Comic review: Batman #43- Starring Bad Haircut Batman

Writer: Scott Snyder
Art: Greg Capullo
Publisher: DC
Released: 12th August 2015



Ah Batman, my old childhood friend, it’s been so long. How have you been buddy? I haven’t read about your adventures since the Joker was messing around with your mate’s faces. That little event ended with a whimper, with the realisation that the Joker was, well, just joking, but how have you been? Seriously, you tireless black uniformed upholder of the corporate/statist totalitarian status quo, how have you been my old bat mate?

Check out that haircut on the new Batman

Okay, I’ll stop being silly. I haven’t read the main Batman title for a while. I stopped because it wasn’t doing anything. It was neither hot, nor cold. It was lukewarm, leaving me feeling nonplussed and a little bit wet.

I picked up this issue just to see if it was doing anything that resonates with contemporary concerns, and in short, off the Bat (gettit?) it ain’t doing any of that. Oh crap, come on Scott mate. At least try.

So what is it doing?

It’s doing character stuff. Here’s the story- Bruce Wayne died, came back to life (as he always does) but this time he’s come back with memory loss, and the trauma that made him Batman in the first place didn’t happen, at least in his mind.

The abbreviated impact of this memory loss basically means that Batman is now Commissioner Gordon with a daft haircut, and Bruce Wayne is just plain old Bruce Wayne, a bit of a drip hanging out with his girlfriend and going to charity events.

The gist of the action in Batman #43 is that there’s a new villain in town (Mr. Bloom) and he has Gordon/Bad Haircut Batman trapped in a hot box. He’s going to kill him, but probably not. Plus, he’s messing around with established villains like Penguin, and I guess we need Bruce to snap back into being Batman again to sort out these two problems.

So, it’s a character book. It’s a book that is looking into the psychological reasons behind why Bruce became Batman. There is no connection to any real world concerns of 2015, and the very fact that the villain is a drug pusher means that it’s supporting the current situation in western countries where governments openly declare that they own our bodies, and can legally lock us up and ruin our lives if we partake in a substance that they do not want us to partake in.

Drug laws create crime. Drug laws create criminals, because of supply (dealers) and demand (users). Governments love prohibition, because prohibition means control, and that’s what governments want. They want control, and because of the drug laws being the way that they are, that’s exactly what they have right now.

Superman is concerned, and not just about the haircut.

Batman #43 does not question contemporary drug laws that have destroyed the lives and families of millions of people. It does not question whether or not government owns your body, and thus has the right to tell you what you can and cannot do with it. Instead, it reinforces the status quo, portraying drug dealers as evil sociopathic villains, and the cops as heroic, morally upstanding heroes. In that sense, it’s a piece of crap that needs to be flung in the nearest bin, as it pushes a lie, and endorses human enslavement to a centralised control system.

Get the book if you don’t care about human slavery to centralised control systems. Get it if you want to read about the psychological motivations of Bruce, psychological motivations that have been looked at in so much detail already that there’s a veritable library of it out there if you want to spend your life studying the fictional brain of a man dressed up as a Bat.

Get the book if you read this review and it annoys you. Get the book if you just want to chill out, forget reality and read a stupid, childish comic book that supports everything that is wrong about the world as it is today.

I’ll be the weird guy, and I’ll dip in, and dip straight out again. The water is still lukewarm in Batman. It’s not saying anything, and it’s not even trying to say anything either. I can’t be bothered with that, sorry, but I have better things to do with my time.


Rating: 5/10 (Another look into the mind of Bruce, yawn.)