know when he was forced to experience the death of his mother when he had been defeated by Batman after defeating him all these things you know all these these experiences in his life has just kind of sent him into an emotional freefall and so he basically uses psycho-pirate to make him feel better you know he tells a psychopath tell me that I'm happy you know tell me that I'm brave tell me that I can always stop and so instead of being addicted to like venom you know the drug that basically gave him super-strength and so on it's really just him being addicted to the emotional feelings that that psycho pirate can engender inside of him now from here we pick up with Gotham girl because keep in mind throughout most all of Tom King's run following the events of iron Gotham where both Gotham and Gotham girl were introduced as a brother and sister superhero duo were psycho-pirate had manipulated Gotham into basically losing his mind and becoming a bad guy and then eventually it took the whole bat family to kill him the O Gotham girl was manipulated to feel extreme extreme fear and that's never really gone away she's never really gotten over that she's been able to temporarily get past it but it was very much like Jessica Cruz you know if she was introduced she was just always afraid she'd be able to get over that fear but it was only for a temporary amount of time it's only now in Sam Humphreys Green Lanterns that she's finally learning how to conquer her fear especially after the events of Darkseid war and she's able to actually become a Green Lantern and start creating constructs with Gotham guerrillas much the same way the problem with this is that because the influence of psycho-pirate is so strong Bruce Wayne comes to the realization he basically says I've got to go I've got to go and I've got to find psycho-pirate I basically have to go to Santa Prisca to the base of Bane get psycho-pirate and bring him back the problem is Batman can't do that on his own between Bane between psycho-pirate between all the soldiers that they have there there's no way that we'll be able to pull this off by himself and so what he needs is a team now this is where things get cool because the story kind of takes on this like Ocean's eleven kind of feel to it not in the sense of like you know the the goofy or the jokey nature and like thieving is someone and so forth but in the sense that Batman is effectively putting together a team so it's like you know Batman's for I guess Batman's 11 it'd be kind of a cool that'd be a cool story like Bruce Wayne's 11 like I would I would breathe like Bruce Wayne he's like we're gonna go rob casinos in Las Vegas I would love that but the first person that he picks up traveling to Arkham Asylum its ventriloquist now this guy Arnold Wesker is probably like he's the queen on the transport he's the most it's not really the most important but the most powerful piece with regards to the plan that they're gonna have going on the reason why is is going to become apparent as we get to the end of this but Arnold Wesker is a guy that DC really toys with the reason why the whole relationship between like Woody the puppet and the ventriloquist Arnold Wesker was so cool and the reason why he's always been kind of a mainstay as a villain in DC's comics is because of the fact that DC walked the line we always kind of knew he had multiple personality but there were some writers who wrote stories about him where there were tires where it seemed like Woody was real like the puppet was actually real and Wesker was just doing what the puppet wanted him to do you know being able to give the puppet life really changed everything so because that had added a whole new you know a whole bunch of different effects more so than this some of the other people that he picks up of course is actually a girl named jewel a guy named Braun Steiger and then another guy named punch now of course bronze tiger a lot of people are pretty familiar with him the story as it's given here is pretty self-explanatory he more or less suffers from delusions of grandeur but he's still a very capable fighter not only that of course Batman's like look you're a little faster than I am I need you on my team for this mission that we're gonna go on but Jewel and punch are actually a little more intriguing here of course with Batman being accompanied by Commissioner Gordon jewel is a girl who's basically been stuck in a catatonic state now the introduction of Jewel and punch actually came out of the possible cancellation of the Joker and a lot of people don't know that back in the 1960s it was entirely possible that because Batman's comics just weren't selling and the Joker wasn't doing well because of the college code DC thought about like killing his character off but what they needed was a more tamed down version but still entertaining equivalent of the Joker and so in 1967 I think and I think it was a Captain Atom comic they introduced Jewel and punch now they were like the like the Joker Harley Quinn they were like a one two a one two punch combo when it came to being silly and being nonsensical of course it was like the Joker and Harley Quinn about thirty years before Harley Quinn but the fact remains here that they were basically nonsensical they were slapstick jewel has these jewels that allow her to use different abilities energy projection manipulating emotions and so on these guys have their own little gadgets their own little tricks what we learn here is that with jewel having been in a catatonic state the Commissioner Gordon is not Commissioner Gordon instead Commissioner Gordon is actually punch and what punch had done is he had come to the realization that if jewel was within Arkham Asylum a time would come when Batman would basically go to see her for whatever reason for information or something along those lines and when that time came he was basically gonna be at his side disguise s Commissioner Gordon now of course Bruce Wayne picks up on this almost immediately but allowed to let you know ed lighted to go through the reason why was because he looked a punch at set is astounding the lengths that you will go to go to to rescue this woman that you care so much about you literally tricked the entirety of the Arkham staff you broke into an insane asylum in order to rescue the woman that you love and he says I need a person that has skills like that now the last person that we pick up with and this is why when the story first launched when I have suicide first launched it was a huge deal because everyone thought this was the Joker you know the story initially started off or I guess the this conversation initially started off almost exactly like The Killing Joke you know I've been thinking lately about you and me that's how The Killing Joke started off when Batman first encounter the Joker in the story the conversation that they had but as you know Batman's talking to this person and begins to undo the mask on their face we learned that as Catwoman the reason why she's here is because she killed 237 people and we don't know why now of course we actually figure that out or at least we're told what it is here in a second and the story behind this is actually really kind of cool what Catwoman says or at least the other way it's given to us is kind of like in a letter that she wrote to Bruce Wayne as he's basically having all these guys or at least he's invading Santa Prisca mob it's really one of these situations where cat will they compared herself to Bruce Wayne in a lot of different ways that as a girl who was raised in an orphanage that was run by Thomas and Martha Wayne she had seen you know the picture of Bruce and Thomas and Martha and it always imagined herself being a part of him and that was always really kind of a cool element of her character is Catwoman always aspired for better but always tried to achieve better in the worst way possible but the kicker to all this is that she essentially says that her parents uh you know she never really knew them you know never really had a chance to meet with him instead the orphanage the fire that was caused was by some crazy terrorist group you know and there were two hundred and thirty seven of them and so what she did is she started a Gotham City and she literally went through and killed every last one and then she expanded outside of Gotham City and eventually traveled the world killing every single member of this Harris group you know they came into their act and they had no reason no motivation there were no claims no demands no nothing they just did it for the sole purpose of inspiring fear now that's why she's in Arkham Asylum and in fact the next little bit of the story will really focus on Batman in terms of him originally catching her that part's not extremely important it is kind of interesting but we're gonna go ahead actually leave that out of the story just because of the fact that it's not really a necessity for the main events that are going on here but with Batman arriving at Santa Prisca of course it's it's 1:1 against 1,000 and despite how capable he is I'm actually glad with what Tom can get here because some writers may have been tempted some miters video may have been like yeah of course it's ridiculously impossible but Batman was somehow able to defeat 500 soldiers and it all happened off panel Tom Kings like no no that's stupid like that it'd be cool to see but there's no way even even the most staunch of Batman fans would just be like I mean I don't know about that like I love Batman but he's not gonna defeat 500 people with automatic machine guns it's not gonna happen and so of course Batman is effectively taken prisoner now he's brought before Bane himself and the kicker about the about all Lister's remember Bane is not using venom right now so he's not using the substance that allows him to take on this extreme strength and in fact during his conversation with Bruce Wayne with that and he basically tells him that he's like I'm not using venom right now so I can't defeat you as easily as I did the first time we met when I broke your back at the Gotham City but he says I could still break your back and that's exactly what he does he breaks Batman's back and so what he does is he basically takes him dragging him down to the same prison cell that Bane himself had spent so much time in and then just kind of leaves Batman there now of course Batman is able to make his escape you know becoming being what it is a Batman is able to get out but once he does we basically learned that you know Selina Kyle the Catwoman had come along as part of this plan and that she had personally brought the ventriloquist the point of Batman even be caught in the first place was to basically be thrown in a prison cell and then allow you know himself to basically open a back door for Catwoman and the ventriloquist to get in because in his mind he knew that is intelligent as Bane is you know in Bane's mind Batman can't escape if that man's back is broken he's not gonna be able to get out and so if he's being held prisoner there's really nothing Bruce Wayne can do and so he can effectively just kind of throw them in there and call it a day now at this point we switch over to the conversation that these guys are having here yeah this is really kind of cool because what this does is it actually allows Selina Kyle and it allows a ventriloquist to have this interesting conversation because it really did beg the question you know who is this in control when it comes to the ventriloquist is it multiple personality or is it the idea that the ventriloquist himself um is really being subjected to the control of a puppet and of course during the conversations between the two a Selina Kyle begins a scooping she's like you know is it really just the puppet er is at you you know and of the mind the ventriloquist he's like no no it's not just me the puppet really does have control you know that's that's really the monster he's really the one making me do these things now for Selina Kyle this is kind of cool you know because she's like basically this guy's got an out he completed sanity every single time because you know to anybody looking at him for what it is he's got muscle personalities I mean you know the mature Eliquis is just a personality a counterpart to him now the reason for this is because back in the in the early days of Arnold Wesker's life he was really timid he was really meat he was for all intents and purposes a coward he was scared of everything he was always running and hiding from all these different problems and things like that but eventually his parents were killed and in the emotional turmoil really that came out of this experience he basically ended up developing a second personality that didn't manifest until he came in contact with a guy named Donegan I think it was and this guy Donegan literally had a had a dummy named named woody and the dummy began talking to Arnold Wesker and eventually helped him to escape and the two of them just kind of went on a crime spree but the fact remains here that by his very nature of eyes very definition Arnold Wesker is a guy who just does what he's told he doesn't have any initiative he has no no Drive no ambition you'd never get anything beyond what you tell him to do he's very much robotic in that sense and so because of that you know the scene account basically says yeah I know Batman told us that you're supposed to stay with me but what I'm telling you is stay here and so the initial indication here the Tom King is giving us is that she's breaking out of the plan that Batman set for them now of course from here we pick up with the other half of the plan in the sense that Rod Steiger and punch and Jewel had basically approached a santa prisca prison with the idea that bronze tiger himself was bringing punch directly to directly to paint now the reason for this is because punch was like one of the only guys I think the only guy who was able to successfully break out of Santa Prisca prison so because of this it's very much sought after its who essentially having returned home if for no other reason the fact that mames just collecting trophies the kicker to all this is that real wha this conversations taking place that man's watching it all unfold from a vent a ventilation shaft Selina Kyle jumps in you know and she basically takes out bronze tiger and then she spills the beans of the whole plan to Bane and basically says the whole reason why these guys are here is a ruse they're supposed to be a distraction I'm supposed to uh to take to kidnap psycho-pirate Batman's got to jump back in he's gonna fight you and while all that's going on I'll make off a psycho pirate and we'll get him back to Gotham City and then everybody's just gonna leave maybe they'll die maybe they won't but that's the initial plan is for everybody to make it out in the middle of all this we have what looks like Selena Kyle killing jewel and then turning around killing punch it so it's like okay this is really the worst case scenario right here Catwoman just destroying the entire plan that Batman had laid down now what I was going through this I was just kind of like holy cow like this is extremely bad because what this basically means is that they're all most likely going to die at the hands of Bane and so with Batman more or less being a held prisoner here or at the very least you know kind of forced to submit to a degree um it's the idea that they're effectively going to take him out like they're they're going to do him and uh this it seems like it's the end of the road for for Bruce Wayne now at this point we have people who were just kind of spread out in different locations and so what's going on here and this is it ducks you took a minute for this to kind of sink in what's going on here is the equivalent of a chess game anybody who plays chess knows the worst thing you could do is bunch your players up more so than that you should always have your pieces strategically placed in different locations because the best way to checkmate a player is to checkmate them at a distance but it's also effectively buxom in a reporter box away gets their own pieces that's one of the best ways to win but because of this think of these guys as chess pieces we have bronze Tiger who's basically been thrown down you know in the pit with all the other soldiers and the killers for hire under Bane's control we have Arnold Wesker who's still just kind of sitting down on the sewers waiting for someone to come and tell him what to do Jewel and punch are dead they're being sent off to the furnaces and Catwoman is sitting alongside Bane while Batman begins to find it now the other half of this is that ain't is very much taunting Batman in this skirmish you know Bane is very much basically saying you know you and I are exactly the same in a lot of different ways now the argument Bane makes here is good and it's very easy to discount this but the argument that he makes is actually pretty legitimate here the reason why's Bane is extremely intelligent I mean Bane what we saw in the Dark Knight Returns you know in terms of his strength that was pretty cool what a turtle of his intelligence it was nowhere near what he needed to be at the end of the movie he was still basically just a henchman he was working for Talia al Ghul spoiler alert for a seven-year-old movie for this for the comics Bane was always wildly intelligent he educated himself you know he was able to deduce Batman's identity and someone between three to six months I think it was he's one of the smartest guys when it comes to combat strategy so on and so forth and what he says what he tells Batman is look you know over the course of my life I thought venom was the answer I thought that having this this substance that would grant me super-strength would allow me to achieve what it is that would make this pain go away you know that would make me feel like a better person because I felt like I could do anything but he said that's not the answer the answer is actually psycho-pirate psycho-pirate will make you feel better all you have to do is tell them that you want to be happy all you have to do is tell them that you want to be brave all you have to do is tell him that you can always stop and so he tells Batman tell me this tells psycho-pirate this Batman responds by saying all I want to do is I want to break your back and that's when all the chess pieces start moving around we learned that Jewel and punch are not dead they're very much alive their bronze tiger is feeding for venom and he basically starts attacking all these different guys bronze tiger then turns around and begins making his way back up to where Batman is you know punch and Jewel are basically using their tricks or so on and so forth to basically create air bubbles using gum so they can you know jump out of the furnace they can jump into the water come back up to the surface without having to worry about drowning by simply breathing in the oxygen that they have in there now of course this stretches the limits of credulity but at the very least it makes for an interesting story finally we basically pick up with all these different guys moving into the direction of Arnold Wesker and we have bronze tiger finally taking Wesker to bring him to where Batman is located on top of all this the plan seems to have been this the entire time Batman seems to have orchestrated this the whole time because Catwoman keeps saying you know do you want me to get involved do you want me to get involved in the finally Batman says break him and Catwoman jumps in and breaks Bane's back and so again this it seems to be the entire plan of Batman to basically not only defeat Bay where I just not only take take psycho part but to crush thing to basically say at the end of the day you're nowhere near where I'm at you know who you are right now is a of your former self now a lot of this a lot of the success still hinges on arnold wesker the reason why is because again psycho-pirate can manipulate the emotions of anyone who sees him and so because of this you know if he looks at Batman if he looks at you know any of these guys and targets them the hill he'll send him into states of absolute insanity by manipulating their emotions but with Arnold Wesker is not that way because Arnold Wesker is emotionally repressed he doesn't allow his emotions to get out there he's just a robot he just does what he's told to do and so because of this in the middle of psycho-pirate moralist haunting Wesker we suddenly have the personality of woody the puppet emerging in the form of a talking hand and this is really just Arnold Wesker is defense his own consciousness coming out and basically saying no one can control me the only person that could control Arnold Wesker is of course woody you know no one controls the ventriloquist so of course because of this psycho pirates take it out which leads to bronze Tiger taking out Arnold Wesker to make sure that he can't become you know too wildly dangerous but again this just kind of allows the story to to come to us to its organic end with Batman taunting Bane one last time by basically saying a times going to come when you're gonna want revenge you know when you're going to want to come after me and when that time comes don't because you're gonna get more of the same and so what this story does is it concludes with the various guards of Bane you know coming running in to his to his aid and the one thing he keeps calling for is venom and so the indication here is that Bane is gonna go back to be in the same Bane he used to be where he was all juiced up and he was like three times the normal size of a human being and he was breaking Batman's back so Tom King's Batman I am Bane is an incredibly well-written story in truth it's one of my absolute favorites the reason why is because of the fact that Tom King has a lot of similarities