I liked their dynamic as well. Also while reading this and it having been my first time with most the tie-ins, it felt very disjointed to me and hopping around. I thought the same thing about Freeze with the Annual issue and there were a few others as well.
Yeah, Syaf did the art on Batgirl for a little while, then Ed Benes got on for a hot minute and then I believe the rest of Gail’s run was done by another artist named Daniel Samprie or something like that. Honestly I think Benes did the best stuff of her run.
Also, you won’t get to see Syaf’s art a lot nowadays, because he was pretty much blacklisted from the industry after putting in hidden messages of antisemitic and anti-christian phrases from his native country of Indonesia in X-Men Gold #1.
I mean, none of the Talons really can be killed, that’s kind of their thing. In terms of coming back, I don’t think any of the Talons outside of Strix, William Cobb and Lincoln March ever come back after this event.
Wanna know the wild part? That’s actually a bit of a remake of some Pre-Crisis Batman, namely World’s Finest #223 by Bob Haney.
I’m sad it’s not on here, because it sounds buck-wild.
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Bob Haney’s work on World’s Finest and Brave and the Bold tended to end up on Earth-B, aka DC’s dumping ground for stories that made flagrant continuity errors:
https://therealbatmanchronologyproject.com/blog/the-continuity-history-of-earth-b/
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The whole Illuminati/cult type villains is a great villain for Batman. It’s super creepy how there has been this ancient villain hiding in the shadows watching Batman and secretly pulling the strings.I also love how nightwing is incorporated into it. The book has a dark tone and I love it. The whole story issues 1-11 are flawless and in my opinion a top 5 Batman story of all time. And they absolutely ■■■■ on this amazing story in the animated film Batman vs Robin. Awful movie.
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I’m interested to hear your thoughts once you’ve finished the arc. (And don’t leave out the Batman Annual that rewrites Mr. Freeze’s backstory!)
Yes, it was. (Hence why I’ve moved the conversation to that thread.) This story is heavily influenced by the original 1970s Thomas Wayne Jr. arc:
As this article indicates, Grant Morrison was already hinting that he might bring the character back into mainstream continuity. And here’s where you’re going to accuse me of being wildly inconsistent, because I wouldn’t have minded MORRISON doing it. Why? Because Morrison and Snyder were doing two very different things in their respective runs:
- Morrison’s run was all about declaring everything in Batman’s history, no matter how absurd or obscure, as canon. He leaned into the ridiculous nature of the character and his universe. By his second issue, he had Batman fighting ninja man-bats in a room full of onomatopoeia-covered pop art, a re-canonization of the twist ending of Son of the Demon, and a flashback to Bruce’s Aunt Agatha from a forgotten 1955 Batman issue. A long-lost brother would feel no more out of place in Morrison’s version than Bat-Mite did.
- Snyder’s run starts off feeling very much like Batman: The Animated Series meets Se7en. His previous work on Detective Comics had echoed Year One not only in story, but in style and tone. The vibe from the start was dark, gritty, and downright gruesome. It’s all too self-serious for such a silly concept as Thomas Wayne Junior. On top of that, Snyder was writing a reboot of the universe. It’s like the polar opposite of Morrison’s “everything counts” approach, since (at least in theory) nothing counts anymore unless Snyder says so. So why oh why did he decide that one of the most ridiculous bits of Bronze Age canon needed to be in this streamlined, new-reader-friendly universe?! Leave that nonsense to Grant.
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I mean…you’re not wrong. But part of me can’t help but admire the sheer lunacy and balls of it, you know?
I’d say it’s probably the weakest element of the story. I think it says something that of all the places where the Court has been adapted into other media (Gotham, Young Justice: Outsiders, Batman Vs Robin and the upcoming Gotham Knights), they tend to leave out Batman’s crazy possibly older brother.
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That…was a lot to process. So, my thoughts on the whole of that (the first two trade volumes, basically) was that it started promising and then just descended into outright madness.
For as much as they were built up as these crazy powerful immortal assassins the Talons didn’t put up much of a fight. Although by that point I was pretty much skimming to get it over with.
The Thomas Wayne Jr. thing just read like a bunch of action movie tropes thrown at a dart board. It reminded me a lot of the Schwarzenegger movie Commando. I had kind of checked out at that point and had to force myself to keep reading.
The next two stories felt like filler. The one with Alfred’s father seemed to just kind of be additional justification for Bruce’s suspicion of the Court, and adding them into his backstory with them causing the car crash that ended his mother’s pregnancy or whatever.
The story with the welder was kind of a breath of fresh air for being more slice-of-life and not having anything to do with the Court of Owls. But why do I feel this is yet another probably sidekick? Characters that aren’t gonna come back don’t get that much spotlight.
The Mr. Freeze one feels like it’s a lazy way to add a twist/drama. “Oh, that was never your wife”. Okay, sure. I’m not a fan of him being a Waynetech employee and Bruce being part of him becoming Mr. Freeze. Not everyone has to be connected, Scott!
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Welcome to the world of Scott Snyder’s Batman, where you think at the beginning of an arc, “Hey, this isn’t half bad,” and then by the end, you’re saying, “What did I just read?”
