Hello and welcome to the World of Bats, the Batman Book Club!
This week we’re continuing our look at the more horror-themed books within the Batman world and looking at “The Death of the Family,” written by Scott Snyder and drawn by Greg Capullo!
This will be the current reading from 2021-10-09T05:00:00Z → 2021-10-15T05:00:00Z, but if you’re getting some extreme facial surgery, you can always come back and share your thoughts with us!
Looking forward to discussing this one with you guys!
I’ll once again grab my comments from another post, this time one from the Dick Grayson Fan Club:
To elaborate, I find all of the “cutting off and reattaching Joker’s face” stuff from the New 52 to be utterly inane, and I remember being really ticked off when it appeared that the Joker had done the same to the Bat-Family, but the ending of the story was fairly satisfying. I generally like Snyder’s work with the Joker (and Red Hood One) more than I like his non-Joker stories.
I have some mixed feelings about this one. The whole Joker having his face cut off and wearing it like a mask doesn’t work for me. I also didn’t like how Batman tried to handle it all himself and he came across as a jerk the way he dismissed the family’s concerns about their identities (I think that was intentional, though). The ongoing metaphor of Batman being king of Gotham and Joker being his court jester also didn’t quite work for me; maybe it was a little too meta.
On the other side, the idea that Joker doesn’t care who Batman is under the cowl totally works and feels true to the character. It was also nice to see Batman learn to trust his Bat Family at the end, but it might have been too late as they may no longer trust him. I agree with @AlexanderKnox it stuck the landing.