to Scott Snyder but he's basically making Batman his own and the stories really just kind of like this multi-faceted thing I mean for the first twenty issues of Batman rebirth it's all about really bookending into his battle with Bane wrapping things up and then setting the stage for the button's storyline of course when we basically deal with the idea of the Watchmen and the DC Universe but the cool thing about this is it again much like Scott Snyder it's all-encompassing when Scott Snyder first took over Batman with the new 52 what he basically did is of course he gave us like quarter vowels for example you know four issues 1 through 12 it was quarter vowels and city of owls but the entire 12 issue run is largely just kind of called the quarter vowels storyline but it was a multi-faceted story that basically revealed to us as the reader that there was an organization operating in Gotham City the Batman never knew about called the court of owls and it was cool to turn the Batman mythos on his head where we previously assumed the Batman always knew what was going on in Gotham that in truth he didn't know everything from there it was the return of the Joker death of the family in game there were multifaceted story arcs that helped to kind of revamp and revitalize the Batman mythos for a new generation of readers and that's one of the reasons why so many people look to Scott Snyder's run and say Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo had the definitive storytelling standard when it came to the Batman landscape and so when Tom Kane took over it was a tough nut to crack how many was a tough sell for a lot of people to say can Tom King live up to Scott Snyder's run in my mind the answer is yes and the reason why is because the whole first 20 issues of Batman is really kind of like this self-contained story but you have to read in its entirety in order to fully appreciate it and so what this story what this video is gonna do is it's gonna harken back all the way to really the very first story of Batman rebirth a very first issue of Batman rebirth and kind of give us an idea of everything that was going on behind the scenes with regards to Batman's final confrontation with Bane now what this does is this picks up with the aftermath of I am suicide there were a couple of one shots between I am suicide and I am Bane but they weren't wildly necessarily it was kind of setting the stage and showing a little bit of romance between Batman and Catwoman and they were cool for what they were but they're by no means essential however the goal of Batman was to make sure that basically capture psycho-pirate now remember psycho-pirate is a guy who can basically put on his mask and then manipulate the emotions of other people sending them into a state of either total insanity of complete happiness literally making them feel whatever it is that he wants them to feel with psycho-pirate impacting Gotham girl who of course we had talked about in the story I am Gotham with her having really the powers that were almost on par with Superman the idea was to basically have her alongside Gotham turn against Batman and send Gotham City into a state of complete and total chaos the idea was that ultimately Gotham was killed and Gotham girl was taken by Batman for the purpose of trying to restore her back to her normal mental state instead of just being in complete and total fear all the time and so because of this with Batman basically you know in the events of I am suicide capturing psycho-pirate what he did is he invaded the the island of Bane Santa Prisca prison and then took psycho-pirate away from him now the reason why this is so significant is because with this story picking up of course it has us it really has Batman engaging with bronze Tiger now on the surface it seems as though bronze Tigers kind of coming out of nowhere but this is really a ruse that's been set up by both Batman and bronze Tygra the reason why is because this is designed for the purpose of basically capturing psycho-pirate and then bringing him into contact with Gotham girl in order to restore her mental state back to where it's supposed to be now we'll see that come to us for which we will see that fleshed out here in a little while but what we end up doing is we actually switch over to bat burger and this is a really cool point in the story this is kind of funny and the reason why is because of the fact we've got Bruce Wayne alongside do Thomas and the guy who's serving their food like they're he's asking like you want to Joker eyes your fries and everything's like that I'd love to go to a restaurant where I could like Joker eyes my fries like that would be amazing it's almost like in and out monsters like animal style oh my god by the way in and out animal style fries are amazing do they're so good I didn't believe it before but they are incredibly delicious but this is really actually a meeting taking place between the bath family so it will really - Barbara Gordon or bat woman so it's basically Duke Thomas and it's Bruce Wayne and then Jason Todd Damian Wayne and Dick Grayson by the funny thing is we get this really cool interaction between them you know for example Damian Wayne basically gets a kid's meal and then when he opens it up it turns out to be a Red Hood toy and there's all kind of you know all upset about and everything but it's so kind of funny the reason why this works is because again and I keep reiterating this with Damian Wayne he's one of my favorite characters because he's so young and he's so ruthless but he's also still a kid and so he enjoys kids stuff but again what's basically happening here is Bruce Wayne's essentially telling everybody look I'm going to have to take Gotham girl for five days like I'm gonna take her and I'm gonna have psycho-pirate he's gonna interact with her for five days Bane is gonna come looking for her for five days you all need to leave Gotham City you all have to get out of here and the reason why is because Bane will destroy anybody in his path in order to get to the psycho part now the reason why why this is the case and the reason why Bane captured psycho apart in the first place was because Bane is not using venom anymore at least was not using venom at the time the serum that Gibson his enhanced strength and durability and all that kind of good stuff but coming off of venom is very much like coming off of a drug there are drawers in this case with venom it's almost like the body's on fire and so in order for Bain it basically overcome the impact of venom without him being on it he uses psycho-pirate to manipulate his emotions solely body doesn't feel as really as crushing as it would if he didn't have the psycho-pirate it's so literally taking psycho-pirate away from Bain is taking away the one thing that's keeping his a sanity intact the one thing that's keeping his body from feeling like it's destroying itself and so because of this again Bruce Wayne basically says you know they're going to come after me like they're you know Bane is going to come after me and he's gonna come after you if you're around here he's going to use everybody that he can in order to force my hand and and require me to give up psycho-pirate now this is the other cool thing because Robert Duke Thomas is still relatively new to the idea of what it means to be a sidekick or trainee of Batman of course we know his role is different from like Damian or Dick Grayson he's not a Robin per se but he does have history with Batman with the I am Robin storyline I guess we are Robin storyline you know and all these different little events but he doesn't nearly have the experience of Damien Damien Jason Todd Dick Grayson any of those guys and so into in Dukes mind he's still very loyal to Batman and hasn't quite grasped the the idea yet that when you are Robin your number one responsibility is to defy bats so because of that you know you basically have Damian Dick Grayson and Jason Todd who essentially race off to go against Bane to try to find a way to defeat Bane to make sure that he can't harm Batman now at this point we follow Bruce with Selina Kyle and again this is a there's a lot of things that happen off panel here that we'll find out later on down the line but this really seemed to be a little segment that came out of nowhere in the sense that there's some flirting between the two but we don't really know everything that goes on we just simply know that for whatever reason Tom King is throw it and in here and this is one of the instances that I've been talking about one of them has been been saying there we go I can't talk the Tom Kings Batman has been hit and missed for a lot of people because there are things that have been thrown into the story that seemed totally irrelevant you know the couple one shots that we had with Batman and Catwoman where they were on a rooftop you know doing their own thing you know these instances here they seem to come out of left field they seem to have no place in the overarching story but well we're gonna find out is that they actually do it's just Tom King has kind of been you know working off panel and so what we end up doing you know as we transition back over to Wayne Manor alongside Alfred Bruce Wayne and Gotham girl is that once they get in the Batcave for the purpose of trance bring her over to Arkham without anybody realizing what's going on when they get into the cave they find the hung bodies of Damian Wayne Jason Todd and Dick Grayson now what this shows us is exactly what we would expect that these three guys do not stand a chance against Bank not only that in this story we're gonna see Bane at his absolute most ruthless and the reason being because of the fact that Bane is basically a desperate man in this situation he's really like a rabid animal in this particular story and it's one of the things that make him so cool of course we'll cross that bridge when we get to it but it's almost like a combination of like Tom Hardy's Bane from The Dark Knight Returns combined with Bane as we traditionally know him and come a book form and it actually makes for a wicked combination it is really really cool but from here you know of course switching over to bronze tiger essentially of course he kind of answers the door out of nowhere while he's still going you know coming off the withdraws a venom only to be shot in the stomach and so at this point we pick up with Superman's Fortress of Solitude and of course we basically have Damian Jason and Dick Grayson being held in stasis by Batman in the fortress of solitude with Superman protecting them now this raises a very interesting question right off the bat when I first saw this is why doesn't Batman ask Superman for aid in fact why does a Batman ask the Justice League for aid any has but the idea behind this and really the overarching theme behind DC rebirth is to have a tighter knit continuity among the various characters as stories that have been going on that was one of the biggest issues of DC you as you would have virtually no continuity Batman's the god of knowledge in the Justice League while he's not Batman in his own story because he's just kind of m.i.a and so that lack of continuity through people off with DC rebirth continuity is the name of the game DC is very much taking a page out of value comics with how hardcore their continuity has to be and so because of that you know we have Batman speaking with Superman the other half of this though is that if Superman were to get involved there would be no conflict Superman would just pummel Bane and then take him prisoner and that would be the end of that there would be no you know possibility of Batman's defeat there would be no question of what happens next you know none of that stuff it would take away from the suspense of the story not only that I just want to see Batman fight Bane and so because of that what we end up doing is we basically have Batman telling Superman look I just need you to keep these guys protected now of course Superman doesn't have to be and the fortress of solitude remember it's Superman super-hearing the whole nine yard much like his you know connection with Lois Lane here now if somebody were to break into the fortress of solitude Superman wouldn't know and he would be there in an instant and so again it's almost like a security system of sorts in terms of Superman's powers but switching back over to to Arkham Asylum this is when we basically have Alfred dressed as dr. Arkham alongside an awesome girl who's disguised as hush Thomas Eliot you know Batman's childhood friend who you know eventually became an enemy when they basically make their way into to his cell recycler Pyrus being held and the idea here is for psycho-pirate to basically use his ability or use his mask to begin restoring the mind of Gotham girl now this is one of the reasons why this is so cool is because psycho-pirate spent a prolonged amount of time with Gotham girl manipulating her mind but it wasn't five days you know manipulating her emotions didn't take a full five days but in this instance it will take that to undo the damage and the reason why is because of the fact that not only is fear really one of the most potent emotions when it comes to DC Comics we know that with regards to the Sinestro Corps the Green Lantern mythos the emotional spectrum but also because of the fact that Gotham girl has been dealing with this altered emotional state for quite some time and so the damage is pretty intense and so the psycho pirates going to have to basically blast her with the full potency of his abilities in order to basically restore her mind back to where it needs to be and of course this basically picks up with him telling her you know you're brave you're very very brave and that kind of thing now transitioning over to really to what I consider to be the kind of highlight of this conflict but we basically have you know a few of Bane's henchmen who are traveling around and rounding up individuals who were either part of Batman's team when they first broke into Santa Prisca prison and stole psycho-pirate or individuals who were just close to Batman so like Commissioner Gordon Catwoman bronze tiger who was shot and has basically been taken prisoner but what is up happening here is Batman's effectively just kind of perched up on the Arkham Asylum clock tower and then Bane just pops a flare and reveals that he has Catwoman bronze tiger Duke Thomas and Commissioner Gordon held hostage now this is where the story gets really really cool and that's where the things about this is Tom Taylor when it comes to like setting up a story he does it pretty well but it seems to kind of drag on a little bit and so what this is up doing is just kind of going from zero to 60 really fast now one of the most important things that he does is he juxtaposes is the history of Batman and Bane together and this is what's so cool because no one's ever really done this before usually what they do is they say hey here's like the origin story of Bane and it's like a one shot or something like that or it's somehow intertwined into the story but we don't see Batman's origin and Bane's origin side-by-side with one another and the cool thing about this is that that the Tom King doesn't really change anything and he doesn't like retcon the origin of Bane order to make it fit the story he just takes the origin of Bane as it exists in DC Comics and then puts it side by side with the origin of Batman as it exists in DC Comics and what we find out is these two are almost identical and that's the coolest thing about this at a young age they both they both lost their parents of course Bane had lost his mother but you know the motivation behind them becoming who they were is rooted in the loss of their parents you know they both are motivated to become better people they struggle with their surroundings but when it comes to the idea of where they end up ranching off this comes in the form of the fact that when they're when they basically undergo the process of improving themselves they enhance their minds they enhance their physical bodies but where Batman looks his experience and says I am going to train myself to become someone more capable I'm going to train myself to to basically wage a war on crime Bane's idea is that he's going to conquer crime he's going to conquer anybody out there who could pose a legitimate threat just remain to do nothing more then establish his dominance as a person in the world out there and so again that's where really their roads kind of started a fork off but even then they're not that dissimilar at that point it really just kind of comes down to semantics you know when it's batman waging a war on crime he might as well be conquering criminals when it comes to you know bane conquering criminals he might as well be waging a war on crime the only difference is the end result where Batman looks to criminals and says they can be rehabilitated Bane says you now work for me and so that's one of the cool things it's really one of these awesome Jackie O juxtapositions between these two characters in terms of how similar they are now the other half of what goes on here is actually just a direct fight between Batman and Bane and Bane pulls no punches I mean he absolutely wrecks Batman and is it's one of the coolest things here because Bane goes on this tirade motivation that says I'm not a joke I'm not a riddle you know I'm not a bird or cat or a penguin I'm not any of your out there I'm not some butler tending to your wounds and telling you everything's gonna be okay I'm not some sidekick that's there to have your back when things go under I'm not some weakling I'm not some rich kid that's basically trying to trying to save the world I am vain and that's the coolest thing about this is because it's Tom King basically saying this is the vain you know and love this is the bane you want you don't want the bane this kind of coming off you know coming off then I'm you know people don't want the bane that's just kind of you know has enhanced strength to a degree people want like the bane who broke the bat they want nightfall bane and that's the coolest thing that's one of reasons why I love this so much that's why I think Batman rebirth is the best thing coming out of DC rebirth right now just because of the fact that we get this awesome amazing segment between these two characters who historically have had so much history between one another now what is up happening here is that because of the fact this is taking place over the course of three or four days that up Batman's basically kind of left unconscious and that's it Bane tells his guys kill everybody to know Commissioner Gordon Duke Thomas you don't kill them off well then of course we end up finding out that what was happening off panel with these different encounters between Catwoman and Batman was that they were setting this up that Batman knew Bane would come for Catwoman it's one of the reasons why he kept her there similar because of the fact the Catwoman knows that she's very capable when it comes to escaping her confines when it comes to her agility so on and so forth she's really the one person in Batman's corner who's almost guaranteed to make an escape if she's captured by Bane and so because of this what she did is she freed Duke Thomas Commissioner Gordon she freed all those guys bronze tiger and then took Bane's guys hostage and so what this does is it thins the playing field what it does is it basically sort of puts everything on the side of that man with with Bane really having no allies left on his side now of course the conflict ends up leading directly to Arkham Asylum itself and this I think is really where the story begins to reach its climax the reason why I say that is because of the fact that with Bane entering into Arkham we get this really really cool segment from from Maximilian uh Maximillian Zeus now those you guys who don't know Maximillian Zeus is basically just a crazy guy but he has these amazing monologues he has like some of the some of the best monologues in DC Comics because he runs off like all these historical lines and stuff like that but in this one he's actually running off a segment from I want to say the inferno the inferno aspect of Dante's Divine Comedy but it basically ends with you know all hope abandon ye who enter here and so it's really just like anybody who comes in here is going to get decimated by Bane the reason why we know this and the reason why Zeus is even free in the first place is because in order for Batman to buy time he freed all the criminals in Arkham Asylum and so it's basically Bane against everyone and it's like the coolest thing ever is one of the coolest things because two-face is the first one who encountered him right you know in two phases look we're of two minds you know the rational side of me says Batman said that he would basically improve my sentence if I stopped you but then his chaotic and his dark side says but if you have something better to offer let me know and I'll take your side Bane punches him knocks him out and says I offer pain that's what I offer I offer pain to those who get in my way and that's exactly what it does I mean this that's God man for a boy that's why this is so cool is because Bane is just a force of nature right now I mean Solomon Grundy not a chance amygdala not a chance these are two powerhouses in DC Comics two individuals with insane levels of strength and Bane takes them both out because remember venom enhances his strength and it just starts pumping that juice and that's the end of them one of the other cool things that we get to is we have like like Solomon Grundy you know I'm Solomon Grundy starts running off the born on a Monday thing you know I make it was like Alameda less so on and so forth Bane says I am torment I am ruined I am plague I am venom and that's what's so cool