The Renegade Robins Club is going right into another event! (The Bat-Books at the time were overdoing it a bit with the events, so most of Stephanie Brown’s appearances at this point in the chronology are tied into this stuff!) Bruce Wayne is falsely accused of murder, which is really going to complicate the whole vigilante thing!
This was one of the first stories I remember reading as a kid - they had loose floppies at my library, and I read a couple every now and then. (I remember reading a No Man’s Land issue with Batman and Superman a few years earlier, but this event felt darker and more “real”, which is fascinating given how stylized the art by Steve Lieber actually was).
Okay, @RenegadeRobinsClub, it’s Spring Break, so maybe I’ll have time to do more with this discussion than set it and forget it.
We’re on Week 4, and we’ve seen Stephanie Brown hanging out in the issues of Robin and Birds of Prey. (It’s about time she expanded her horizons!)
This story is not the first time that Bruce Wayne has ended up in legal trouble, of course. The first time we see this premise is in “The People vs. Batman” from Batman #7 (1941).
Of course, this story is also the one in which Commissioner Gordon decides to deputize a costumed vigilante with a 12-year-old sidekick…
And Batman wouldn’t lose that status until the early 1980s under Mayor Hamilton Hill…
Yeah, but it’s an important shift, nevertheless. It established Batman as more of a Sherlock than a Shadow, thus allowing him to be a proper superhero.
@RenegadeRobinsClub, we’ve reached the final week, so if anyone has a summary statement to make about this event, let’s hear it!
(My own opinion is that it goes on a bit too long and isn’t all that satisfying in its conclusion, but that’s a fairly common complaint I have with Batman events.)
I think the problem is that they had real disagreement in the writer’s room. There are claims that the true culprit wasn’t decided until after the big planning meeting, and the distribution of plotlines was very poorly done. And there’s some really bizarre time-wasting arcs in the middle that aren’t bad, but completely unnecessary for the overall storyline. And the overall storyline, while very psychologically and relationally compelling, does not justify the kind of “new status quo” that led to the strange story arcs in the middle.
I’m a HUGE fan of Sasha Bordeaux - Tec 767 is one of the very first comics I remember ever reading at the library, and I still think it’s deeply compelling. I think the Sasha storyline is very cool, though I think her stuff in Checkmate is much better overall - but it does get drawn out very, very far. I also think that Rucka’s characterization of Bruce is kind of ridiculously dysfunctional - his Bruce really isn’t that much fun to read about (perhaps ironic given my love of Tom King’s Bruce ).
I still think that two things really stick out as awesome from this event. First - the psychological breakdown of Bruce, his struggles with his identity and the Batfamily’s struggles with his possible guilt. Second - Sasha - I think she’s a really fun character, with a really fun “what if Wayne Enterprises got sick of Bruce’s antics and stuck him with a bodyguard” thought experiment hook. I wish she were as beloved as other characters Rucka had an imprint on, but sadly, she is pretty much completely forgotten today, even though she is back in continuity after Rucka’s Wonder Woman run.
