Peak Nightwing and just the best of crazy-ass Jason Todd
It may shock you to learn that I am a little bit of a nerd. One of the ways I fill my free time is by writing my own stories based off DC, Marvel, Doctor Who, or one of my myriad other geeky interests (not to mention my own original, terrible creations). Well the other week I was putting together a draft script for a movie that would see Red Hood going up against Nightwing, set within the (let’s face it, now defunct) Dawn of Justice-era DCEU (now Worlds of DC). I’d already read Nightwing: Better than Batman and Under the Red Hood, and figured they would be good starting points for character inspiration, but I wanted to incorporate something with a little more internal Bat-family conflict.
The following review may contain spoilers!
So I took to Google. “Graphic novels where Jason goes nuts”, “DC comics about Jason and Dick’s relationship”, “Batman books without Batman” are a few of the things I threw into the search, and happily only one of the queries returned porn (I’ll let you guess which).
Batman: Battle for the Cowl was a three issue series that ran in 2009, supported with a couple of tie-in Gotham Gazette issues included in the book, written and pencilled by Tony S. Daniel.
The story picks up after the apparent disappearance of Bruce Wayne, and in his absence Gotham has turned to anarchy. It seems obvious that Gotham needs the bat, but Dick Grayson is unwilling to give up his own identity as Nightwing to do it. Meanwhile, a crazed, gun-slinging, murdering Batman has appeared, but his arbitrary brutalisation of Gotham’s underworld only fuels the fire – not to mention besmirching the bat symbol in the worst way. So Bruce’s remaining inner circle (Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, Damian Wayne) must fight to take back Batman’s identity in… the Battle for the Cowl!
Robin War
You may recall my review of Robin War, a book which I’d picked up looking for something that would explore the relationship between the former and incumbent Robins (the bat-brothers?) as I’ve always found that dynamic quite interesting. If sibling rivalry is based off a fear of being bettered and replaced in the eyes of your parents, then nobody could feel that worse than a Robin – a mantle only held by Bruce’s trusted partner of the day, with a revolving door of others both before and after you. Way to make a guy feel special, Bruce.
Well it tuned out Robin War didn’t really dig into that too much – it was still pretty cool, but it had other ideas it wanted to explore. Really, I should have tuned to Battle for the Cowl for that purpose.
While the former Robins don’t interact a great deal directly, the way in which we see how each of them copes with Bruce’s absence isn’t something I’ve encountered before. From Dick’s identity crisis, Tim’s insecurity, Jason’s madness, Damian’s anger – Daniel paints a picture of an incredibly dysfunctional family collapsing without Bruce.
Monster of their own creation
In true superhero form, the biggest villain of this story is one of the heroes’ own creation – in this case, Jason Todd, whose cheese has firmly slipped of his cracker at this point. With Batman gone and Gotham gone to hell, Jason is the first Robin to take up the mantle of the bat. But without Bruce to keep him in check, he quickly reverts to his murdering ways, and even his bat-brother Tim Drake isn’t immune from his savagery.
Jason’s decent into madness is really what threads this book together. How each of Bruce’s remaining ‘sons’ individually handle his disappearance as both Bruce and the bat makes for an incredibly interesting scenario. When they are finally brought together, the strength of the Bat-family is put to the test in a way that we’ve not really seen before, and how each Robin approaches the other under such circumstances makes for a really cool story.
I must admit, therefore, that I found the inclusion of Squire (Beryl Hutchinson) a little left-field – she doesn’t seem to offer much to the plot aside from her motorbike, and her interactions with Damian Wayne, as humorous as they are, would have been better delivered by one of his bat-brethren. Perhaps she’s around because of something else going on in the wider comic continuity at that time, but looking at this book as a standalone, it feels like we could do without her.
Conclusion
Overall, this is a fab book for any comic fan to have on their shelves. With the main story being told in just three collected issues, this is a reasonably short read, but it packed with action and drama.
The art is brilliant, with a really cool blend of broody, powerful images of all the characters, but with occasional frames with something jarringly grotesque, mirroring Jason and Gotham’s skewed perception since Bruce’s disappearance, and their further descent into madness.
As a reader, I’m mostly familiar with New 52 and Rebirth era DC, so it was cool to explore something from a different time, and it’s certainly enticed me to have a nose around related books from this period.