about this is because it's just God I love seeing this version of Bane it's just it's so awesome because that's one of the things that we've always wanted to see right I mean bate has always been like a thinking man's villain he's always been extremely strong extremely durable but one of the greatest aspects of Christopher Nolan's version of Tom Hardy Spain in the Dark Knight Returns is just how insanely powerful he was I mean just his sheer force of strength was the ability for him to just overcome Batman and there was no fight I mean you guys know just as well as I do the first fight between Batman and Bane that wasn't a fight that was a murdering and it was the coolest thing to see because it was just Batman getting completely dominated because he was not prepared what we get in this is still the thinking man's Bane the one that we used that we know from knife oh we get this smart being the educated Bane the bane whose why intelligent and uses that to his own ends but because of the fact that he's desperate to regain the psycho-pirate he's now fallen down into this path of being intelligent but also being a man filled with nothing but rage and so because of this he starts taking to everyone and that's what makes us so interesting now switching back over to Bruce Wayne of course it's kind of crazy because Bruce is talking with Alfred and Alfred's like dude why why did you free all those villains and Batman's responses well we're just kind of buying time now in truth this was a really smart move by Batman you're Bruce Wayne knows right off the bat these villains are not going to stand a chance against Bane right I mean there's they're not going to be able to hold him down I mean as long as he has that juice pumping he's going to be an unstoppable force but it's not the idea to stop bane the purpose is to basically have a stopgap measure it's the basically slow Bane down in order for Bruce Wayne to recover even if only temporarily to basically kind of regain his mind to bring yourself back together and then to fight off Bane again and so again you know with with Bane continuing on it's mr. freeze gets taken out Firefly gets taken out it's one villain after another man-bat Victor's as the Mad Hatter all these guys keep getting crushed you know Copperhead no one is able to stop him no one's able to keep Batman from from pulling off what he needs to pull off now what Tom King also does here is he begins the process of setting up the war of jokes and riddles for the larger Batman mythos of course it's really really small here it's basically Bane taking Riddler and having Riddler put his mind to task with cracking this massive door where psycho-pirate is supposed to be held captive but what uh what what Riddler also says is once the doors open and Bane makes his way in he simply just kind of runs it off is a quick little line it's not too huge but he says tell Batman I still remember the war of jokes and riddles I still remember what he made me do and you guys know just as well as I do that he deserves this and so again what this does is lead up into this sort of final conflict between Batman and Bane and again that's why all this makes sense is because with the story Batman basically Ponder's his own death issue number one when he first encountered Gotham and Gotham girl you know when this plane was was about to crash you know into end of the Gotham Harbor when these two people showed up seemingly out of nowhere with enhanced strength and durability and the power to fly you know basically all the same abilities of Superman Batman look at them and said that's my way out and that's why Gotham in Gotham girl were so significant and that's why Batman is at least seems to be going to the lengths to basically preserve to restore Gotham grow back to the way she was before because in that story Tom King basically said the one thing that we've known for years and years and years and years and all the time that we didn't we've been reading Batman Bruce Wayne does not want to be Batman Forever eventually he wants to walk away he wants to retire that's the basis behind why do Thomas is here and is the basis for why he paid special attention to Gotham and Gotham girl because if he trained them adequately they could be the first in a new generation of heroes who could protect Gotham City the way it needs to be protected with Batman finally relinquishing control and stepping out of the shadows and allowing himself to live a normal life or at least a life as Noble as he could live and so because of this it was it's basically Batman kind of looking on at this idea that everywhere he goes destruction death and and failing is not far behind but if it means that he can defeat Bane if it means that he can restore the mind of Gotham girl then he was all worth something at the same time again he continues to ponder his death um he tells Bane you have any idea how many times I've been told I'm gonna kill you you're gonna die tonight I've been told that every single night since I become Batman it's wearing thin it's getting old but what he also reveals here is that all of this was done for the purpose of buying time when he first came up with the idea of taking psycho-pirate from Bane he knew that there was going to be fallout he knew that there was going to be consequence all this stems with the end of the of the i''m Gotham Soylent as soon as Gotham girls mine had basically unwarped by psycho-pirate Batman said we have to get psycho-pirate back psycho-pirate is a source for Bane in order to allow Bane to overcome his addiction to venom because of that Bane is going to be a wrecking machine as soon as we take psycho-pirate all these fights all these conflicts everything that's happened in the story so far is just for the purpose of buying time but it's also bringing to an end this massive battle between the two now the other cool thing about this is that Batman recollects on his own history he looks back at his own past and really begins to realize how similar he is to Bane but their roads led them down two different paths and that's really what Tom Taylor is hitting home here when it comes to the characters of Bane and Batman yes they're very similar yes their origins are almost entirely identical the difference is that Batman is ruled by his past and Bane is not now that's kind of crazy because we would expect it to be the other way around because what this does is it basically forces Batman into the situation where he's governed by his own destiny he doesn't control his own destiny he's controlled by it you know Batman is ruled by fear Batman's ruled by fear the fact that somebody else out there will experience the same situation he experienced with his parents now that gives him strength to do what he does every day but instead of him controlling his own life controlling his own destiny he's governed by it his road was set the instant that his parents died now with bane it's not necessarily the case Bane chose his path Bane chose to go onto the road of becoming a bad guy chose to go on the road to becoming a villain but then that asked the question what would have happened if he had chosen a different path what would have happened if he had chosen the same road as Batman where he decided to wage a war on what would have happened if the two of them had come together as allies what kind of work could be done in Gotham City if they both function together and so that's why this story is so cool is because it begs those questions but in the end of course Batman you know is bane continue saying you know I am Bank Batman's responses yeah I know I've heard it before but I'm Batman and just headbutts the hell out of Bane and essentially knocks them unconscious and so what this does is it basically brings an end to the battle between these two there's something to be said about the conflict here because it's really kind of like this final battle almost indicative of you know the Batman versus Joker in Scott Snyder's in-game and that's one of the reasons why I say you know Tom King is very similar in terms of how he's more or less mirroring scott Snyder's Batman in terms of how he adds in Bane but it's still its own style of storytelling so it's really kind of cool it's one of those cool situations where they do stand side by side but they are still different at the same time but what this does is it really kind of has Batman sort of having this imaginary conversation with his mother who's now deceased and the idea is you know is really him coming to grips with her death in a lot of ways you know where he basically says look all this has been about is saving Gotham girl you know it's keeping this girl's life intact is giving this girl a chance to live a normal life and of course it really sort of ends with his mother telling him look you don't have to die in some grandiose way to make me proud everything you've done is has made me proud the fact that you've lived up to our legacy done the best you could for Gotham City both financially as Bruce Wayne as well Batman in terms of your war on crime and so again it's really just kind of him coming to grips with his own history coming to grips with his own his own life but it's really kind of one of these these interesting things we asked one of the reasons why I like this story is because it basically just sort of wraps up everything that's happened in the last 20 issues and then it sets the stage for the next phase of Tom King's run which will focus on you know the whole button story off the idea of the Watchmen being in the DC Universe oh my god Rob core okay so check us out this story is called the brave and the mold like if that gives you any indication of what it's about and I swear to god this story is hilarious it's like the best thing coming out of DC rebirth right now like it's it's absolutely one of my favorite stories with Batman now here's the funny thing this has Swamp Thing and like I've never read Swamp Thing I'm a little ashamed to admit it I have never read Swamp Thing once in my life like I've never read a single comic of his I heard that like the new 52 Swamp Thing is really really good but I've never read it before and it's kind of weird because he's like a pop culture or mainstay right like most everybody knows what's going on like like who's Swamp Thing is when they see him but I can't even read anything about him so this is like my first real exposure in comics to his character and it's amazing so here's a years ago thing so initially this picks up I mean technically it's kind of like chapter two they kind of split into chapters like the old anthology books from the 1940s and 50s and 60s where you would have like a singular book that would go on for 30 pages but you would have like Part 1 which would be like four pages apart two might be six pages or chapter one chapter two setting on those lines but all that really happens here is just like some guy in an apartment is shot in the head and he's kind of singing this really haunting song this is actually picked up on by by Jim Gordon and Batman now this is where things get hilarious because with the character of soif The Swamp Thing from what I've read and for what I understand he's tied into something called the green and that I'm pretty familiar with just because of the whole lot injustice stories but the way it works as far as I'm aware the wait originally worked his Swamp Thing was just kind of like this outlier in DC Comics he was just kind of out there in no-man's land like Hellblazer in the Vertigo stories he was just kind of out there by himself and he really wasn't tied in to like the rest of DC but with the new 52 DC rolled him into the shared universe and what they did is they came up with an idea called the green and what they basically said was that in the realm of DC's landscape you've got the green which is plant life you've got the red which is animals you've got the black which is rot it was almost kind of like this earth-based equivalent to like the emotional spectrum from the Green Lantern mythos but the fact remains that swampthing is tied to the green much like poison ivy and so what this means is that he is effectively immortal I mean as long as plant life exists he will exist and he can literally just kind of like reconstitute himself take on additional masks he has strength of a level that's never been calculated before is incredibly capable in terms of what it is that he can do but that's about the extent of my knowledge on his character after reading this story I'm almost inclined to go back and read the new 52 Swamp Thing just to see if it was really that good um I have no idea how long it went on for it I can't imagine it went on too long 52 issues is what everything ran for in the new 52 because they were all monthly titles so it's not like it was a super lengthy thing but but the fact remains here the Swamp Thing basically just kind of reconstitutes himself or you know forms out of some plant matter and just kind of makes his presence known to Tim Gordon now this is a funny thing because that man knows who's Swamp Thing is right so that man's just kind of like looking at the crime scene and analyzing things and Jim Gordon is just like okay like this giant swamp monster just kind of emerged behind us and I really feel like that needs to be said right now like I really feel like we have to acknowledge that this happened and it's just funny to see people reacting to this and that's one of the things I love about about Kings riding is because he gives the characters so much character like Jim Gordon is just this guy this like okay I mean I guess it was only a matter of time before something like this happened we live in a world where bullets bounce off of a man because he's an alien we've got a guy who flies around at night or just like glides around at night dressed as a bat beating people up it makes sense that there would be a giant guy who's composed of you know plant matter appearing in the middle of a room and a crime scene but it's kind of cool because while this is happening Batman's just like is there a problem he's just he's totally responding to Swamp Thing as if he's an old person now from here we switch over to Alfred and this again is another funny scenario because Swamp Thing being being composed you know of compost you know being a giant compost heap it's just kind of like leaving marks and stuff on the ground leaving plant marks on the ground you know Alfred cleans this kind of stuff up but it's just like yeah it's all for the course when you're offered it's just kind of the way it goes you know messes get brought in by the giving tree' things just come in messes get made and that's really yet but again it's one of these kind of cool things now the interesting thing about this is that Tom King is so good at characters and this is where the story really kind of starts to shift a bit towards the character development and the reason why is because with Swamp Thing there is no such thing as death at least as far as he explains it here to Bruce Wayne there is no such thing as death a person comes from the earth they come from life evolution averages you want to look at it they come from divine intervention they die so to speak but they become one with the earth and in turn they feed plants and they feed trees which provide life-giving oxygen or nourishment to different you know critters and organisms across the world and so there's always kind of like this cycle of life and death so to speak but no one's ever really dead and that's what makes us so cool is because in his mind he basically says look you know this man who was killed is my father he sent me letters beep tried to talk to me I've spoke to a maybe once after the whole instance with the swamp where I became something and that was really it like this guy never really had a role in the life of Alec Halden instead he was just kind of disguised and Alec knew about but never really did anything with now the reason why this matters and the reason why this is so cool is because what it does is it bridges the gap between Bruce Wayne and Swamp Thing Swamp Thing is this guy where he's basically like I have this man who's my father then I'll never be able to talk to anymore I'll never be able to like converse with I'll never be able to learn more about him not that I ever did know much about him in the first place but now that I want to know about him I can't because he's effectively gone I'll never be able to speak to him in the conventional sense vo with Bruce Wayne it's much the same way his mother and father were killed in front of them he'll never be able to talk to Thomas Wayne he'll never be able to talk to Martha Wayne he'll never be able to get their opinions get their ideas ask them do I make you proud that's one of the most significant moments about the button that's why the encounter between thomas wayne from the flashpoint universe and bruce wayne from the main DC Universe was so significant because even if it's not his biological father industry in the traditional sense it's still his father you know it's still the thomas wayne that he knew albeit just a different version of thomas wayne and it was emotional and it was visceral and it was amazing and so because that it creates some real emotional tie to these characters if that kind of makes any sense and so ultimately when is up happening here is it's waffling basically says look I'm just kind of here because I'm interested in solving this murder that really kind of seems to be it I mean it's like look my dad was killed I want to know what's going on now the initial indication here from Bruce Wayne is that this man was murdered on like the 84th floor of a building and there's only a handful of people who could have been the ones responsible for that now the first one he goes after is kite man and kite man do kite man is amazing so cool all this guy does is fly around and yell kite man hell yeah that's all he does like that's his thing that's his whole ordeal now of course the cool thing about this is that Tom King very much plays on the idea of like what Batman's about right like we know as the Batman is the guy who doesn't kill but the bad guys don't need to know that the bad guys just need to believe they're gonna die and if your kite man and your your soaring 500 feet above the ground and Batman latches on to you and will not let you go the only thing racing through your mind is you're going to smash into the ground and Batman is gonna let you die he's gonna bail out and you know what second before it happens he's gonna live but kite man's gonna be done with all his living that's it was kind of cool because I mean we know this is not gonna happen we know he's not gonna die but the questions a Batman has is you know who is it that committed this crime or how would they have gained access to the resources necessary to commit this crime because kite man didn't invented his own stuff he got his stuff from somewhere else so again it's really kind of like one of these whodunit mystery sort of things and so what cat man basically says is that he grabbed his stuff from a guy named Mooney money now of course Mooney money is clearly a comic book stand in for Guy Fieri but the fact remains here that going through all these different sources and jumping through all these different guys eventually Batman you know basically realizes that this murder seems to have been done by a guy by the name of headhunter now headhunter is a guy that I know nothing about I don't know if he's new I don't know if he is a character that was recently created I really don't like using Wikipedia's just because anybody can edit them but I don't know anything about that guy but really the only explanation we need is what's offered here where he's basically just like a mercenary and he always executes his victims by shooting them twice in the head and no one knows why he shoots a second time but the funny thing about this is that Bruce Wayne kind of hints at this and says look this guy is gonna be hard to find because he basically commits his crimes he goes underground he goes on the run and then he only resurfaces whenever he's ready to commit another murder and so the guy is sporadic I mean he pops up here he pops up there but there's no pattern to what it is that he does outside of the murders that he commits and so it's really kind of a cool mário because what this shows us is that even within the realm of Gotham City or even the world as a whole there are some people out there who were just that good at evading Batman they're just that good at evading him and again it makes Bruce Wayne more realistic it makes him more grounded and makes him more tangible and basically telling us that despite all of his vaunted resources all of his wealth all of his capabilities at the end of the day he is still only human and he can only do what a normal human can do and so because of this Swamp Thing basically chimes in and says he's currently entering the the Gotham Museum of Art and when Batman's like how did you find that out swampies response is that the grass told him and that's the coolest thing about this because like the grass or if you're talking to the grass that's cool whatever man do what you do man you be you I'll be me and we'll call it a day and so it's just really kind of funny to see these interactions between these characters who would normally never meet because they're so starkly different right I mean Batman is hanging out with plant metal as they're going to investigate a murder and so again it's interesting to kind of see how these characters relate to one another how they deal with one another now of course once they get to the Gotham Museum they immediately encounter headhunter and headhunter really just kind of starts talking about how he had killed this guy he had killed the father of Swamp Thing just because of the fact that he was sort of