[World of Bats} Batman Book Club: Legends of the Dark Knight-Issues 1-5 Shaman

@AlexanderKnox, Once again great summary. :clap::+1: Yeah Bruce definitely made a part fowl by tell the story to Spurlock.
I too love how O’Neil incorporates events of Year One.
Also thanks for including the fun facts. Looks around to make sure @HubCityQuestions isn’t around I have never read a stand alone Question comic so I had no Idea about that one. Really looking forward to your next post.

I was reading the '86 Question series a little while back, and it took me completely off guard to see Santa Prisca, because I thought it had been created for Bane’s origin.

Great series, though. Can’t recommend it enough. We’re missing the six Quarterly issues from the early '90s, but we’ve got the whole monthly run, all the annuals, the Question Returns oneshot from '96, and, for what it’s worth, the Blackest Night tie-in oneshot that billed itself as the 37th issue of the original series. It’s similar in style to O’Neil’s Batman work, but substantially darker, almost verging on black comedy in a few places (and with very minimal superpowers or costumes other than the Question himself and one or two villains). On the other hand, it does have more of a sense of humor, so it’s not completely depressing.

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Awesome I will check it out! Thanks you :slight_smile:

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“Shaman Book Three” by Dennis O’Neil: https://www.dcuniverse.com/comics/book/batman-legends-of-the-dark-knight-1989-3/93973c06-d732-4642-92a1-e12fe9bd02d1

Leaving the body of Bennet behind, Bruce returns to the ballroom with Spurlock’s Alaskan Indian exhibit and discovers that the bat mask and bow are missing. Someone in the dark fires an arrow at him (Ollie, is that you?), and as he catches it, a police officer points a gun at him and threatens to blow him to a Mark Waid/Alex Ross comic. The officer thinks that Bruce is the killer, but Wayne helpfully points out that Bennet was killed with a lance, not an arrow. The housekeepers provide Bruce with an alibi, and the officer sheepishly asks for a statement. Once Bruce gets back to the limo, Alfred implies that the officer wasn’t so bright, but Bruce takes up for him, showing that Batman is just as much an enabler for the GCPD’s incompetence as they are for his vigilantism. He then tells Alfred to book a trip to Alaska and gets annoyed that the butler isn’t writing down his orders. Alfred replies with more snark, as he is wont to do.

Bruce’s next stop is the Gotham Athletic Club, where he runs into banker and real estate investor Carl Fisk, who invites Bruce to a social gathering that night. Bruce declines, and when Carl suggests that he’ll be cuddling up with a warm body instead, we get a hard cut to Batman freezing on top of a construction site that night. rimshot (At least he doesn’t have another bladder spasm, as far as we know.) He has been stalking Grandy Jimenez (one of the men who was allegedly trying to kill Jimmy Wong at the hospital), who is now enjoying a nice, warm barrel fire below. Batman leaps down to interrupt a drug deal and starts kicking everyone in sight (except for one guy who decides to opt out of the deal and walk away–Batman punches him instead). Batman allows them to start firing their guns into the darkness and then delivers a judo chop to one of the men. Now it’s just Bats and Grandy (or so it seems), and Batman implies that he’s going to kill Jimenez if he doesn’t squeal.

Too bad Batman was too distracted to see the shadowy figure lugging a bag of dry cement at him from behind. Once he is knocked down, the other criminals pop back up to praise Chubala and kick Batman while he’s down. He plays possum as they take him up to a high level on the unfinished building, but he resumes his kicking habit when they try to throw him off. But again, he is hit from behind, this time with an arrow fired by a man wearing the stolen bat mask. This man tackles him off the side and tries to stab Batman’s hand once the Caped Crusader tries to halt his fall. Batman flips backward and grabs onto a nearby steel cable. He has to slide down the cable to avoid getting shot, using (and ruining) his cape to prevent his hands from being harmed from the friction. Batman decides he’s had enough and flees.