Speaking of which, it looks like the Dick Grayson Club covered the next arc:
I feel like I’m going down a rabbit hole here, and for the time being I think I want to jump down the Jack Kirby New Gods rabbit hole instead. I read his first issue of Jimmy Olsen and I’m dying to see what happens next. I think I need some Silver Age weirdness right now.
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Yeah, near the end you did kind of get the Aliens effect of “you beat one once and it was a struggle, now you’re fending off dozens of 'em!” It might help to try some of the other tie-in books that were going on with this part of the story called “Night of the Owls,” where you see other members of the Bat-Family deal with them in interesting ways. At the top of the page for this is the DCU Storyline Collection for it presented in chronological order, but here it is again.
I also really enjoyed #12. Fun fact – the artist of that issue, Becky Cloonan, was the first female artist on the Batman book.
And you’d be right in that Harper does become a sidekick. WOB and Renegade Robins are actually covering the story where it happens, the weekly event Batman Eternal. And while she was kind of off the playing field for a couple of years during Rebirth (she showed up a couple of times, but as a civilian), she did recently put the suit back on for the Punchline one-shot and James Tynion has said she will play a role in his run moving forward.
Yeah, I can’t say I hated the twist, but I was never in love with it either. To his credit, Snyder did put Freeze’s original origin back during his All-Star Batman run.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! 
…Also, on a semi-related note, did you recently change your name? Because I would think I would have noticed sooner that @AlexanderKnox and @KingOfTheWickerPeople were talking to each other. 
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So, to address your comments (without quotes, because I’m a little lazy after work):
I’m a little discouraged on reading much further within this arc, even among characters I really like. I get that New 52 was a reboot of sorts but the whole reshuffling of the Bat-Family still kinda rubs me the wrong way (I miss Cass and Steph)- I’ve expressed elsewhere before how overwhelming I find the number of current Bat-Family members and per the “Dick was being groomed to be a Talon” I’m not thrilled with the turns they’ve taken. Ultimately I had two motives for reading the Owls arc: they’re apparently going to be featured prominently in the upcoming Gotham Knights game, and I ended up with all of Snyder’s New 52 run as part of an ebay lot I purchased.
I’m familiar with Cloonan through her work on Dark Horse’s Conan: Queen of the Black Coast. I feel her style fits Batman a lot more than Conan (I’m always gonna be partial to that old-school Savage Sword style). I’d be interested in seeing a full arc with her art, I tend to like what highly stylized artists like Mignola and Wagner have done.
Granted, I wasn’t saying I’m a big fan of the character as she is in the story. It seems like since Babs ditched the Oracle identity (a move I’ve never been a fan of- I feel like even if she has the ability to walk again, Barbara would see the value in providing information, cybersecurity and technical knowledge, especially in today’s world) Bruce is just letting the security breaches happen left and right.
I mean, I felt the whole Freeze story was simultaneously throwaway, and an unnecessary change that didn’t really add anything to Freeze.
And no, this has always been my name since I joined DCU (in March, I think?). I think it suited me, Batman 89 is the earliest Batman I remember- it came out when I was a year old and I can’t remember not being obsessed with it as a kid.
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I get what you mean about the changes rubbing off the wrong way. I will say that in terms of what this story does with Dick, the tie-ins to Night of the Owls in Nightwing explains it a lot better, to the point where it doesn’t feel that intrusive to his original origin. Also, if you miss Steph and Cass, I would definitely recommend checking out Batman Eternal and then Batman & Robin Eternal, since both books reintroduce the characters back into the New 52 continuity.
I’d love to see Cloonan do more with Batman, I agree. She did the art for a story with Warren Ellis for Detective Comics #1000, but outside of that, she’s actually done more as a writer, co-writing with Brandon Fletcher on the Gotham Academy series.
I see what you mean with Barbara, though I feel like she can do that as Batgirl as well. Stuff like the Arkham Knight: A Matter of Family DLC as well as what we’ll likely see in Gotham Knights can definitely show that.
That’s funny, I was the same age as you when ‘89 came out. It was my favorite as a kid, nearly wore out the videotape watching that over and over as a kid, much to my parents’ chagrin, I’m sure. 
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I think part of the problem is, I was away for so long, and I didn’t see the changes happen gradually. I’m getting them all at once. It’s almost less jarring to jump into a title I have no real prior experience with like I did with Aquaman and Power Girl earlier this year. The status quo can’t stay the same forever, obviously, but I still don’t agree with a lot of what’s been done. From what I’ve read so far, it seems like it’s been a rough decade for my favorite heroes (Dick and Wally).
Matter of Family was really good (far better than most of Arkham Knight’s story, to be honest). My thing is, when I started reading comics, Barbara was always Batgirl past tense. To me her going back to being Batgirl is like 20-something Dick going back to being Robin or something. It just feels like a step backwards. But it’s been canon for years, so what does my opinion matter?
And yeah, I had the tape up until I got rid of all my VHS. Somehow it never wore out. I think we all remember the Diet Coke commercial with Alfred.