bragging about how he knows he rose or he's has an in with superhero so to speak only and so far that he knew his son was Swamp Thing and that was really about it but it was one of these scenarios where it was this situation where a guy was basically spouting off of the mouth in the wrong place at the wrong time and headhunter effectively killed him you know basically killed him for that purpose now in response to this Swamp Thing immediately kills headhunter like he just immediately crushes him you know Batman its kind of begging him to stop the whole time but as soon as he's done you know Swamp Thing starts crying and basically talking about how his father's dad he's never gonna be able to talk to his father again Batman's immediate response is like what happened to like there is no death what happened to like everything lives on you know it's like light descending and all that stuff like what happened to that things like nah man he's just dead that's basically what it is and Batman's so pissed like that man reads him the riot act he is so pissed off because in the mind of that man Swamp Thing used him right like Swamp Thing shows up with this whole dog-and-pony show up oh well you know enough things are really dead everything just kind of lives on knowing the full of plant life and different things like that you know but it's basically him just kind of turned coding here just being like that's it man everything's dead you know there's there's that's that's there's nothing to a man like you die and then that's it like that's just the end of you you know and it's kind of crazy because while Batman's reading him the riot act Swamp Thing is like I gotta go and he basically just bails out and that's it and it really just kind of ends with Batman screaming at him that's pretty much all there is to it it is an amazing story this is so good it is a perfect ending to a Batman story and I really hope this question goes out to you guys who are Swamp Thing fans my question is this is the new 52 Swamp Thing like this or is it just like kind of weird and dark and so on because this is an amazing story and I absolutely love this I love seeing Batman reading Swamp Thing the wry not because like Swamp Thing could crush him like a bug right like some thing would be like you know what I'm tired of you Batman and then that's just the end of Bruce Wayne it'd be so cool like it's such a cool scenario to see Batman just not caring and just screaming at Swamp Thing and The Swamp Thing just being like I'm out peace and just bailing Rob core man y'all know what I'm getting ready to say Batman the best thing coming out of DC rebirth right now oh I'll do this story is so good man this story is so good like Tom King man Jason man this man's living up to his namesake he's the king of writing Batman right now mostly because he's the only one right in the Batman comic Detective Comics is good Detective Comics is amazing I love Detective Comics but this right here with Batman is amazing in all seriousness stuff this is a beautifully written comic I mean a beautifully written comic because there's no like villains there's no bane coming there's no all the Joker no none of that stuff this is Batman at his most real this is Batman like Batman's characters tangible you feel it's the cool thing about this is this really kind of offers like a follow-up to the whole events with Gotham girl and it was always like this unresolved hotline right like it as things been going on forever and ever and ever and ever and it's just never really been resolved even now we still don't know a lot about her all we really know is that in the beginning of Batman rebirth that Gotham and Gotham girl had just shown up in Gotham City you know and they had these powers that made them almost akin to Superman they could fly they had durability and hand strength so on and so forth now over the course of the story Gotham of I am awesome movie it learned is that somewhere along the line they had effectively sold years of their lives in relation to power which meant that if you wanted like absolute power you would have to basically say here's the X amount of years that I'm willing to give away what that really means is that the more she uses her powers the more she drains years off her life and so she's kind of at this impasse because if she decides to become a superhero she's gonna start losing more of her life if she doesn't she can live out the rest of her days or whatever day she has left as a person and that's really the crux of this story in a lot of ways with the exception of the ending but the cool thing about this is that with the character of Gotham girl because she's so powerful she was one of these people that basically had her emotions messed with by psycho-pirate and so as a result she spent most all of the storylines after the events of I am Gotham she spent all the other storylines just kind of sitting in fear now of course this is really kind of Kings way of putting around the back burner of just saying hey look we're gonna save her for later but for right now if we have somebody fighting as part of the bat family then had strength and power that basically made them equivalent to Superman then it would just solve all the problems that are coming along Batman fights Bane gotham girl swoops in and saves the day it would cause all kinds of issues cuz fans would be like well why does he gotham girl just do anything so it allows her to be put on the back burner but having recovered from her whole experience with regards to the the mecha nations of psycho-pirate puts her in a position now to where she can basically decide what she wants to do next because it's really kind of a fresh start for her and the cool thing about this is that it really asks all these important questions with regards to Bruce Wayne as a character because with Gotham girl kind of pondering what she's gonna be next is she gonna be a superhero is she gonna be an ortley gonna live a normal life she asked these questions to Bruce Wayne because he's really the first guidance that she's ever really had and being a superhero keep in mind Gotham girl in Gotham gained their powers they decided one they wanted to be superheroes but they didn't have any real training they didn't go to the Justice League and say teach us how to be superheroes Batman was the first time they encountered a superhero in Batman is a very unique case among the superhero community because he's so capable but he's also just mortal all they would take is for someone to know Bruce Wayne's identity and then to be sitting on a rooftop on a building somewhere with a sniper rifle Bruce Wayne gets out of his car he goes to walk into Wayne Enterprises he gets shot in the head and that's the end of Batman I mean that's all it would take a story like that wouldn't be very fun like he's just the death of Batman I think it's three pages long it would not be interesting at all but you know that's that's what it for this character but he's so unique he's so interesting because he's so smart he's so easily killed that's what makes the thing so cool about him but in a lot of ways he's also the first superhero that Gotham Girl has really encountered they can teach her what it means to be a superhero to go out and live a normal life and it's kind of interesting you know because is she asked a question what would I do like you know what were where would I go and it's kind of funny because she says I was hoping he would just point me in the right direction I was hoping that all this would be done to my emotions would be be back under control you know you would give me a piece of paper and say follow these rules and you'll have a normal life that's what she was hoping for was for him to basically hold her hand and guide her to where she needed to go to become a hero but at the end of the day it's not like that because it's not like that for anyone there aren't there's no rulebook on how to live life there's no guidebook on what you should do and what you shouldn't do in me it's not like you're born you know and then you get to the point where you go through elementary school and middle school and high school you know when you're ready to go off to college you get you're 18 years old you get your first job and your parents say okay here's the book of life have fun and all you have to do is just go through the pages as you encounter situations kind of pay bills what credit means I mean there's no guidebook for that kind of a stuff I think I'm gonna start a YouTube channel like where I just where I do that the guide book to life I have no idea but nonetheless you know these are things that she's literally learning not for her the idea of paying bills things like that I mean that's not essential but you guys understand what I'm saying there's no guide book on how to be a superhero and that's the kind of crazy thing is because that's why each member of the Justice League is so significant you know despite the fact that he's basically the security guard slash guy that hangs around you know and just like watches whatever he washes on TV black mirror I have no idea cyborg plays a role in the Justice League Superman is the backbone he's the guy where everybody knows no matter how bad things get it's not over unless Superman's incapacitated Wonder Woman the one who will fight until the bitter end Batman is the brains of the operation Green Lantern he's the one that's like look if things get really bad I've got a whole army behind me that I can just bring in to unleash absolute hell everybody has a role to play with Gotham girl she's figuring out her role she's figuring out her life she's really kind of just having this existential crisis right now she doesn't know where she belongs she doesn't know who she's supposed to be here what she's supposed to be about and Batman says that Batman says look when it came down to it following the death of my parents sure Alfred said hey look here if they you're supposed to do you know here's how you live your life here's how you become a man but when it came to him becoming a superhero there was no guidebook Batman did the best he could he suddenly came across a guy who was dogging this Red Hood they got into a fight Red Hood fell into of that and became the Joker you commit to actions you do things they have consequences and you navigate and chart those waters as best you can but the funny thing about this is that this creates a lot of questions in the mind of Bruce Wayne remember we did the button at the end of the button or during the events of the button he came face to face with his own own father Thomas Wayne but that version of Thomas was more significant than the actual new 52 version of Thomas that was shot in that alley and the reason why is because the flashpoint version of Thomas Wayne saw his son died he saw that version of Bruce Wayne killed his wife Martha Wayne became the Joker these are the kind of things that he dealt with and so when he sat down with Bruce and he said go live your life do not live your life as Batman do not live your life fighting crime go and live a life go make a life for yourself find the woman settle down start a family hasher your knowledge on to the next generation let's somebody else be Batman go and live what he's finding himself doing here is reiterating that exact same advice to Gotham girl and she's in turn asking well then why don't you follow it if that's advice that you think is so sound if this advice that you think it's illegitimate then why aren't you following it and this is the beauty of all this this is this is the beauty of the whole conversation that they have Batman says because I don't know how to not be Batman I don't know how to be anybody else that's who I am that's what I am my parents were shot in an alley I'm terrified you know that I'd have to relive that experience I'm terrified of losing the things I care about the only way for me to cope with that situation is to become Batman Batman became an ingrained part of Bruce Wayne so much so that Bruce Wayne is the costume it's the face he puts on when he goes out in public when the Sun Goes Down when the criminals come out Batman comes out and that's who Bruce Wayne really is he doesn't know how to be anything else and that's what's so cool about this is because this hitting home it's telling us the one thing that we as Batman fans always knew it didn't take a genius to know that like Batman was the character Bruce Wayne is just the guy that we see occasionally that's just that's the way it's always been but it's so cool to just kind of see that thrown on you know in pen and paper and ink that that's what it is that Bruce Wayne is just he doesn't know how to be anybody else but Batman not only that the idea of of failing to him is a massive calamity it's something that he's absolutely terrified of not only that while he tries his best to live a normal life while he tries his best to do the things that ultimately work for him at the end of the day he's afraid of what it means to not be Batman and because of that he fails he basically sets himself up for failure he sits down in his home in the comfort of his own home in front of a fireplace with a glass of scotch and asked the question I wonder what life would be like if I wasn't Batman but he looks around the city of Gotham and he says I'm the last bastion of hope here I'm the last man standing I'm the last fig-leaf if I stop being Batman this city gets overrun the cops can hardly do the job on their own the only reason why the city is where it is now is because I operate outside of the law I can bend the rules I can break the rules I can make people talk who wouldn't talk I can make people talk who wouldn't talk to the cops they wouldn't be able to get the information they need I can swoop in in the dead of night I can make people so scared to commit crimes that they don't rob banks but they don't mug people in the streets some do but at the end of the day the biggest threat to the city of Gotham other big guys the Joker the penguin two-face those are the kind of things that we have to worry about and so in a lot of ways he's done his job but his biggest fear is that if he steps down and he walks away then Gotham's just right for the pickings word gets around them the Batman's gone oh my god the Batman Scott dude the city is ours and suddenly it just descends into absolute madness and so while he wants to live a normal life he can't because he fraid he's afraid that if he does he'll fail the city of Gotham and if he fails the city of Gotham he'll fail his parents and that again is why it's also important because at the end of the day it's like that same line it's like the line that we saw in in injustice to that thread doesn't change no matter what universe we're in if Batman or I'm sorry of Bruce Wayne is Batman then it's the same thing all the time no matter what he looks like no matter what you know huge calamity he's engaged in no matter what enemy he's fighting or how big his Justice League team is at the end of the day the man under that cloak and cowl is a little boy who's crying because his parents got shot in an alley that's what's so cool about it and that's what makes it so interesting is because that's who Batman is and so taking this advice you know when he says look this conversation is not about me and and you know Gotham girl says that's the problem the conversations not about you we need to make it about you Batman has to really ask himself take a good look Tamir and say am I really doing everything I can to live a normal life am I am I really in this position where I've tried everything that I can and so what he ends up doing is he goes to Catwoman and this is why it's so gorgeous because it's not like a knee-jerk thing it's not like you know King was sitting right in the stories like you know what I wonder what would happen if like Batman proposed to Catwoman let's just see let's just let's just have it come out of nowhere now it's a gradual work in it's a gradual thing it starts you know really all the way back I would daresay with with Scott Snyder's run but it really picked up steam with Batman rebirth it starts with the introduction of Gotham of Gotham Grove the possibility existing that Batman can train these two new people so that he can go and have a life for himself only to find out that one of them goes crazy ends up being killed by his sister and the sisters emotions are manipulated by psycho-pirate and she ends up having to be taken care of and it's right back to the way it was before right back to the way things were before Bruce Wayne's gotta be Batman and he's got to keep Gotham City safe and he's got a train do for whatever it is that he's got to do and then suddenly it's Bane oh my god Bane's back it's the same thing over and over and over and over again and then he goes to be rihanna says hey let's do some investigation about this button eobard thawne shows up eobard thawne just wreaks absolute havoc on Batman disappears reappears rants about having seen God Barry Allen and Batman jump into the timestream Batman runs into his own father Thomas Wayne Thomas Wayne says go live your life the world the universe the multiverse is screaming at Bruce Wayne go live a life man quit being Batman go live a life go do your thing and so what does he do he finally after so many years follows the universe's advice follows the multiverses advice everybody says go live a life and he does he goes to Catwoman in one of the most beautiful moments that I've ever seen in a comic book he goes to Catwoman it says from the time I first met you I knew that you were gonna be the one whether it was because opposites attract whether it was because she was just so willing to do whatever it took in order to pull off whatever goal it was she was trying to achieve at the end of the day he says I'm terrified of what it is that I'm about to do I'm so scared that I might lose you the one connection that I have to what it can mean to have a real life I'm terrified of what it means to possibly take this step because it means I'm gonna step down from the life that I've had but regardless of it all he tells Catwoman he loves her and he proposes to her the reason why this is so visceral is because any man who's ever proposed to a woman will tell any any man who's ever proposed to a woman will probably tell you it was the most terrifying moment of my life because what if she says no but for Bruce Wayne it's not terrifying because maybe she'll say no it's terrifying because of what this represents it's terrifying because of what this means with Bruce Wayne being Batman the reason why he's kept so many people at arm's length the reason why he's kept so many people distant is the possibility of losing them so much loss in his life he looks around and says if I proposed a Catwoman if I take this step if I lose her it could shatter me it could break me in a way that I never imagined but in the end he does it he takes that step because he's ready for something new he's ready for a new era of his own life and that's why this is so great because what this does is it bolsters the Batman's story now because now he's got his own Lois Lane he's got his own Mary Jane Watson he's got his own a love interest in his life but he has to hold on to because she's now the closest thing he has to what it means to live a normal life but without being said guys if you are new here to come this explain make sure you guys hit the sub button to become part of the Rob Corddry guys enjoyed this video make sure you drop a like god this was an amazing story this is actually gonna lead into the war of jokes and riddles which I'm really really excited about but oh my god was this beautifully written DC Comics Bravo Bravo this was amazing is the best thing coming out of DC rebirth right now absolutely stellar I really hope that we get more stuff like this it's one of the reasons why I love Kings Batman so far because it's just been astronomically amazing and this is just the cherry on top it's the icing on the cake beautifully done okay so the war of jokes and riddles is amazing this story is incredibly good in this video we're covering part one and then we'll probably upload a second video either later on today or later on this week that will be part two the conclusion of the whole thing but the war of jokes and riddles is incredible dare I say the best thing coming out of DC rebirth right now it is probably one of the best stories that I've read in a long time involving Batman but this comes directly out of the aftermath of zero year which we've covered and you'll find that down in the Batman playlist in the description what this also does is it basically follows up to the idea that Bruce Wayne has only been Batman for a very short amount of time and so this story is basically a retcon now for those of you guys who were familiar with comics and you know that is bear with me for a second for the people who don't reckon is basically it's it's short for retroactive continuity and what it means is that a writer will basically go back to a particular character and put something in their comics that wasn't there before this is basically a story that was never told before it was a set of events that had never been hinted to you we didn't know anything about it and it's basically just throwing it in there now saying this actually happened and it's essentially a war between the Joker and the Riddler and it is god it is incredible so the cool thing is that when it came to Batman 0 year when it came to like the origin of the Joker different things like that the idea was that it was telling the story of how the Joker became the Joker but it fit in with the notion of the fact that the Joker is a guy that will always be one of Batman's main villains if not his most significant villain and so because of that and following the events of zero year but