Back in the cave, Bruce brags on the cape for protecting him from both the arrow and the cable, but Alfred fails to share in his enthusiasm. He’s also quick to point out that the human sacrifices started before Bruce funded Spurlock’s expedition, seemingly determined to shoot down Bruce’s only lead. Bruce wants to talk to Spurlock anyway, but after numerous injuries and 48 hours without sleep, he’s in no condition to do so. When he finally gets to speak to the anthropologist, he claims that his injuries were caused by tennis. Sprulock feigns sympathy, and Bruce changes the subject to Chubala (offering the flimsy explanation that Alfred’s niece–Daphne from the late 60s Batman comics, I’d like to imagine–is doing a report). Spurlock informs him that Chubala is a vulture-esque deity in the Santa Priscan religion who is big on human sacrifice. If you fail to cough up enough bodies for him, he condemns you to an eternity of rats eating you from within your stomach, but if you please him, you get to enjoy nonexistence after you die. Surprisingly, the faith hasn’t really caught on outside of Santa Prisca! He further explains that a priest becomes Chubala’s avatar during sacrifice ceremonies, as seen at the beginning of Book Two.

Bruce asks if similar beliefs exist among the Alaskan natives, but as Spurlock begins rolling his eyes at the question, an arrow hits the anthropologist in the back. No time for conflating the belief systems of wildly divergent cultures now, Bruce: there’s a guy in the shaman mask hanging out in a tree above you! The man gets away, leaving Bruce to fume about his own inability to stop a murder in broad daylight. Back at home, Bruce is feeling utterly outclassed, but instead of reaching for Joe Chill’s gun in the nearby drawer (he won’t get that desperate for another year), he listens to Alfred’s advice to cool it for a moment and think about the clues he has so far. Bruce decides that if he fails this case, he will retire the cape and cowl, but first, he’s taking that trip back to Alaska. Alfred can’t decide if he’s rooting for Bruce to succeed or fail, but since he’s being a total enabler of Bruce’s bat-scapades in this situation, he has little room to talk.

Bruce is surprised at how much Otter Ridge has changed since he was last there, and he is distraught to see that the old shaman who saved his life has stooped to panhandling for the influx of white tourists. Bruce goes to speak to the man’s granddaughter, but she greets him with a slap worthy of Robin’s face. Bruce asks why, and she explains that Spurlock ruined the place by convincing the tribe to modernize and by trading them booze and drugs for tribal secrets. She even believes that the anthropologist used a truth drug on the old man and then stole his shaman paraphernalia, and the shame has caused her grandfather to become a drunk. Bruce gets hit with a heavy dose of white guilt as they drive toward a ski lodge, and then the truck they’re in also gets hit–by an oncoming car. They go careening off the side of the road and plunge through the icy top layer of a lake below. I’d call it a cliffhanger, but they technically fell off the cliff…

This issue keeps up the intrigue by killing off the last surviving suspect from the previous issue (while setting up another suspect, perhaps). It also offers some social commentary on cultural erasure that wouldn’t be out of place in O’Neil’s classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow run.

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This was a very unique take on Year One and I really enjoyed it. I’m really enjoying these bookclubs (trying to keep up with them all, lol) as it allows me to have a much more diverse style that I’ve read. I haven’t really read a solid detective comic in a bit and this was a solid one. I definitely agree that it almost brought more enjoyment then throwing in some huge characters and a big fight. I’m not great at summaries of my opinions but I will continue to enjoy, read and comment every now and then. This community rocks!

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@jnlynn11, glad you liked it :slight_smile: no worries I wanted this to be an easy going book club, that’s why I gave it 10 days and didn’t have a particular set of questions just share your thoughts.

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@AlexanderKnox, Great job I feel like I could just read you comments and not even read the comic :). The panel with Bruce claiming his injuries is due to tennis is hilarious LOL.

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Just finished it tonight and overall enjoyed it – while I agree with someone who said that some aspects of the mystery didn’t fully connect with me, the characters and the overall mood (especially how it’s drawn) makes up for it.

