I love Ghost-maker. I hate Batman: the Knight. (An analysis, cont’d)
With how much I’ve blabbed about Khoa on here, it’d be easy to assume that he’s my Blorbo Supreme. But as much as I love Ghost-maker, the character closest to my heart is and has always been Batman. While Khoa is still relevant to this segment, I won’t pretend that he’s its proper subject; the spotlight’s gonna be on my guy this time around, so align your expectations accordingly!
Atomic batteries to power... Turbines to speed… Let’s fire up the Bat-Yap.
Part Five: Will The Real Batman Please Stand Up?
That title is just a cheeky reference to The Dark Knight (which was itself a reference to an old game show, so I guess what I’m really referencing is To Tell The Truth); I’m not actually pretentious enough to believe my idea of Bruce Wayne is the purest, most accurate, most real version of him. Batman has existed for close to a century at this point, and he has countless, countless iterations. When I, some random guy on tumblr, say something is out of character for Batman, I can recognize it as being effectively meaningless. “Batman” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and my preference is not remotely universally shared.
But I want to communicate the necessity of James Tynion IV’s vision of Batman when it comes to understanding Ghost-maker. Because Khoa’s compatibility with Bruce is fully dependent on him being characterized is accordance with that vision. And I don’t just mean in regards to shipping.
Among the very first of Tynion’s official Batman writing was for Bruce in his training years, co-written with Scott Snyder and published as the backers of Batman (2011) #21-23. I love (and highly recommend reading) all three of these short stories, but I’m going to focus in on the second one, titled “That One Time,” which takes place when Bruce is 21. This is the bulk of it:
Tynion’s Bruce is a problem-solver. An out-of-the-box thinker. He’s not just intelligent, he’s creative. And he’s incredibly competent, just on his own. You can connect the dots of exactly how this guy will become Batman after four more years of training. He doesn’t always know exactly what he’s doing, but he’s got the brains, the heart, and the right amount of screws loose to figure it out. That combined passion and skill is what makes him so appealing to Khoa. From Batman #105:
Bruce stood out to Khoa not simply because they shared a goal, but because they both had the capacity to achieve that goal. There is something very crucial in them having met during the period of Bruce’s life most concerned with self-improvement. It meant that the Bruce who Khoa was introduced to spent all their time together proving just how willing he was to master any and every skill, to excel, and become exactly what Khoa himself was working to become. It’s why Khoa was able to project so completely onto him, and why the revelation of Bruce’s motivations was such a betrayal to him. From Batman #104:
Bruce needs to be so driven, so committed to learning and improving and succeeding, that Khoa can accept him as his equal. Somebody like him. A person he can trust with his name, his face, and his humanity, because he views Bruce as an extension of himself.
Even once Khoa recontextualizes Bruce’s actions within the motivations he wasn’t initially privy to, that sense of kinship needs to persist. Khoa needs to feel justified in his unwillingness to let Bruce go; in spite of the differences that have been revealed between them, they still need to be intrinsically alike. A shared goal, a shared potential, and a shared state of mind. Otherwise Khoa simply would not care to follow Bruce around the world. He would not spend so much of his time trying to convince Bruce to see things his way, like we’re shown him doing in the Gobi flashback. He would not insist, even after years of disagreement, that Bruce stay with him in Argentina. And he sure as hell would not voluntarily live in Gotham - a city he has always viscerally hated - simply because Bruce asked him to stay there.
So does BtK Bruce live up to this standard? Is he Ghost-maker’s - or even Anton’s - equal?
Let’s start at the beginning. The Batman beginning, you might say.
In issue #1, once young BtK Bruce has been thoroughly established as an angry, violent problem child, we get this scene:
It would have made sense if this served as the start of Bruce understanding that he’s going to need to train. That violence alone is not enough to stop people from committing crime, and he needs to put in effort to gather the skills and knowledge that will fully equip him to make an actual difference.