Joker had just sort of taken off you know the guy who had become the Joker eventually became the Joker and then he would just fight Batman later on what this does is it takes place before a lot of the Joker stories that we saw after zero year what it also does is featuring you know kind of talking about the Riddler for a second the idea was that the Riddler was a little more involved in a little more complex and more developed in terms of you know his storytelling now the reason for this was simple the idea was that when new 52 first launched and writer Scott Snyder was basically crafting his run on Batman the idea was to bring the Joker back later on down the line during death of the family technically speaking death of the family is the first major storyline that we that we see that features the Joker when the new 52 first launched back in 2011 following that was Batman in-game but the idea was that because the Joker was basically put on the back burner to be used at a later date Snyder sort of focusing on things like the court of owls and the night of owls and different things like that two-face and Riddler and so on and so forth so Riddler got a lot more attention from Snyder and it basically dealt with the idea of the Riddler taking over Gotham City setting up all these traps using the various abilities of different villains and then ultimately being caught and then being being arrested and thrown in jail the cool thing about this is that Edward nygma in a lot of ways I would say is more dangerous than the Joker is the reason for this is because of the fact that yes the Joker is crazy and yes the Joker zany and yes you never know what he's gonna do but Riddler is all about elaborate schemes elaborate traps he may start a sequence of events and the conclusion of those events will not be come readily available or won't even be understood until maybe months or even years after they originally start and that's the cool thing about him is because while he's in jail what he actually starts doing is making friends and talking to people now it's really friends in the sense of the fact that because he was so good at figuring out puzzles and riddles and so on that what he did is he became a source for various cops who were trying to figure out ways to solve crimes that they could not solve on their own and what it did it had been kind of an essential figure in the sense that a lot of cops began to get to a point where they needed him one cop in particular is basically killed by the Riddler who in turn begins engineering his own escape and that's kind of the danger of it all is because what we end up finding out is that one of the guys the Riddler was talking to you ah The Riddler didn't ask for anything in particular he wasn't asking for money he wasn't asking for resources he just wanted information about other cops and the reason why is because when he goes to make his escape he starts running off the names of all these different cops family members their wives their children their son basically being told the names of these people which in turn he's going to use as part of his plan to work perfectly for him because he doesn't have to lift a finger he doesn't have to shoot a person or anything all he has to do is just say I know who the people are that you care about and bad things will happen to them if you do not let me go and ultimately that's exactly what they end up doing they end up just stepping out of the way they unlock the door and the Riddler goes about his business now the other half of this is the nature of the Joker himself again because this takes place after the events of the first zero year story which dealt with the origin of the Joker himself this is when he's full-on in the scene in Gotham and so at this point people are well aware of who he is but remember Bruce Wayne has only been Batman for a very short amount of time and so that trust between society and Batman such as it is has not really been built up yet the other half of this is that because they basically figure out the location of where the Joker is what they end up doing is basically blowing up his base of operations just infiltrating the place trying to take it down only to realize the Joker's not there the problem with this and the issue the drug of the Joker struggles with is that he's lost his ability to laugh not in the literal sense it's more of a metaphorical thing in the sense that the Joker doesn't really find anything funny anymore and so the goal is to basically find something funny now what this does is it sets the Joker on the path of looking Batman is a guy who's basically the butt of every joke where it basically begins the process of pitting the two of them together about how Batman needs the Joker the Joker needs Batman that kind of a thing and that's why it's cool is because at the end of the day the Joker taking up residence and do whatever it is he used to do and then ultimately he and the Riddler encounter one another and the proposition offered here by the Riddler is pretty cool for them the idea of cops being corruptible is a very simple thing all you have to do is make enough money to pay off cops and then those cops are just sorted and that's it but Batman cannot be bought you know he's not a person that you can just go commit crimes and then talk him out of arresting you it doesn't really work that way and so because of that the goal is basically the two of them sitting down and saying hey look we can make something that's greater than the sum of its parts we can literally come together and we can kill Batman when we do you get whatever it is you need that will make you laugh I'll finally topple the bats and we can just conquer the city together and just rule it all together the problem with this is that this feeds into the unpredictability of the Joker one of the things that makes the Joker so dangerous is he is just as likely to shoot you as he is to work with you and in this instance Riddler doesn't know what the Joker is gonna do there's no predictability there there's no real pattern there The Riddler says there is when he basically says look I was able to figure out you were the one that was committing all these acts and I figured out that you can't laugh because you were basically killing comedians and you were attacking places you were trying to find a joke that you could laugh about and you can find it but I could help you solve this riddle ultimately the Joker turns on Riddler actually just shoots him and then is just done and that's it the problem with this is that remember back during this point in his career of being Batman Bruce Wayne was still very very new to the whole thing he was still very unsure of himself in a lot of different ways he was still figuring it all out in this instance he believes the Joker to be more of a credible threat than the Riddler also because the Riddler was shot and it looks like he's just gonna bleed out and die instead because the fact that Batman goes after the Joker the Riddler is able to escape he's able to get away and so is the Joker and so again that hits home at the inexperience of Batman the fact that he doesn't really know what road to taken so ultimately if this massive war breaks out between the Joker and the Riddler where various villains are essentially forced to take sides now of course the other half of this is that this also comes out of the idea of Batman's conversation with that woman in the sense because of the fact that the two of them are supposed to be getting married to one another the question is will she actually do it and is one of those things where Batman's just kind of dumping his heart out to the world and telling her everything about himself his deepest darkest secrets so that she goes into a marriage with Batman basically being sure of what it is she's getting into and that's why it's cool because at this point we basically continue to pick up with the Joker and probably one of his most ruthless moments now on the surface it doesn't seem that ruthless it doesn't seem that hardcore but he actually ends up walking into a home that currently belongs to a family that templeton family walks into their home and the Joker eliminates them all literally takes them all out because he's just trying to find something that's funny the Riddler ends up coming back by basically getting some surgical work done by a disgraced doctor who had long since lost his career but the other half of this is the perception that it gives us of the Joker in relation to how the rest of the criminal empire views him when the Joker calls up a guy by the name of carmine infantino he basically says look you have an hour to kill the Riddler and if you don't do it bad things are gonna happen and immediately in Patino's on the job it has his guys taking care of it he doesn't reluctantly but he ends up doing it anyway because he knows that the Joker will follow through with his scheme this is essentially a scenario where people are just building up soldiers to their side when it comes to the Riddler teaming up with poison ivy this was already established in zero year when he used a lot of the things that she had to his advantage in order to basically pull off taking over Gotham a lot of the traps and different things like that but when in videos guys run up on Riddler and poison ivy they're taken out almost right off the bat and so of course because of that once again Pitino shows back up and the Joker sit in his office and he says and hours passed and the Riddler's still alive we end up finding out that the Joker had travelled three hours to Metropolis to find the mother of carmine infantino killed her and then took all of her teeth out of her mouth that was what he did in response to Infantino not following his directions like he said and that's why people are so terrified of the Joker is because of the lengths he will go to in order to pursue his goal that's why he's so dangerous and so ultimately with Batman is simply disgusting this whole thing it turns into just this massive war I mean on one side you have the Riddler you've got you know Deathstroke and you got to face and you have scarecrow and you got Victor's eyes and all these different gods and the size of the Joker you've got Mr Freeze you've got Solomon Grundy you got the Mad Hatter yeah Deadshot you have these guys who are basically criminals that just kind of go about and they do their own things but all these different villains that exist in Gotham City are perfectly aware of the fact that the Riddler and the Joker are two of the most dangerous if not the two most dangerous villains that exist and so because of that they basically fall rank-and-file they essentially choose their sides with whoever it is they think will ultimately win now the other half of this is something this does is it actually switches over to a completely different guy a guy by the name of kite man and kite man is the best character ever I love kite man hell yeah I love kite man so much but he's got like this saddest story ever know a little bit of history here kite man goes all the way back to 1960 with that man issue number 133 and he was really more of just like a joke character that was created by Bill Finger the idea was a kite man was like the man who can fly anything is really what it was and he would just commit crimes by using contractions largely associated with kites and then that would just really be it he'd become a Batman he'd get beat up and then he would get thrown in jail or he would end up getting you know getting out he played some roles here and there you know he had involvement like Infinite Crisis different things like that but for the most part he was just this background small-time joke character in this particular story his origin is traumatic and he's really this incredibly interesting character because the whole idea of the war of jokes and riddles is not necessarily just the Joker in in Riddler going to war against one another it's the people caught in the middle and there have been a lot of people caught in the middle of this whole thing focusing more on the idea of of Charles Brown the whole purpose of this is that he's one of these guys who had previously worked on the Joker mobile for the Joker so he's got ties to one of them already and in his desperation Batman actually snatches him up subdues him and then sends him in to essentially spy on the Joker the problem with this is that him spine is immediately figured out by the Riddler because of the fact that they have spies on both sides I so brought before the Riddler he basically spills the beans he's eventually brought before the Joker who figures out where he basically explains everything that's going on and so again it creates kind of a weird scenario because ultimately when ends up happening is we basically find out that because the Riddler realized that Charles was basically a spy for Batman who owned to work for the Joker and had already been taken by the Riddler ultimately the Riddler had actually poisoned his son and so the result is that he basically ends up losing his son and that's what's so crazy is because what this does is it unhinges him he's not Joker crazy he's basically just sort of lost his mind to a degree and so what isn't happening is he actually just kind of takes massive pieces of fabric starts cutting them out into the shape of a kite gives himself a bodysuit and then just starts calling himself kite man and so as funny as it is at the end of the day it's basically this idea that he is a guy who was really stuck in this crossfire and experienced one of the worst traumatic experiences that a parent can ever have which is losing their child the other half of this is that will actually find out there's a lot more going on with the creation of his character than we originally thought but with regards to the major event itself the idea is that with Commissioner Gordon looking at the fact that you basically have the Upper East Side the Upper West Side which have been taken over by the Joker and the Riddler the goal is to find a way to bring the war to an end to basically preserve Gotham City so nobody else has to experience a casualty like this the crazy thing about it is that when Jim Gordon goes to meet with the Joker when he goes to meet with the Riddler he's given demands by both sides in terms of how he's supposed to show up the Joker just says show up in your underwear cuz it's the Joker and when you're the Joker that's what you do the Riddler is a lot more complex as his character should be now the cool thing about this is that this is designed to display two diametrically opposed sides and juxtapose them next to one another the Joker is simple he's just a crazy guy who wants to take out Batman that's it the Riddler is complicated he's intriguing he's got all this lore and all this mythology to him the other half of this is that the war of jokes and riddles is being fought on a multi-faceted level you basically have criminals fighting in the streets of Gotham City in this instance it's Deathstroke a genetically modified super soldier against Deadshot who's just a super accurate guy but because they're the two greatest mercenaries in the world their fight spans five days and 62 people die in the process so it is a massive calamity between these guys facing off against one another and it's a pretty big deal at the end of the day it all basically comes down to Batman it comes down to him as a character having to figure out a way to end this war knowing that it's not gonna stop into the Joker or the Riddler achieve their goal of essentially taking him out and now the cool thing about this is that because Batman has the Wayne family fortune at his disposal what he actually does is he orchestrates a sit-down between the Riddler and the Joker it's basically just them bickering with each other the whole time just thinking potshots and like the Riddler making fun of him and in that kind of a thing but it's interesting to see this happen because it goes down exactly as we would expect in the sense do they just sort of argue and carry on different things like that but it's basically them making the case as to why it is that they should be the one to take down Batman and that's the proposal that Bruce Wayne offers here again they don't know that Bruce Wayne is Batman they have no idea that the two of them are the same person and so going through and basically pretending as though he doesn't care about the Batman concept he doesn't care whether Batman lizard dies that his loyalty is directly to Gotham City itself he basically says both of you guys make your arguments on who it is you think should win and I'll give a billion dollars to the winner and that'll allow them to pay off all the criminals in Gotham City pay off the cops do whatever as they need to do in order to basically take out Batman and it's kind of crazy because what we end up finding out is that prior to this sit-down the Joker and the Riddler had basically both brought in hostages under the idea that if something were to happen to them the hostages would be killed what is up happening is the Joker agrees to free his hostages and the Riddler believes he killed his before he showed off which he did it's pretty I mean it's not funny but it's it's it's pretty it's messed up me it's pretty messed up I mean it's kind of rough but but the fact remains here that it is interesting to me because again it really hits home with the notion that Bruce Wayne is having to do a lot of things that he never thought he would when it came to the character of Batman the idea was to basically be a guy who could essentially walk the middle ground he could walk the middle line where he was basically always doing the right thing he'd have to make some questionable choices here and there but there would be the good guys and the bad guys and the cool thing about the whole war of jokes and riddles story so far is that what it shows us is the length of Batman has to go to from now on you know to basically be the guy that could take out the criminals is he will have to become the antihero who will have to blur the lines that sometimes he's going to have to make questionable choices that will force him to ask the question am I really a good guy so that's kind of the crazy thing about this one of the major choices that he makes is he sits down and he says if I have to pick a winner and if I have to bring this war to an end and the only way to stop it is to basically take out one of these guys then which guy do I side with he basically makes the smarter choice and sides with the Riddler because the Joker is so far gone in a lot of different ways because he's just so crazy Batman were to take up sides with the Joker then the Joker may very well just kill him at this point you know the Riddler and the Joker both want to win so it's really one of those things worse like the enemy of my enemy is my friend but there's no guarantee the Joker would see it that way if the Joker and the Riddler are at war with one another and their ultimate goal is to take out Batman but in the short term goal is to take out the other person the Joker may bypass all that the Joker may say well I mean the ultimate goal is to take out Batman so I'm just gonna take him out and be done and that's it you know and then whatever happens happens that's the crazy thing but the Riddler is a lot more fluid in his thought analytical in terms of how he looks at things the Riddler's immediate goal is to take out the Joker after which then he'll focus on Batman and so because of that Batman sides with the Riddler it's just the smarter choice to make now the other half of this is also using the resources of the kite man against both Joker and Riddler using kites to fly into where the where the Joker is at and then in turn in the middle of the whole conflict once the Joker's temporarily defeated and the most logical thing happens when criminals of the Riddler turn against Batman he basically set things up so that kite man could modify the packs kick him into action and they were basically yanked the criminals out of Gotham City into the air would they be swooped up by Alfred in the bat blimp because apparently the bat blimp is still a thing but the idea here is that this ultimately boils down to the Joker and the Riddler fighting against Batman but the crazy thing about this is that this is essentially everything Bruce Wayne has been talking about when he's been going through and recounting this entire story - Selina Kyle take Catwoman basically saying this is where I committed the act that I swore I never would have committed before we end up finding out that in the middle of this conflict the only option Batman feels he has in order to successfully take out the Riddler is to kill him and that's exactly what he ends up doing he harkens back to the idea of the Riddler killing kite man's son he harkens back to the idea that this war has cost so many lives and has seemingly been pointless and in that anger in that wrath while he is of clear and sound mind he takes the action of trying to kill the Riddler now that's huge for Batman because it'd be different a Batman just let himself go right like if he does acting out of rage and wasn't thinking clearly and had a temporary moment of insanity and once you go tell the Riddler that would make a lot more sense for the Batman character in terms of fans letting it slide I mean Batman fans will let Batman get away with anything but in terms of you know people looking at it and saying okay this is not something Batman normally should have done him being of clear and sound mind shows us how far and how fast he was able to fly but again it really hits back home to the nature of the fact that he's inexperienced because Batman as we know him now which is to say if you go crack open a story from DC rebirth and you read I am Bane or something along those lines