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“Shaman Book Four” by Dennis O’Neil: https://www.dcuniverse.com/comics/book/batman-legends-of-the-dark-knight-1989-4/ff324cd9-cbd1-40e1-b523-a525bd1ea8a5

We begin with a cheat worthy of an old movie serial: Bruce had escaped the truck right before it fell into the lake. Not that it matters, since he quickly dives into the freezing water to rescue the shaman and his granddaughter. Bruce complains about the cold as he did in the first issue, but no Snow Chill this time. Luckily, he has the Batsuit stored in a secret compartment of his suitcase, so he’s able to retrieve a butane lighter from his utility belt. (One wonders why he didn’t just grab the Hypothermia Repellent Bat Spray instead.) He calls upon something that Doggett the bounty hunter had taught him: look under big rocks for brush to burn. By the extremely tiny fire, Bruce wraps the woman in his cape while the shaman insists that he “can warm from the inside.” (Presumably, he rubs his chest, knowing that his arms will take care of themselves.)

The shaman cannot do anything for his granddaughter, though: he has lost his healing powers along with his dignity. He instead expects Bruce to conduct the healing ceremony from memory while wearing his costume’s cowl instead of the stolen shaman bat mask. Faster than you can say “White Savior Narrative,” Bruce is appropriating Indian culture with full approval from the old man because of “the mark in your eyes.” Batman kinda bombs at telling the story, and he laments that, unlike his father, he’s no doctor. (He will later decide that he actually is a surgeon, and that mud pits are operating tables.) Still, she is able to survive the night and receive proper treatment at a hospital. Bruce decides that he will never speak of this incident (not even in an awkward, shirtless, hairy-armed conversation with the reader).

At the hospital, the granddaughter informs Bruce that the villainous Thomas Woodley hadn’t died after all, but had been recovering right beside him when the shaman had healed Bruce. The world’s greatest detective speculates that Woodley and Spurlock had been working together in a nefarious scheme to exploit the region, but after a falling-out, Woodley had followed Spurlock to Gotham and killed him with the native Alaskan weapons on display (supposedly because he couldn’t find someone to sell him a gun in Gotham…riiiiight…). The granddaughter states that Woodley has faith in the shaman mask and intends to return it to Otter Ridge–once he kills Bruce for being connected to Spurlock, of course. She also lets Bruce know that she won’t out him as the Batman, thus starting a long trend of women burdened with his secret identity. Bruce gives a million-dollar check to cover the hospital costs, which is either a really generous gesture or a sign that he’s utterly out of touch.

The shaman starts dancing for dollars again, and while he’s too proud to accept Bruce’s charity, he is willing to tell him another bat story for a small fee of $100. (Serves Bruce right for swindling Gordon out of $5 earlier.) Apparently, the bat had taken the illness from the raven and redirected it toward the vulture’s (Chubala’s?) nest instead. He then tells Bruce to “wear the mask” and “become the mask,” but that crossover with Dark Horse won’t happen for another 10 years. That mantra helps Bruce to connect some dots, so he gives the old man some more money before hopping on a plane and reading some files Alfred collected for him. He wonders if witnessing the death of his parents gave him “the mark” the shaman had mentioned. Bruce decides to jump straight into Batman-ing as soon as he gets back to Gotham, and he doesn’t think much of it when Alfred doesn’t answer the phone…

As Batman engages in some breaking and entering, he notices a copy of Winnie the Pooh among some banking law books, and he reflects on some advice given to him by his mentor, Harvey Harris, whom long-time fans would know as the detective from the bizarre early Silver Age story where a teenage Bruce Wayne dressed up in the first Robin costume (Detective Comics #226, later recounted in Untold Legend of the Batman #1), but contemporary fans would have met the post-Crisis Harris in 1989’s Detective Comics Annual #2. Anyway, the Milne book is a switch that causes the bookcase to reveal a secret room full of incriminating evidence, and Bruce decides that he’ll pick a better fake book if he ever employs the same gimmick in Wayne Manor. Then Batman goes to great effort to get the attention of the security guards outside, eventually resorting to tossing a Christmas tree out the window. And now that they’ve seen him, he scares them off.

