Page from "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" in Batman #686 (April 2009), script by Neil Gaiman, pencils by Andy Kubert, inks by Scott Williams, colors by Alex Sinclair, letters by Jared K. Fletcher
This post is for pal Brian, who's been requesting this scene since January!
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQenrY-T9_-EUVG2XBTW-ZiSnvw_V3JFU-8tiFlhrdgKCUBaE56ekbiILucymY9gA-xa4zdGy_z1Njojw78Z-YnlUiN4PIRRurK7GzqoEg3B-PmXl2RJaS1ZaVKVCEHP-m-WVr2xjqailLu1jlzylysiBGc3sVXLXNMFDzAURyrHhKBfcqyO4/s1600/button-libertybellmarch.jpg" "It's...")
4 comments:
So what, he just painted over his mustache?
Under normal circumstances I'd think they were referencing Ceasar Romero, but the way it just disappears, I think they just forgot about it.
With all due respect to your pal and my fellow Brian, I hated hated hated this sequence. (I said as much in my review of the hardcover a couple of years ago.) Batman doesn't work when his world is "rationalized" nor when he's treated as psychopathic, and, while I like to think that Gaiman was rather agreeing in combining both approaches as commentary by story, to me the result is can't/doesn't transcend an inherent deflation of the whole concept.
I think it's presented absolutely as a hallucination/dream-sequence/near-death fever dream, and bruce himself even comments on it. "Alfred can't be the Joker; the Joker's sitting right there." But I get your meaning: I didn't like the Legends of the Batman story that suggested Alfred set up Bruce to be assaulted violently to teach him a lesson about hubris.
I think (without reading the whole comic) that sequence is amazing and nightmarish and has a certain diabolic logic to it. Thanks for sharing it.
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