Batman is calm he's almost in complete and total control of his faculties and he never allows himself to get carried away with wrath or anger and if he does it's momentary it's never a major thing in this instance he's still young he's still reckless allowing himself to get carried away falls in perfectly with the idea that he's still trying to figure out his place in this whole pantheon of superheroes of the DC Universe in relation to all the criminals that exist in Gotham City trying to kill the Riddler is a pretty big deal because what is up happening is the Joker actually gets in his way and the Joker stops him and in his insanity finds the whole thing hilarious but that's what's crazy about it is because the Joker stopped Batman from killing the Riddler and that's nuts it's it's it's wild to really think about it that way that the Joker was the thing that kept Batman from falling over the edge now this hits home with the nature of the Joker right like it's a well-established fact the Joker needs Batman he needs to have a merry needs to keep him there and so it makes sense that he would go that length but spilling all these beans to Selina Kyle basically telling her that he allowed himself to fall to that point where he almost became the villain that kills people he also merely ends up saying look if we're gonna do this you have to know what you're getting into I've fallen before I've made that mistake but Selina Kyle's argument is everyone has the fact that you did this all it does is it makes you human you get carried away you get angry you get sad you get filled with emotion just like anybody else it's not a failing it's the fact that you recognize that you fell that makes you great because it means that you know where you can get down to and you don't want to be there anymore and that's why it's cool is because it's her saying if you get to that point if you feel yourself slipping then I will be your guide I will be the anchor by which I can pull you from the bottom of this ocean of despair and I can bring you to the light and so when the questions asked will you marry me Selina Kyle says yes okay so I'll be honest man this writing regarding Batman and Catwoman it is it's Dudus it's so cool like it's it's really amazing you know like what Tom King is doing it's it's probably the best thing to come out of DC rebirth so the whole idea of of that when Batman and Catwoman it really throws into sharp relief the nature of like marriages and comic books right because there's two types of marriages there's the ones that are gonna be difficult but interesting and there's the ones that are too easy like for example Superman and Wonder Woman I mean granted super and Wonder Woman never got married but they were dating for a while when the new 52 first kicked off and fans didn't really like it what story could you write that would involve Superman and Wonder Woman that could be compelling and last any real measure of time Oh No Lex Luthor has green kryptonite he's attacking Superman with it you know you know what Wonder Woman shows up and she knocks out Lex Luthor and she grabs her green kryptonite and Chief throws it into space and Superman gets up and says thank you Wonder Woman and the story's over that's it whereas when you have Superman in like Lois Lane Lois ladies human she has no powers she's just a reporter and she's in danger a lot of the time but she could also hold her own but the fact that she has no powers forces the rider to rely on Lois Lane's ingenuity in order for her to pull it off and it's cool because with Batman and Catwoman it's much the same way it makes sense that Batman and Catwoman would get together now this whole idea of Batman marrying Catwoman or at least proposing to Catwoman does set in stone this idea that there can be some pretty compelling stories and this initially picks off with the two of them just kind of rolling through the desert and having to put a horse down because I just can't walk anymore now it's it's kind of intriguing because the the interaction between the two of them in some ways is almost like an Aaron Sorkin TV show like an Aaron Sorkin script right like if you guys ever watch a show like The West Wing or the newsroom or something like that the way that Aaron Sorkin writes interact the interactions between people people never talk that way but it is interesting to see and with Batman and Catwoman it's much the same way you know where they sort of have these interactions like they'll finish each other's sentences or don't know what the others thinking or something along those lines and it's almost like a fictional account of how you imagine a relationship to be but it works with these two characters because they've been enemies for so long but there's always been this kind of romance between the two of them and it works and is really really cool but the other half of is the bat family right like we talked about in Red Hood and The Outlaws that in a lot of ways Jason Todd doesn't see himself as a tried and true member of the bat family he is but he doesn't necessarily see himself that way but in the middle of the bat family hanging out doing whatever it is that they do in their off time I guess hanging out the library and just you know kicking their feet up and just talking about stuff Alfred shows up now Alfred showing up is always interesting because offers like the father figure for Bruce Wayne right and I mean while he is there to serve the Wayne family keep in mind Bruce doesn't really treat Alfred like a real Butler which is to say he's not like your job is to come here do these things and then you leave no he's a father figure the O Bruce Wayne is almost always inclined to take the advice of Alfred unless it runs contrary to what Bruce Wayne wants to do which is actually about pretty far from like a father figure I mean it's actually kind of far from okay so I don't know how you reconcile those two things together but switching back to Batman and to to count one because again this will bounce back and forth between those two groups to a degree we basically pick up with with the tiger now the tiger is a really interesting character in fact he was introduced on in the early days of the new 52 when DC was experimenting with the character of Dick Grayson one thing to remember is that when DC rebooted in 2011 they were switching things up for a lot of characters a lot of it was looking at characters who had existed for a long time and said how can we make them more intriguing and Dick Grayson was a really good example of that I mean you got to think about it Dick Grayson appeared back in 1939-1940 subtle on those lines so he was basically Robin for like 45 years and then eventually he became like Nightwing becoming Nightwing having his own story holding his own character he did that for you know over 20 years and then eventually when DC rebooted everything in 2011 they made him a secret agent and while a lot of people didn't like it it was interesting because it provided different levels of storytelling now Tiger was introduced as like the best spy of spiral which is the organization that Dick Grayson worked for but it is kind of cool because it's always been this theme with its character that he's the best broker of information in the world he knows everything that goes on and so the idea is that Batman and Catwoman are searching for a particular person now from here we jump back to the bat family and this is really funny it's like a pretty cool situation because Alfred is just kind of like alright look Bruce Wayne left and he wanted missed a legal mission and there's something that he did that I'm not supposed to tell you about but I'm gonna tell you anyway and everybody's guess is like okay so like it's gonna destroy the bat family right because that's usually what happens with Batman's secrets the big huge revelation that Alfred drops is Bruce Wayne proposed to Selina Kyle catwoman and she said yes and people are just like what even ace the bat-hound it's just like what they're like no way that happened that's crazy talk it's really funny to see that whole relationship unfold now forever here picking back up with Bruce Wayne you know with Batman and Catwoman they basically kind of stumble across this guardian of the desert for the most part and again we you know it's very ambiguous here in the beginning it's kind of like you know what's this Guardian hiding nobody's supposed to get in there there's a pact that was struck between the Justice League and the United Nations where it was you stay away we stay away no one goes in there so it's like whatever's inside this cave has to be a pretty big deal now the other half of this and one of the things that Tom King is really really good at is messing around with a character of Catwoman in the sense that a lot of people view her as like a little girl like you're here to have fun but you're way in over your head what a reality Catwoman's pretty rough around the edges and this guy probably has about four feet on her and she beats the crap out of him it's amazing it happens off panel but it's pretty hilarious to see it all take place but again you know the other half of this is that of course Alfred gets a response to the Justice League saying hey look somebody went with a cave when they were supposed to and someone so forth and this kind of tips the bat family off that somebody needs to intervene or at the very least needs to show up now of course with Tiger leading Batman and Catwoman to this cave it is kind of cool because basically it's this idea that Damian Wayne wants to be the person to go in there Damian Wayne knows exactly what Batman's looking for and his response is we have to go and get him but the fact remains here the person that Batman searching for inside this cave is Talia al Ghul the daughter of Ra's al Ghul now this is a very big deal because Talia al Ghul is a mother of Damian Wayne ie the mother of Bruce Wayne's child and of course it was one of those scenarios where Bruce Wayne was kind of duped and then ultimately you know Talia al Ghul slept with him and then eventually it led to Damian Wayne being born about nine months later but the fact remains here is it's a meeting of the exes the other half of this as a Tom King is really really good at building on the nature of Batman and Catwoman I mean what did it keep in mind here you basically got a man who has a hard time trusting anybody who is engaged to a woman who's a professional thief and so it's almost just kind of like oil and vinegar you would never expect them to mix but they do and it works so well the other half of this is that with Talia al Ghul basically being told Bruce Wayne has Perez proposed to Catwoman and he's brought her here it's almost like a bit of jealousy you know it's almost like a little bit of whoa well that's not cool like why would he bring here will bring his fiancee here which it does kind of make sense of course with regards to like all the guards that Talia al Ghul Sims after them only they make pretty pretty quick work of it this is by no means meant to be a great big huge point of the story it's just really designed to show that working together Batman and Catwoman as a couple are greater than the sum of its parts which is to say they're better together than they are separate this leads to the arrival of Superman and of course basically Superman says look Batman is not supposed to be in there but the worst thing that we can do is dig a deeper hole so nobody else is going in there now in truth this is kind of Tom Kane's way of basically keeping things pretty limited if Superman allowed Damian Wayne to go in well then Superman will probably have to go in and suddenly you have this veritable army of people running into this cave and it would it would over complicate the story and so Superman kind of showing up saying look you can't go in there of course he takes off to Central City because of some alien invasion stuff like that you know and this ultimately leads to the whole idea of like Damian and Dick Grayson are considering going in but of course Dick Grayson chimes in and says like Superman can still see you from Central City so he'll be back here in a heartbeat if he sees you going in there which is kind of funny you know and again this is the cool thing is because the character riding here is interesting and it's what Tom Kane doesn't forget about in this scenario where Damian Wayne's like everybody wants to kill you using kryptonite I would use magic but Superman's response is well I mean you got to thinking about a Damian if you killed me then Jonathan wouldn't like you anymore and like that's enough to stop baby your friend won't want to hang out with you anymore now the other half of this is also the relationship between Dick Grayson and Damian remember when Damian first came up him and Dick Grayson bumped heads and the extreme over the years of Damian's development starting in the pre new 52 era going all the way up to the launch of the new 52 a lot of it's been the evolution of Damian Wayne is the evolution of a kid who was raised in isolation who was raised outside of tried-and-true human interaction and being forced to interact with people and not really knowing how to do it I mean again kind of the epitome of social awkwardness I've met a few fans from the Rob Court who were socially awkward and they'll tell you man that is a fly with me decide track here for a second we've done meetups and they'll be like fans you just kind of sit around in the background because they're nervous and they don't know what to say and I'm like nope I'm gonna get you to talk one way or another I'm gonna get you to talk and I'm gonna answer your questions on which character is my favorite superhero and who could beat who and we'll get ice cream and all kinds of cool stuff like that I love hanging out with fans it's one of my favorites anyway batman correctly deduces the idea that these guys showing up and facing off against him and Catwoman are not to kill them it's to tire them because Talia al Ghul finally makes her presence known and says I challenge the both of you now in truth she overcomes Batman pretty quickly and I would surmise Batman actually lets that happen that under normal circumstances Batman could easily take out Talia al Ghul and the fact that Batman was so easily overtaken by Talia al Ghul indicates did he let her overtake him because from there her focus shifts to Catwoman now I would not believe that Batman would let Catwoman die for me I think it's more of a test where does she reside and that kind of seems to be how this goes you know with regards to the way the story ends but the battle between Catwoman and Talia al Ghul the battle itself isn't really so great as much as the dialogue between the two because one of the things that happens as Batman says look we're here for a girl named Holly Kaplan was accused of killing 237 people she took the rap for a girl named Holly we're gonna get Holly to basically confessed to her crime so they kept one we could be free and she could marry me without having to live underground and worry about the cops chasing her down all the time to give her some measure of freedom it's out there but the whole dialogue between the two is Talia al Ghul starts to run over this whole scenario where she says from the time that she could walk all the way up to the time that she became the formal a formidable fighter that she is her father Ra's al Ghul would throw her sword and say fight and you keep fighting until I tell you to stop fighting and if she died he'd throw into the Lazarus pits resurrector bring her back out and start the whole process all over again but the whole scenario the whole thing that Talia al Ghul is hitting home is that there's a difference between the way that Catwoman lives and the way the world really is it's a battle of ideologies there's two kinds of people out there there's people living their heads in the clouds and then there's people who understand the world the way it really is and that's what this is designed to be Talia al Ghul is the darker side she's a part that she believes matches Bruce Wayne because Batman has the dark side he's got the brutal side the part that doesn't really want to let bad guys live because if they lived and they'll probably go back to committing their crimes again it's that side of Bruce Wayne whereas Catwoman is really kind of like the caring side the loving side and that's what's so interesting about this is because there is this this conversation that takes place between Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne Dick Grayson asks Damian Wayne do you know why Batman proposed to Catwoman and Damian Wayne's initial response is I mean I don't I don't really know I mean you can offer an opinion but at the end of the day it's just your opinion and Dick as response is because it makes him happy but the reason why he didn't tell us is because it means he's asking for something and that's the coolest thing is because decreases sistiana he says look at Batman's history look at everything that Bruce Wayne does all he does is give and give and give and give he sacrifices himself for the betterment of others it's always been giving things up it's always been losing things Batman's never really been able to say this is mine Batman lost his parents he lost Jason Todd he lost Alfred for a time it's always giving things away losing things were asked with Selina Kyle Batman's being selfish and he's earned it Batman's earned happiness and it's not easy for Batman to ask for things and again that's the funny scenario about this you know because Damian weighs responses yeah well Batman's happy and dick races responses know it no he's not happy he's not happy at all he's never been happy ever since he lost his parents he's never been happy it's always been on the quest to stop crime but look at everything he's lost in the process he's never really had any measure of a long term romantic relationship his parents have been dead for years and you'll never get him back he's lost Robins over the years for whatever reason he's always lost these important figures in his life he's lost friends he's lost superheroes he's always lost things what he wants is something to hold on to somebody that he can have that wants to be there too and so again it's really interesting because this is probably the most human analysis of Batman death there's ever been and that's why it's so cool that's why it's so amazing because it's this philosophical perception that Batman just wants to be happy Batman wants to finally come home and he wants to hang his coat up and say I'm done and that's what this all really seems to be about you know Tom King is knocking on the door of this possibility that when Batman gets married to Selina Kyle that a time will come when he will just walk away from Batman and just say I'm done now I'll be an adviser I'll pop into the comics occasionally you know but from from this point going forward somebody else will be Batman I doubt it'll stay that way for any measure of Todd if it even happens at all I mean I personally think this is gonna end with something terrible happening Kevin's gonna die or something sad like that I have no idea but you know in my mind it is beautifully done it's a great analysis because Batman just wants to be happy he's just like everybody else he's tired of fighting he's tired of you know struggling to hide out giving things up tired of losing things all the time he just wants some measure of peace some small measure of peace and that's why it's cool because at the end of this whole battle sumit Lee Selina Kyle's able to overcome Talia al Ghul but ultimately Selina Kyle approaches Holly and of course says look I'm trying to find happiness myself I'm trying to get away from this life that I've been living a thievery and crime and so on and so forth but I can settle down with a man that I love and I could find happiness and I need you to help me do that by confessing to the crimes you committed now the other half of this is Talia al Ghul Talia al Ghul kind of sits down after the fight with with Catwoman sits down next to Bruce Wayne is like look man you didn't make that bad of a choice she's pretty cool as that's why I kind of seem to be a test of sorts you know is this one of those things where she really is legit now I'm honestly it's not like Talia al Ghul's word is law it's just one of those lines is just kind of thrown out there like hey I mean you know she's a she's a pretty good choice but it is kind of interesting in terms of the whole connection between the two because Damian Wayne kind of asked his father you know when Batman emerges with Catwoman he kind of asked the father are you happy and so of course this really hits home with the idea the Damian Wayne is finally getting involved into the nature of his father's role does he care that his father's happier and happy whatever the case may be it is interesting and turn to the evolution of these characters how they relate to one another Damian finally beginning to view Batman as a legitimate father figure instead of a person who is his father that he just happens to live with so this story is like the greatest Batman story ever told really it's like a Batman Superman story but it's like the greatest story ever told I love this story so much now I mean I haven't read everything about Batman so I guess maybe it's not I guess I can't really say it's a greater story ever told but oh the stories I've read it's like the best Batman story ever told it's so cool because this is all about like bromance between Batman and Superman as well as like Catwoman and Lois Lane okay what would be the woman equivalent of a bromance like I don't know what the woman equivalent that is like oh oh whoa mance I guess I don't know like maybe there's friends I don't know like like BFFs I have no idea like what