After terrorizing Bernie and Peaches (the couple who caused the car accident in Alaska) with a dead bat in a box, Bruce dons a mask and a wig to pose as a security adviser for the building that he had broken into the previous night. He sneaks back into the secret room and sabotages a gun, bulletproof vest, and Chubala costume before working in his own Bat Spray pun to the guards he had scared earlier. Alfred still isn’t answering the phone, but Bruce thinks that he may be visiting church since it’s Christmas Eve, which just leads to Bruce feeling sorry for himself again as he watches parents looking after their caroling children and thinks about what he used to do with his parents at this time of year instead of his current hobby of hanging out on cold, cold rooftops.

Meanwhile, poor Alfred is really tied up in a chair while a man in the shaman bat mask threatens him with a knife and rambles on about how he’s been watching Bruce doing his Batman thing for a month now. It’s Woodley, and he waits by the door to stab Bruce, who has just arrived back at the manor. TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH! SAME BAT-TIME, SAME BAT-COMIC!

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“Shaman Book Five” by Dennis O’Neil:

Bruce notices the lack of tracks on the snow, so he decides to materialize from the banister inside the house and knock Thomas Woodley outside. After several failed attempts to knock the knife out of Woodley’s hand (and narrowly avoiding being sliced open thanks to the padded costume that he had been wearing as part of his security adviser disguise), he breaks the villain’s arm, and Woodley flees into the nearby woods. Bruce tries to get Alfred to take the Rolls-Royce (not to be confused with the Jaguar or “the other car”) and flee town, but Pennyworth refuses to run. Bruce relents and lets Alfred know that Carl Fisk from the third issue was the guy with the Chubala costume. As he leaves the manor, Batman begins slapping himself in the forehead for having missed the obvious clues that had pointed to Fisk’s connections with Santa Priscan drug dealers in Gotham, whom Fisk had kept in line with the Chabala sacrifices.

Fisk is planning to perform one such sacrifice at midnight, and Batman determines that it must be happening in an abandoned building on the riverfront. Right before Fisk-Chubala can stab the man chosen for the sacrifice, Batman detonates one of the tiny explosives that he had planted in the Chubala costume during his second trip to Fisk’s secret room behind the bookshelf. Bruce then starts telling the gathered cult members that Chubala is pretty much a loser among the pantheon, and since he has made Fisk look weak, the cult is willing to hear him out. Batman continues detonating the explosives while calling on the Chubala priest (Fisk) to put up a fight, and once Fisk is on his knees from his injuries, Batman takes the ceremonial blade and cuts Fisk with it (through the bulletproof vest, which Bruce had damaged with acid on that same trip to the secret room) to demonstrate that he is a mere mortal.

Fisk’s last ploy, pulling out his pistol, doesn’t go well because Batman had put blanks in the gun, and he is left begging for mercy. The cult members flee in terror, and Batman frees the would-be sacrifice and tells him to deliver a message to the police. Batman then turns to Fisk and demands that he record a confession and reveal the location of the drugs he’s selling. Bruce isn’t moved by Fisk’s plea that he would have become poor if he hadn’t taken up this venture, and the caped crusader leaves Fisk tied to another lamppost with a note that reads, “Merry Xmas, Capt Gordon.” Speaking of Gordon, he now knows where to find the drugs thanks to a little bird…er, a little bat who told him. Back at the cave, Bruce gets spooked out when he discovers that Fisk’s gun had real bullets in it after all. Could it be magic? Nah, Bruce doesn’t believe in that stuff, remember? (Despite living in the DC universe, but I digress.)