But instead of remotely broadening his approach to justice, BtK Bruce is only shown using his shiny new book collection to do this:
This is not an intelligent or constructive solution implemented after learning something new. It is (to be honest? Unimaginative) assault and psychological torture committed for the sake of personal, sadistic satisfaction. In a scene I’ve yet to get into, which references the events above, BtK Bruce is told that “you don’t want justice, you want vengeance.” And, yeah! You can see why he doesn’t make any attempt to dispute that assertion, or say he’s changed since he was a kid. It’s because justice has never been his genuine pursuit. Mitch’s only textual crime was that he pushed one of their fellow students earlier in the issue, and Bruce already retaliated in the moment by punching him. But Bruce never let it go, even though Mitch isn’t shown repeating or performing a single similar act of bullying after that first instance. It was never about defending or preventing victims, then, or even about teaching Mitch a lesson - if that was the case, then the punishments should have been made clear as having been a response to the crime. Instead, it was about BtK Bruce witnessing someone wielding power, and wanting to wield even more power over them. Not to achieve any kind of specific end, but simply to feel stronger. To be the biggest bully, and therefore keep himself from ever being a victim again.
Later in issue #1, after BtK Bruce has been arrested along with the other participants of an underground fighting ring, Alfred picks him up from the police station. What follows is this exchange:
I really, really like it. Alfred brings up something incredibly important - the economic status of the other fighters in that ring. He compares them directly to Joe Chill, calling them all scared. Desperate people with nothing, driven to violence due to poverty. They may be law-breakers, but they deserve sympathy and understanding. I believe that is crucial for Bruce to have internalized by the time he becomes Batman.
Issue #2 further expands on the idea of criminality ≠ evil with the introduction of Lucie:
I think these are essential questions for a Batman-in-training to be asking, and again, I really like it! Issue #2 is peak BtK to me. Lucie is a great character - she teaches Bruce in both a practical and emotional sense, ticking off the boxes for a classic training story. Bruce is learning how to be Batman, but he’s also learning what being Batman means. I also like that Lucie doesn’t prey upon/take advantage of him, and rejects Bruce after he kisses her, specifically due to his youth. It sticks to the idea of her being good, regardless of her criminal activities.
But this setup just doesn’t…go anywhere.
For all that I phrased it as BtK Bruce “learning,” he never actually processes any of the lessons that should come from these experiences. His emotional arc is nonexistent. By the end of the story, he’s still the same angry little shit that he was when he started.
This is the scene I mentioned earlier, from issue #1, that also reappears in issue #9:
It says so much about BtK Bruce that he has to be told not to become a cop. That he almost definitely would have become a cop, if not for Dana (a character whose addition I do not care for. She exists entirely for Bruce’s benefit; he gives her absolutely nothing in return. She’s his enabling defender, and then she’s his doting, worried mommy, and then she’s his therapist, and then she’s a photoshopped corpse whose fake death is meant to make him upset. She’s a prop, never a person in her own right, which is far too common amongst fictional female love interests. I’d rather she just wasn’t included at all, with that in mind). This is BtK firmly cementing its protagonist as a directionless, immature, overconfident, spoiled, rich brat. Zdarsky’s Bruce is, at his core, an angry little boy waiting for someone else to tell him where that anger would best be aimed. Who that anger should brutally punish. He is not at all predisposed to becoming Batman. In fact, he would be far better suited to police work! God knows he’s already a bastard, and a mindlessly obedient one, at that. This little piggy is just itching for a fascist to follow.
But you know what? That could work. Bruce Wayne could start out like this (however much I personally dislike the idea) and learn and grow over the course of the time he spends training.
Except that BtK Bruce simply does not develop past this point. Just look at how the aforementioned scene comes back in issue #9:
Here he is in the penultimate issue of his origin story, speaking to his self-proclaimed final master, and he’s thinking, “I have no plan.” WHAT? Zdarsky doubles down on it in the following issue, too, after BtK Bruce has become the Demon’s Heart:
This is ridiculous coming from a mid-20s Bruce Wayne. He’s 24 minimum here. Supposed to be Batman in less than a year. But no, at the end of his training, he’s “never had a plan before”. Like…am I nuts? Who is this man?