the what the equivalent of that is but it is cool because like like initially this kind of kicks off with like Superman and in Lois Lane kind of going back and forth right and the whole reason why is because Lois Lane is like you should call Batman like we need to hang out like we do like get together and like we need to like hang out and have some fun and just like have like an adult's night out because like it would be fun and it's kind of funny because like Superman avoids it right he's just kind of like oh I'm busy you know I've got I've got stuff you know that I've got to do I mean I've got you know superhero things like it's just making up reasons for why you can't call Batman and the I'm Batman does the same thing right I mean Catwoman and Batman are facing off against some guys you know and it's like well you should call Superman like like you know he's like the best friend you have like we need to hang out we got to get together and that's what's kind of funny about this is like when it comes to the way these stories are done you have like Lois Lane and Catwoman who kind of stand in as the voice of reason and we wouldn't normally expect it to be that way right like we've been expected to be like Batman and Superman who were like the voices of reason but are there like two guys who just can't bring themselves to call each other because it's all kind of based on Pride and all that kind of stuff but as this goes on it kind of begins to sort of Windell things down to where we get to like the heart of the matter of why they won't necessarily call each other I mean Lois Lane wants to meet Catwoman and like Catwoman wants to meet Lois Lane and so really to kind of like bring the two together sort of going through their husbands it's really funny you know because when it comes to like Lois Lane she just dances look you know I've looked at me Catwoman you know I've looked into what she's about you know I've looked into who she is as a villain basically like Selina Kyle and I'm I'm curious about her like I want to know what would lead a person to want to marry Batman I want to know what level of insanity would drive a person to that cloth how do you to know why this is the case and again it is fun because we would kind of expect them you know Superman is gonna be like okay cool let's let's call let's see what's up like listen let's get together but once we start to go through into these little Nick's and crannies you leave these little tidbits these little small things it's sort of make these characters who they are what we end up finding out is like Batman and Superman in a lot of ways idolize each other like I mean you got Superman fighting against some radiation guy you know I don't really know his name I don't really care enough to look it up but you got Superman fighting some radiation guy you've got Batman going against this various group you know and really these roads are kind of leaving them to each other but it's not really the villains they're facing it's not that's not the important part of this the important part of this is that they sort of hide light the other's existence they highlight the other's purpose the role they play they highlight who they are and what they're about when it comes to Batman he sits down and he simply says boy at least would count woman speculates it says you're ashamed of me of course Batman's response is of course not that's crazy talk I am not ashamed of you at all that would land me in the dog house if I said yes even if I was joking but still from Batman's perspective the almost see Superman is like a better man than him and that's what's so interesting about this but at the same time Superman sees Batman as a better man than him each one puts the other on a pedestal and that's what's so why this was so cool about this because all they really see are like the great aspects of each other now just a hallmark of having a friendship it stood the test of time for so long I mean that's really kind of the thing that goes into all this is that you've got Superman and Batman who were like the one-two punch of DC Comics and they've been neato they've been enemies they've been friends all those things but all that has kind of built up over the years into this tried and true friendship that's had its ups and downs but each one respects the other to such a degree that they don't really see the flaws and the other person I mean they know they're there but they don't really look at those aspects they look at what makes them great Batman is is the detective he's like one of the smartest men if not the smartest man I would argue that maybe Lex Luthor is a little bit smarter depending on what circumstance were talking about but by and large like mr. terrific Batman Lex Luthor had like the top three spots but still in the eyes of Batman Superman is like the hero he's the good guy like he's the boy scout and even if Batman will give him a hard time over it there's respect found in that there's respect found in the idea that Superman will put all others above himself and Batman will too but where Batman is kind of like the dark and brooding side of role really of like a singular person Superman is kind of like the uplifting side that's the cool thing about this you juxtapose these people you put them into like one person and suddenly like they're just two sides of any one individual person they keep each other balanced and they keep each other grounded and so what is up happening is that the villains a face basically leads into like one particular building and they take two different Everett entrances to get in there Batman sneaks in because you know he's Batman like that's what you do when you're Batman you don't just walk in the front door that's crazy talk if Batman we're gonna go grocery shopping for example Batman would not go to like you know Kroger's and like walk in the front door he would like jump on top of the building and like sneak down feel like the ductwork and then like sneak around and get what he wants and then like swipe his bat credit card and be out before anybody knows he's there but like when you're Superman you know like yeah man we gotta go grocery shopping because we're low on lettuce you know and like you you go in there and you buy the stuff you need and then you leave like a normal human being does but still like they end up running into each other and it is kind of funny because what ends up happening is like they're kind of standoffish right like well I didn't expect to see you here Batman you know and maybe have like Selina Kyle and Lois Lane and Lois Lane's like you must be Catwoman it's nice to meet you and like they immediately break the ice and start shaking hands now of course these villains show up and of course they make quick work out of them but Superman's response is well let's get some dinner this is the story gets amazeballs it gets so cool they show up to the Gotham County Fair and it's superhero night no I want to be honest with you guys I've been doing a lot of fairs all right I've been to a lot of fairs a lot of carnivals in my time I have never seen a carnival or Fair where it's like you can't get in here unless you're dressed as a superhero I really want to go to one of these anyway when these guys get in here it's kind of funny because they're immediately turned away right they're like hey look it's superhero night you have to be a superhero if you're not dressed as a superhero you can't come in here and they don't believe they're superheroes even though this guy is talking to Batman and Superman Lois Lane and Catwoman have this genius idea whether like well let's just switch costumes Batman can be Superman and Superman can be Batman and like AI Lois Lane will be like like Catwoman and it's like the most beast idea ever right because like the whole time Batman's like no we're not doing this we're not we're not doing this all right we're not switching into costumes we're not trading places we're not doing any of this stuff we're gonna sit and be sad because like I'm Batman that's what I do I mope and so like you guys know it Batman mopes but still like the funny thing is that we're we're Batman's adverse to it all Catwoman's like whoa you guys misunderstand what he's saying when he says no when he says no what he means is that he knows his fiancee is really hungry and she's being very patient right now but her patience is running out very very fast and he recognizes he needs to remedy that and so he's going to do that aren't you Batman because it's in your best interest to do that and so like they do as any married man will tell you if the wife ain't happy ain't nobody happy and so it's funny because like they basically switch costumes and like the whole time this happens it looks so amazing like it's so cool because you've got Batman who's cheery and Superman who's just like mopey you know like like I'm just gonna call the Batman suit right now I'm gonna confuse the heck out of you guys but you got like Bruce Wayne Superman who's just like this is not going to be fun but I mean look at this it's like the most fun ever like you're eating corndogs and like Lobo is doing the Hammer machine thing that like like people always fail out and they feel bad I mean it's cool with this thing because I did go into the tunnel of love and it's like it's like a married couple versus a a newlywed couple Clark Kent and Lois Lane come out it's this is so weird to me like seeing them like this Clark Kent and Lois Lane come out they're like well that was nice man Bruce Wayne - Selina Kyle come out and they're just they're going at it like rabbits and he it is it amazing but the best part of this is the batting cage right when they get to the batting cage they're just like smacking baseball's left and right and then Superman's like hey man I mean I could pitch to you if you want like you wouldn't hit it but I mean I could pitch to you if you want and then Batman's like naw dude like if you pitch to me Superman I would smash that baseball like you don't have a chance like there's really nothing you could do here like I would absolutely smash I think something else also want you guys to notice too Superman is dressed as Batman wearing his glasses I think it's hilarious I think it's amazing Batman wearing glasses Batman weren't specs to that this is this is like the most fun I've ever had covering a story before this is amazing but the other half of this is like like we pick up with Lois Lane and Catwoman right and this is this is this is cool because for the most part again like they're foreign entities to each other to a degree and the biggest question that the Lois Lane has is like why Batman like of all the people you could marry why would you marry Batman and the answer of Catwoman is so simple and it's so amazing and it's beautifully done her response is it's just because he catches me when I fall and as innocent oh the question is like like can you relate to that and it's it's so cool because like that's the story of Superman and Lois Lane and we've said it a million times before Lois Lane Falls Superman catches her but it's that he's always there for her and she's always there for him it is the definition of what it means to be like a tried and true partner you know try to Dru luck I mean that's kind of the nature of life right I mean when people get together and people get in relationships they're not really waiting on Superman right I mean like like a lot of women out there are really waiting on Superman to show up and whisk them away from all the dangers of the world and to give them all the money they need so they never have to worry about things I mean there are some who are but like by and large if a woman out there is waiting on Superman is because she's superwoman she's looking for a partner she's not looking for a superhero white knight to show up and rescue her from all of life's struggles you know the the idea of a relationship is coming across problems and solving them together and that's why this works is because the relationship between Selina Kyle in Batman is juxtaposed right next to the relationship between Lois Lane and Superman and where we would think they would be starkly different and where we would think it would all be predicated on two completely diametrically opposed views instead they're the exact same everybody's looking for the same thing everyone is looking for love and we're Lois Lane and Superman fan selina kyle and batman have found it but it's one of those things were like when you cut below the personality of Gotham when you cut below the hole you know I'm putting this wall up because I'm Batman and this walls here because I protect myself from the world when you cut past all that and when you cut past you know Selina Kyle he does the same thing there does to people looking for love and they found it in each other and that's why this is so beautiful and that's why this is so cool now from here like it's kind of funny because as they're walking along this guy dresses the question runs up and snatches the purse of Lois Lane and it's hilarious because it's like the question is that who's going to let me the question is who is going to stop me and it's this is hilarious honestly if I saw this like if I were at like this superhero themed comic book him or another yeah I guess like a comic book convention at a theme park like if I were there and I saw this I would try to get it like I would try to record it and like I would upload it as a front bumper on my channel I'd be like guys you have to see this you know and they're like I would put it in the video but like people would love it and it would be amazing and I would just be like yes yes all those likes I am feasting on them but like it would be it'd be hilarious because in response to all this Superman and Batman are just kind of watching this happen and then like like Superman's like okay so like here's how far this guy is how fast he's traveling and Batman's like god it throws a baseball knocks the dude right out and somebody dresses Green Lantern is just kind of like damn also maybe it's just me that guy looks like he's dressed as Alan Scott Green Lantern oh my god they're reversing Alan Scott Green Lantern like the old Alan Scott now the new Alan Scott the new Alan Scott's not as good as you old one the old Alan Scott but once that eye starts to wind down like once everything starts to come to a close and it really starts to come to an end it's really more or less everybody just saying hey look this was amazing like this was this was a great time you know I had a blast Batman is just kind of like no I did not have fun even though I did I'm just not going to tell you like I mean that's that's brooding Batman but you know when the whole thing winds down is funny because the Superman's like hey man like I'd still love to like pitch at you sometime to like throw a baseball and see if you can hit it you know I mean you can't but like I mean we'll see what's up it was like I know a place so they end up at like a baseball pitch right and this this is a cool this is a coolest thing ever we end up at a baseball pitch and like Superman goes to throw the baseball and Batman's like dude um I'm gonna hit it I mean that's just the way it is you know and Superman is like whatever man nobody can hit this baseball like you're not gonna hit this baseball Batman and Superman throws the ball and he's like here's to the impossible and in the comic games we never find out what happens that's not true I don't know why I told you that what is - his Batman smashes it why because he has prep time okay so we are picking up with actually what I think is one of the coolest stories in DC we were so far with Batman which is called the gift and this actually sees the return of Booster Gold now Booster Gold also did appear in the booster shot with Superman but we haven't really covered that yet that actually comes in the aftermath of the Oz effect so I will probably cover that sometime in the next couple weeks or so but when it comes to like this that this is really I think this does a better job of kind of hitting home at the nature of Booster Gold really feel like a lot of new fans and the reason why is because for people who are getting into DC rebirth are really getting into DC Comics because of DC rebirth there's a very good chance you have no idea who Booster Gold is now he was in like new 52 and you did see him there but really a lot of fans modeling's how they think of Booster Gold really comes from like before the new 52 right like it comes with the post-crisis landscape and the reason why was because that was when Booster Gold really blew out I mean Booster Gold was introduced in 1986 so he's a post-crisis character but the idea here is that when DC when you had the original Justice League back in breda back in not braving the bolt and then they got their own solo series you know really for my 1960 going forward when crisis on Infinite Earths happened DC canceled the Justice League in its entirety they got rid of the traditional Justice League team Batman Superman Wonder Woman Green Lantern all that kind of gets stuff to flash and they relaunched it under Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis as Justice League International and the reason for this was because by the time crisis on Infinite Earths happened the core members of the Justice League were hugely popular I mean they didn't really need a Justice League team it was cool to have but the concept of the team could be used for other purposes namely bolstering of popularity of characters who just really couldn't sell their own bucks because the name Justice League was so huge and so handing it over to to given and Mateus and then having them revamp it as Justice League International meant the name remain the same but the roster changed now of course in order to keep weary readers from walking away in its entirety they threw batman on his leader of the team and that was enough to keep people you know keep you all interested and then once you know the the roster began to take form and you had like guy gardner and he had Booster Gold and he had Blue Beetle the kind of comedy / serious nature of the stories proved to be hugely popular Justice League International was massive when it first showed up people loved it now as time progressed it began like people began to lose edge and that's the reason why in 1998 uh Justice League International was just basically wiped away all the Justice League teams were removed in their entirety and then you got JLA by Grant Morrison Justice League of America it was the return of the original Justice League team but nonetheless when it came to the character of Booster Gold he was really popular because one he was a glory hound and two like he was basically a crook he was he was a guy from the future who had used his knowledge of of current events because he was from the future and showed up and then it was just like I know how to save everything and it was funny for what it was but it was really more the relationship between Blue Beetle and Ted Kord that helped to make Booster Gold hugely popular like that's really really what kind of set things off this sort of like you know buddy-cop duo that the two of them formed made them wildly popular for a lot of fans and so really liked that aspect of Blue Beetle always almost always remained there were a lot of great stories that dealt with the idea that he felt like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders but for the most part he was just kind of like that comedic element and so he always had that that little bit of humor here so what this story does is it initially does not pick up with Booster Gold instead it picks up with Green Lantern it picks up with Hal Jordan and he basically offs himself which is actually kind of wild because it's like like right off the bat I mean one he's kind of grinning it looks pretty sadistic and screwed up but two he's just kind of like look the Rings don't let you take and take yourself out but if you overcome the willpower of the ring like you can do whatever you want to do and like death falls in line like we know that from the Green Lantern mythos now of course we end up finding out he does this in the face of Booster Gold but this is kind of crazy because everything is screwed up right now and it's kind of wild because it's like what in the world is going on and so ultimately you end up having Blue Beetle who's just kind of like okay look you know we got to go find Batman you know we got to go find Batman and we have to show um you know everything that's going on what have you and then of course he's taken out from behind by Batman but Batman's Batman's wearing guns and so right off the bat the idea that Batman is strapped with like massive bullets he's got grenades he's got you know these huge guns he looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger from Terminator blended with cable from Marvel Comics which is actually pretty cool he looks like The Punisher can we all just admit here that if Batman became the Punisher it would probably be the coolest thing ever like that's a story we need to have but basically it's this idea that is almost reminiscent a flashpoint when you have the flashpoint event anyway we got this alternate reality we had a surge a circumstance where Bruce Wayne died instead of his parents and Thomas Wayne became Batman and Martha Wayne became the Joker it was an amazing story when it came out it was like what is a a to maybe there's like a three or four part story I think was for but with this thing it's cool because this version of Batman is just like ruthless and it's very reminiscent of how Thomas Wayne was Thomas Wayne was cutthroat he would kill people he would do whatever he had to do but while you end up having like Booster Gold and Batman who were facing off against one another we transition over