Batman goes out into the woods near his home and finds the tracks and blood trail left by Woodley. He calls out and tells Woodley that he will turn him over to the tribal authorities instead of the white man’s legal system. A barely-alive Woodley emerges and tosses Batman the shaman mask, having decided that Bruce is more worthy of it than he is. It just so happens that he had fallen on his own knife during their previous struggle, so he’s not long for this world. Bruce had frequently said that the cold was an enemy over the last four issues, but Woodley refutes this notion and states that the cold is his friend. Bruce asks if there’s anything he can do for him, and the dying Woodley asks to hear a story. Bruce says that the man wouldn’t really want to hear one of his stories since he has embraced the cold (which Bruce seems to take as a metaphor for villainy), so he simply wishes him to rest in peace instead.

In the epilogue, Bruce is flying in a Wayne Enterprises jet to return Woodley’s body and the artifacts to Alaska. The pilot tries to tell a racist joke about Indians, but Bruce stares him down into silence. Unfortunately, Bruce arrives a week after the death of the tribal shaman, He tries to make amends with the granddaughter by saying that he told the press that Spurlock had made up the bat myth, but she tells him that it’s too late to fix it. She also pushes off his advances, telling him that he’s not the type who will ever get to settle down and have a family. Rather, he either needs to get over the “mark” he received as a child or to give into it and use it for good. He remarks that he will have to wear a mask, and she reiterates her grandfather’s words about becoming the mask. Speaking of masks, he tries to return the shaman bat mask, but she tells him to keep it.

Cue a montage of the shaman mask opening to reveal the human mask beneath, which then slips over the Batman cowl. But since that’s all heady and overly symbolic, we get two more panels to round out the story: Batman places the shaman mask in a glass case in the Batcave, and he hangs out on a gargoyle as the narrator reminds us of the ending to the bat myth that appeared in the fourth issue. That’s the end of the story, but fret not: BATMAN WILL RETURN IN “GOTHIC” BY GRANT MORRISON (kinda a test run for Batman RIP, in retrospect).

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Oops. I left out the link-of-convenience from that last post: https://www.dcuniverse.com/comics/book/batman-legends-of-the-dark-knight-1989-5/872099e4-e58f-4b3c-9827-5b6e6a2bc507

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Jay_Kay Happy to hear that you enjoyed it overall. “aspects of the mystery didn’t fully connect with me” are you referring to the Santa Priscans story that was used? I feel that was used as misdirection on purpose.

Probably, and yeah, O’Neil likely intended that to be a red herring. I think it also didn’t help that having a day or two in gaps of reading and having more or less normal people, it sometimes took a second to remember who the suspects were.

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@Jay_kay, Yeah gaps in reading will make you forget for sure. Every time I pick up a new Doomsday Clock issue I have to go back and reread the last one LOL. I liked the misdirection it kept me guessing and had the wheels spinning.

@AlexanderKnox, once again great summery of the story. I will say you have some opinions that I did not look at with the same view point. In your summary of issue 3 you state: “Bruce gets hit with a heavy dose of white guilt” as a repercussion of what became of the Alaskan tribe due to his retelling of the story of the bat and funding Spurlock’s expedition. White guilt is “harm resulting from racist treatment of ethnic minorities” Bruce did not do anything that was racist. Guilt alone would have been the appropriate term. Then in your summary for issue 4 you state: “Faster than you can say “White Savior Narrative,”” in relation to Bruce preforming the healing ceremony when the Shaman states that he has lost his healing powers. I looked at that scenario as the Shaman trying to nudge Bruce on to fulfilling his purpose in life and accepting who he is meant to be. Also he just finished saving them both from drowning, would it have been better not to have saved them because he is white? Regardless though you did an excellent job summarizing this story and it is clear that you know your Batman stories with the addition of fun facts regarding other stories that have relation and tie into this one. (not tying to offend just sharing my view)

Thank you all for joining in and will have “Legends of the Dark Knight: Gothic” up tomorrow!

Late to the Party*

I loved this! Even the mystical side of it at the end had me in awe. Batman becoming who he is because of a near death experience in the mountains. That was such a stunning read.

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@DCMaster52, Howdy! So glad you enjoyed it! No worries on the timing, you can post at anytime. I really liked this story as well. Swing on by whenever you have the time, we have some cool stuff planed for this year and hope y’all dig it.

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