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Final Thoughts on Batman: War Games
Jan. 18th, 2021 05:51 pm Brushing this place off since I haven't been using it. I just finished reading Batman: War Games, aka the infamous storyline where Spoiler dies.
-First off, this arc definitely majorly interrupts the pacing in Nightwing. I really wish I could read what Nightwing would have looked like with those 4 (or 10, counting Nightwing Year One) extra issues that got shoved into a major event.
On top of being racist, this is where War Games really starts to fall apart because it’s the first of many plotpoints that just don’t make any damn sense. For the first half or so, War Games is an arc that leans hard into the gritty, noir realism tone of 2000s Batman, which I usually like. But Black Mask, a wealthy white man, can flawlessly imitate a Black gang leader’s voice after ten minutes practice? I don’t think so. This plotpoint veers left into comic booky nonsense in a way that sharply breaks my disbelief. Black Mask has to imitate Orpheus voice, speech patterns, and accent, and not one person notices.
(Did I mention that Orpheus, Onyx, and Commissioner Akins are the only Black characters in this? Yeah, because that’s a thing. So of the 3 Black characters, one’s an antagonist at best and one gets murdered and impersonated by a white man halfway through.)
Honestly, after this, I had a hard time caring about how badly done Stephanie's torture scenes were. Not because I didn't care, but because it was pretty much standard sexualization of women in defeat that I've seen in other comics, and I felt like it was overshadowed by the literal fucking blackface in 2000-fucking-5.
3 - Related to this, the endgame of Black Mask ending up on top as chief gang leader of all of Gotham also makes no damn sense. Black Mask gets people’s trust by impersonating someone else, somehow convinces them to follow him when he reveals himself, then deliberately sends dozens of his own people to die in the Clocktower. When the Clocktower explodes he doesn’t obviously publicly survive, which to me should lead to people assuming he’s dead - again. Hardly a resume that fosters a large army of underlings.
Honestly, if I were Red Hood, I’d just shoot Black Mask and tell people I was lowering the cut taken and wouldn’t knowingly send anyone to die. That alone should give me enough clout to gain the loyalty of most of the mobs, making my rules seem pretty reasonable, no duffelbag of heads needed.
4, and I know I'm the only one who cares about this - Where the hell did the Aranas, Tarantula's gang, go? Tarantula has them in Batman #634, but then in Nightwing #99 she’s still in Gotham, working alone, with no explanation as to why. They just vanished into the ether. This really bugs me, especially since Tarantula often suffers from doing whatever the writers need her to do regardless of whether or not it makes sense (see also her appearances in Secret Six, which is incongruent with every single one of her appearances elsewhere). When we need her for War Games, she has a gang. When we need her for to call Bruce out and potentially draw parallels with Jason and Stephanie, poof, they're gone. We don't see them with her, or swearing allegiance to Black Mask - they just vanish.
5 - Almost the entirety of the epilogue, War Crimes, was unnecessary, and actively made it worse. The only things we needed to know from that was that 1. Arthur exposed Stephanie as Spoiler and Robin, 2. Arturo Rodriguez was working with Black Mask (arguably also unnecessary) 3. Leslie left Gotham and 4. Commissioner Akins was keeping his job. All of this could’ve been done in one issue, without several twists that ended in assassinating Leslie’s character for Bruce’s man pain.
the Black Mask/Joker plotline was especially dumb. It ended with both of them in the exact same places they’d been at the start of the epilogue (Joker in prison, Mask as top dog). There’s also absolutely no reason it had to have been Black Mask impersonating Bruce - this is what underlings are for, guys! What’s the point in making him head mob boss if he’s not using his underlings?
Conclusion - I actually really liked the first half, but as soon as Orpheus died it started unravelling.
-First off, this arc definitely majorly interrupts the pacing in Nightwing. I really wish I could read what Nightwing would have looked like with those 4 (or 10, counting Nightwing Year One) extra issues that got shoved into a major event.
-Second - why did nobody tell me Black Mask did blackface? No, seriously, I got all kinds of warnings about Stephanie’s death, to the point where I was expecting it to be much much more graphic and sexualized than it was, but absolutely nobody thought to mention the part where rich white boy Roman Sionis does blackface.
On top of being racist, this is where War Games really starts to fall apart because it’s the first of many plotpoints that just don’t make any damn sense. For the first half or so, War Games is an arc that leans hard into the gritty, noir realism tone of 2000s Batman, which I usually like. But Black Mask, a wealthy white man, can flawlessly imitate a Black gang leader’s voice after ten minutes practice? I don’t think so. This plotpoint veers left into comic booky nonsense in a way that sharply breaks my disbelief. Black Mask has to imitate Orpheus voice, speech patterns, and accent, and not one person notices.
(Did I mention that Orpheus, Onyx, and Commissioner Akins are the only Black characters in this? Yeah, because that’s a thing. So of the 3 Black characters, one’s an antagonist at best and one gets murdered and impersonated by a white man halfway through.)
Honestly, after this, I had a hard time caring about how badly done Stephanie's torture scenes were. Not because I didn't care, but because it was pretty much standard sexualization of women in defeat that I've seen in other comics, and I felt like it was overshadowed by the literal fucking blackface in 2000-fucking-5.
3 - Related to this, the endgame of Black Mask ending up on top as chief gang leader of all of Gotham also makes no damn sense. Black Mask gets people’s trust by impersonating someone else, somehow convinces them to follow him when he reveals himself, then deliberately sends dozens of his own people to die in the Clocktower. When the Clocktower explodes he doesn’t obviously publicly survive, which to me should lead to people assuming he’s dead - again. Hardly a resume that fosters a large army of underlings.
Honestly, if I were Red Hood, I’d just shoot Black Mask and tell people I was lowering the cut taken and wouldn’t knowingly send anyone to die. That alone should give me enough clout to gain the loyalty of most of the mobs, making my rules seem pretty reasonable, no duffelbag of heads needed.
4, and I know I'm the only one who cares about this - Where the hell did the Aranas, Tarantula's gang, go? Tarantula has them in Batman #634, but then in Nightwing #99 she’s still in Gotham, working alone, with no explanation as to why. They just vanished into the ether. This really bugs me, especially since Tarantula often suffers from doing whatever the writers need her to do regardless of whether or not it makes sense (see also her appearances in Secret Six, which is incongruent with every single one of her appearances elsewhere). When we need her for War Games, she has a gang. When we need her for to call Bruce out and potentially draw parallels with Jason and Stephanie, poof, they're gone. We don't see them with her, or swearing allegiance to Black Mask - they just vanish.
5 - Almost the entirety of the epilogue, War Crimes, was unnecessary, and actively made it worse. The only things we needed to know from that was that 1. Arthur exposed Stephanie as Spoiler and Robin, 2. Arturo Rodriguez was working with Black Mask (arguably also unnecessary) 3. Leslie left Gotham and 4. Commissioner Akins was keeping his job. All of this could’ve been done in one issue, without several twists that ended in assassinating Leslie’s character for Bruce’s man pain.
the Black Mask/Joker plotline was especially dumb. It ended with both of them in the exact same places they’d been at the start of the epilogue (Joker in prison, Mask as top dog). There’s also absolutely no reason it had to have been Black Mask impersonating Bruce - this is what underlings are for, guys! What’s the point in making him head mob boss if he’s not using his underlings?
Conclusion - I actually really liked the first half, but as soon as Orpheus died it started unravelling.