to Jason Todd and what we end up finding out here is Jason Todd is not the Red Hood instead what's been going on here is Jason Todd is actually like he owns a tire company and this tire company specializes in basically creating tires that shock Joker's from stealing people's stealing people's rims basically now again this is cool because this is blending a lot of small things together right like I mean if you if you look at DC like have you been reading DC for a while then like it's taking all these little threads all these little tidbits and sort of bringing them all together for example the concept of the Joker's definitely comes from Batman Beyond and Batman Beyond the Joker had long since been dead and in his place came like the Joker game and so you had like all these people men and women who would dress up as Joker's and then go out and commit crimes also notice here that it's basically Joker with like a rod in his hand which is kind of like a throwback basically to like the the death death and the family story arc where Jason Todd originally died in DC Comics but this is kind of cool because what this indicates here is that of course Jason Todd never became Red Hood which indicates that Jason Todd was never adopted by Batman if that wasn't the case then we don't really know where he ends up coming from instead we just know he kind of becomes a tire mechanic the other half of this is Booster Gold talking to his machine Skeets now Skeets is the means by which Booster Gold travels back and forth through time and will actually get a little bit of clarification on that here in a minute so we won't spoil it for right here and now but though the thing that I want you guys to notice here is really the relationship between the two of them because this was a hallmark of Booster Gold the fact that he and his machine would bicker with each other Booster Gold was always a character who seemed kind of childish and when taken out of context and and really when when sort of just thrown out there by himself it can be hit and miss in a lot of ways he can be like Deadpool I think the success of Booster Gold really comes into play when someone takes his character and they throw it into a comic where he has someone to bounce off of and that's why Booster Gold will always worked so well because in a lot of ways the relationship between like Booster Gold and and Blue Beetle or like Booster Gold and Batman or even Superman is very much akin to like cable and Deadpool they just kind of bounce off each other it's serious combined with like humor now Brewster Gold's taken by Batman kind of whisked away and it's kind of like hung from from a balcony and that's when you end up finding out this Batman is actually Dick Grayson no again this is what the things that I love about stories like this is because we're not gonna find out how Dick Grayson became Batman and that's why things like this are so cool why the mini series of like like white knight and and things like Knight wings new order the reason why those little things and tidbits like this are so cool is because they keep us wanting more and that's actually a genius move to kind of sidetrack here for a second one of the big issues that Marvel's been struggling with for the last while is they've really kind of reverted back to where DC used to be maybe 50 or 60 years ago in the sense of they're like very very linear stories and Marvel is like that when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were writing stories but they're very linear stories it's just kind of like you know here's an event that sets off this story and then here's a story happening and then the story ends done and like that's it it doesn't really give you any reason to want anything more than what you already see but with stories like this the reason why these are a great reprieve is because you're just kind of like well then how in the hell did Dick Grayson become Batman where's Bruce Wayne like what's going on with Bruce Wayne's character like those are the kind of things that you want to know and they keep us coming back and they keep us wanting more and then we end up tweeting the hell out of the writer give us the answer to this question give us a one shot man like do something that's where we could we kind of get a real cool interest with those things now again the other thing to bear in mind here is that when Booster Gold makes his escape one thing to remember is that while he is a glory hog and while he is somewhat nonsensical he is not incapable Booster Gold is very much a capable superhero in a wide variety of different ways what we also end up doing here and this is really more of us of an aside than anything else we actually pick up with Duke Thomas and this is kind of interesting here I think this was really done just for the purpose of showing where Duke is in and what Dukes doing but he hasn't really had that many significant roles in DC Comics that there's a reason for fans to care about what's going on with him here but again it is kind of a cool thing to see I mean at this point Duke Thomas is basically had his head cut open he's been lobotomized and someone's just kind of screwed feeding him and that's it but the fact remains here what we end up doing is switching over to Bruce Wayne and that's when we find out in this line and this in this current set of circumstances Bruce Wayne ever became Batman and the reason why Bruce Wayne ever became Batman is because Bruce Wayne's parents never died Thomas and Martha Wayne are still very much alive and Booster Gold shows up and he's like hey man like I got a present for you what I did is I went back in time and I saved your parents from dying and so like your parents are alive now because of what I've done but I did that because you're getting married and I wanted you to see what happiness would be like so like now we have to go back and we have to like let your parents die it's kind of screwed up it's kind of messed up my hey man this life you're living is a lie but this is the gift that I gave you and now I'm gonna take this gift and take it away it's like giving a person a million dollars and just saying I wanted you to see what it was like to hold a million bucks thanks and then just take the million dollars and leave but like that's Booster Gold now the funny thing about this is the responsive Bruce Wayne is like I've always known that that was the case I've always had this itch under my skin there's always just like this phrase on the edge of my tongue I knew that something wasn't right here it was an itch that I couldn't scratch things are not the way they're supposed to be and so the result is that he's like okay I mean I guess things could go back to normal but I don't want them to so he destroys Skeets strapped you know Travis Booster Gold on them in the modern day and leaves him there and then just leaves and goes back to his life and we pick up a year later and then we end up having Booster Gold who breaks into Arkham Asylum to free Catwoman and so picking up with with Thomas and Bruce it's kind of cool here but we also in defining out some somewhat seedy things are going on of course you know Oswald Cobblepot the penguin basically is President of the United States but still like Thomas has done some seedy things and that's the interesting thing about this is when you go through and you look at the various iterations of Thomas Wayne and DC Comics and even when you go back and you look at like the origin of Batman the indication is that Thomas Wayne was always a good guy know along it was because we didn't get a whole lot about him and it's only really in like expanded flashbacks well just to say flashback to give you more information about his dad that there seems to be the possibility that maybe he did some seedy things that maybe he wasn't really as legit as we thought he was but still like in this he's been working to try to make Gotham a better place but there's just kind of something off about him but in the midst of all this because of the fact that everything's crashing down because villains are going awry because everything is going crazy here what we end up having is one he suffers a heart attack and - the revelation is that like Oswald Cobblepot is gonna bring in the forces of Ra's al Ghul who have basically conquered Europe and Asia combine them into a single continent and then use those forces to essentially quell any kind of rebel threat that exists inside the United States but the hidden letters here the hidden wording the invisible ink really kind of says that like Ra's al Ghul like once he gets in he will not leave and so he'll get his forces in here and then he could potentially conquer the United States not only that of course pick Nia with Booster Gold he's really kind of rambling on - Selina Kyle but we start learning some things that are going on behind the scenes that when Booster Gold travelled back in time and stopped the parents of Bruce Wayne from dying that of course that meant Bruce Wayne never became Batman and because Bruce Wayne never became Batman Bruce Wayne never joined the Justice League and because Bruce Wayne never joined the Justice League that meant that there was no one there to save the Justice League when they first faced off against star up and when that happened Starro killed two Justice League they're all dead and so it's kind of crazy I mean you end up having like you know um you know Green Lantern of course he was alive but like the the indication seems to be here Wonder Woman presumably Martian Manhunter ah the flash they're all dead but again this is one of those things we're just like well I mean I like I want to see him I want to see this climactic battle and I want to see how I want to see how they died like those are the kind of things that are kind of interesting because I'll be honest with you guys if there's a story where like the Justice League dies or like a superhero team that I really love and there's like this dystopian future where everything goes bad and they die like I want to see how it happens like I wanted to OS I want to see that take place but booster gold's idea is okay we have to take you captain we have to get you to Bruce Wayne because Bruce Wayne's gonna marry you and and if we get you to him then everything will be fixed and everything will be fine and the two of you will get married and so his line of logic is I'll take you to Bruce Wayne and everything will be sorted out and so of course picking up with Bruce and Martha this is actually one of those instances when you see a harder side of Martha that you never really seek more there's always kind of given to us is like this tender person of course it's kind of funny because she puts on this hard edge but the doctor comes out and says if you'll come with me and she's like well what about my husband he's like well I need you to follow me in her immediate responses we are Wayne's of Gotham City we not follow anybody you tell me what I want to know not now but right now and it's cool because it's just like BAM Martha Wayne just boom just like that and I like that I like seeing that hard gritty edge of Martha Wayne because it's like a side you never really see and it's kind of a way to say look like the Wayne's are still very powerful in the city of Gotham they're still like probably the number one family in Gotham City they're a very big name and so again we end up finding out that Thomas survived the experience he's not dead but then from there you basically end up picking up with like booster and in in Catwoman travelling to the house of really to like Wayne Manor to pick up with with Thomas and Martha and Bruce the problem with this is that Booster Gold is only ever paying half attention to what's going on and he doesn't realize the reason why Catwoman was in Arkham Asylum is it because she's just like an incorrigible robber or anything like that it's because she's an insane serial killer and so as soon as she gets into Wayne Manor she starts killing everybody Alfred's the first one to fall which is always the case guys riders can we please stop killing Alfred I love Alfred alright please kela my main man Alfred Catwoman goes through there and she literally just starts tearing people up and just starts like taking everybody out now of course Batman's follow them there and what this does is it turns into like a bloodbath I mean this is a massacre Batman goes after Booster Gold and Catwoman Catwoman goes after Bruce Wayne and Anne Thomas and Martha Wayne and she kills them all like Alfred like Catwoman kills Alfred shoe killer kills Thomas she kills Martha she kills Batman she kills them all except for Booster Gold but then you end up having Bruce Wayne who gets the shot off on Catwoman and so Booster Gold unconscious and everyone else is dead and it's just like Jesus like this is insane Tom King the Tong King knows how to ride a donkey knows how to ride a quite crazy stuff it's it's but it's cool though because from there you basically pick up with this this this idea that Batman or I guess Bruce Wayne is now completely and totally resolved and what he's actually doing is taking shots at Batman and taking shots at Catwoman by various statues that he's created and honing his skills but this is really Tom Kings way or seems to be tom keys way of saying that like Bruce Wayne does not have the various skills with weapons use and things like that that we would expect he's literally like learning how to shoot here and it works for what it is and the reason why is because it fits in perfectly with the way the stories being told that with Bruce Wayne having never lost his parents he never had a reason to become Batman which meant he never had a reason to learn all that kind of stuff and so because he never had a reason he's basically learning those things now and so he's not as capable as we would expect him to be but he's also got Booster Gold just kind of chained up inside this giant cave and that's really about it he's just kind of keeping in there and so what he ends up doing is having guys basically clean up Booster Gold they fix Skeets and the response is you're gonna take us back in time and you're gonna take us back to the to the point where my parents died and we're gonna fix it now here's the funny thing about this is the time machine of Booster Gold is not an absolute thing you just kind of have to say like send us back to like about this general point in time like send us back to this point where I did a thing like that's that's how his time machine works I said where Bruce Wayne kind of offers out it orally says that's how Booster Gold puts off the reception this time machine works and so we're Batman we're Bruce Wayne's kinda like okay look fine then like take us back ten minutes before my parents died then you in turn have Booster Gold he's like okay we can do that now this is what this is one of the funnier moments in the comics because then like as that happens he just kind of like he's like yeah he's like he's like Skeets do that send us 10 minutes before Bruce Wayne's parents died and then winks and so like you get this hilarious exchange because he's just like Bruce Wayne he's like like what did you just wait why did you wink and it just kinda like this going back and forth like what what do you mean like I mean I didn't I didn't wink so I guess you did it's like well I mean I winked but there was a fly in my eye there was no fly they're like it's it's funny to see these this is this going back and forth this is a moment when I say that Booster Gold works really well when he has someone to bounce off of like this from there like like you end up having them basically jump back ten minutes before and then we end up finding out it's not 10 minutes before the massacre in Wayne Manor it's 10 minutes before Booster Gold basically saved the parents of Bruce Wayne when he was a kid and that's kind of a tragic thing here is because Booster Gold kind of has to make this choice right um he's kind of like look basically I just have to buy time he's got to kill 10 minutes but he's not telling he's not telling Bruce that Bruce has no idea where they are right now all he knows is that they're on a rooftop somewhere he doesn't know exactly I mean he could kind of look around the skyline and get a pretty good idea of where they're located at but like witnessed time passing suddenly you have Booster Gold when he originally showed up here and so you got two boosters fighting at the same time and so of course he shows up the intention is to basically save the pairs of Bruce Wayne but instead Thomas Wayne I'm sorry Bruce responds exactly as you would expect he takes out that version of Booster Gold and so from there it's like okay now we basically have to like let this let these events unfold you end up having like the original Booster Gold facing off against Booster Gold as he I'm sorry facing off against Bruce Wayne alongside Booster Gold as he exists now and all the while where this fights taking place you have Thomas and Martha who hear the gunshots of like Bruce Wayne when he's facing off against these two boosters and the response is well things are kind of weird so like let's go this way instead and they run into Joe Chill Joe Chill that whole circumstance unfolds exactly if you would expect it to Thomas and Martha Wayne are dead and this is kind of crazy because it's basically Tom Kane's way of saying like Bruce Wayne kind of engineered the death of his own parents Bruce Wayne basically this kind of has to look down and realize that his parents are dead that like there's no way to escape this and so ultimately Bruce Wayne turns a gun on himself and and that's the end of that and someone turn like Booster Gold basically fix things and so of course Booster Gold jumps back everything sets back to the way it was supposed to be and then of course Bruce Wayne or I'm sorry Booster Gold reveals everything to Bruce and says hey look here's what I did and here's how I screwed up and and so on and so forth but it's kind of cool here because this is designed to do two things when you expect and one you don't expect the one you expect is it basically just kind of shows Booster Gold despite his best intentions usually ends up screwing things up Booster Gold tries to do the right thing and ends up doing all the wrong things instead but to me and I think I don't know if this was Tom Kings intention but to me this clarifies the events of Flashpoint and what dr. Manhattan did at the outset people will look at this and they will say okay how can booster gold travel back in time and allow Bruce Wayne's parents to survive and then travel back in time again and allow them to die and things go right back to the way they were before like flashpoint showed us if you go into the past and you screw things up like you'll change the future but when you go into the past and you try to fix them the future will still be different originally like from the from the way it was supposed to go because the very fact that you traveled into the past changed how the future is gonna turn out like you you've altered the course of the future so you can never make it exactly the way we were supposed to be you've altered the direction things are gonna go alright here's why I think this works if you look at flashpoint for the way it was originally written that logic is sound the way that you think about that is 100% correct it is absolutely accurate but what DC we worth has said is that when Barry Allen went into the past and saved his mom's life and then initiated the flashpoint universe and then went back in time after realizing that his mom has to die things were supposed to go back to normal nothing was supposed to change but dr. Manhattan changed it and so this fits in perfectly with that because what it basically says is like that can happen someone can go into the past they can change things realize that what they changed was wrong go back to the past again to set them back to rights and everything will be okay everything will be fine it's the fact that dr. Manhattan changed things due to flashpoint that's what really throws that throws a wrench in the works that's why everything seems so different now than the way it was originally supposed to be before cooler before new 52 happen before the events of Flashpoint took place so I wanted to throw that out there because to me it kind of it works I think it works really really well I think it actually fits in perfectly I think that was probably one of the reasons why Tom Kane may have done it like this is so that in future stories when the whole DC thing gets lined out we get that huge explanation from dr. Manhattan about what he did why he did it and so on and so forth and even if things don't go back to normal this will fit in very nicely with that it'll fit in nice and snug with everything that's been done so far and it won't really stand out and it won't really you know be out of place but without being said guys we're gonna go and bring this video to an end if you are new here to come as explained to make sure you guys are the sub button to become part of the Rob core if you guys enjoy this video make sure you drop a like and I will catch you all later peace [Music] you

Channel: Comics Explained

Views: 1,032,507

Rating: 4.5977621 out of 5

Keywords: comicsexplained, marvelexplained, fluidicbeats, Comics, Comic Books, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, The Joker, The Riddler, Catwoman, Married, Proposal, Justice League, Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle, Bane, Villains, Gotham, Gotham Girl, Batman Rebirth, DC Rebirth, DC Universe, The Button, Robin, Nightwing, Dick Grayson, Damian Wayne, Detective Comics, I Am Suicide, I Am Bane, I Am Gotham, Rules Of Engagement, War Of jokes And Riddles

Id: 9CDZaNiKOIk

Length: 206min 17sec (12377 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 13 2018