If Zdarsky was determined to start Bruce in a place of directionlessness and then have him orient himself toward Batman-ing over time, then why does he never take any opportunity to make Bruce grow? Why does Bruce remain a static character throughout every new encounter, every skill acquired, regardless of whether he succeeds or fails?
Issue #3, in particular, is where BtK Bruce really starts doubting his mission, starting with Lucie advising him to go home. Initially, Bruce refuses, but he almost immediately changes his tune as soon as Ducard gets shot:
The way this is set up, you’d think that Bruce would do some detective work, make a positive difference, and recognize that there is a point to his training. That for all that he is bound to witness pain, for all that he is bound to make mistakes, he shouldn’t go home early. He shouldn’t quit. Because the change he desperately needs to see in the world cannot be achieved by means other than the ones he’s still in the process of gathering. Just as any story has a need for its protagonist, the DC universe demands Batman’s conception. So if Batman is doubting the necessity of his existence before he has even become Batman, then logically, he should be made to prove himself wrong.
But that doesn’t happen! Not here, and not anywhere else in Batman: the Knight. What happens in issue #3 is that BtK Bruce tracks down the murderer, is too late to prevent his last kill, beats the ever-loving shit of out him in retaliation, and gets walked in on doing so by Lucie. He rushes to hug her, she comforts him, and the scene ends.
Afterwards, he and Lucie part ways like this:
The conclusion here is one that Zdarsky circles endlessly - that Bruce Wayne is dark and violent and angry to the core, vindictively enraged before he is anything else. But…is there something more that’s been achieved since we last reached that very same conclusion? Seriously, we spent two entire issues (out of TEN - a FIFTH of the full story) in Paris, so… What happened there? What changed? What is so different about our protagonist now compared to when he first started?
And my answer is... Nothing! ✨🤗✨
It can be argued that what’s changed is the amount of practical knowledge Bruce has. But in the case of issue #3, the actual training - the lessons Bruce is taught by Henri Ducard, one of Batman’s more well-known, pre-established teachers - is all left offscreen. It gets vaguely referenced a few times in issue #4, but we never witness it ourselves. So instead of exploring how the World’s Greatest Detective first learned how to, y’know. Detect, all we get is him spectating a case that he has little genuine impact on or ultimate involvement in. A case that just needs to involve orphans, because why else would Bruce Wayne give a damn?
To me, this writing choice does nothing but continue the trend of making BtK Bruce a flat, boring, one-trick pony. Why is he not only directionless, but purposeless? Why is he so utterly lacking in investment in anything outside of himself?
BtK Bruce only properly cares about crimes that bear at least a passing resemblance to his own tragedy, which is just…ridiculous, given who he’s meant to become. The vast majority of Batman mysteries are connected to the Wayne murders solely by virtue of starring Bruce Wayne; his parents haunt the narrative, but Batman has always invested himself in a wide variety of cases - not even just homicides.
This is because Batman does what he does to help people. Yes, obviously he has a soft spot for orphans and wayward children, but he is endlessly fighting to protect and improve his city (and in his larger-scale adventures, the world/universe) to the fullest extent possible. BtK Bruce, meanwhile, exclusively takes action in order to seek personal, emotional catharsis.
Remember an eternity ago, when I said Khoa’s interest in Bruce is due to their similarities? Beginning with a shared goal?
Well, what the hell does Ghost-maker do with a Bruce that doesn’t even have a plan?
It’s time to talk about issue #4.
I’m just going to analyze BtK Bruce and Anton’s meeting scene in full, because I think it’s…really weird when put under scrutiny. Specifically in what dynamic it establishes between the two of them. This is how it starts:
BtK Bruce considers himself as being behind, which immediately proves to be an accurate self-assessment when he slips and loses his balance. Conveniently, though, Anton appears just in time to keep him from falling. I may have shipper goggles on, but Anton is canonically bisexual and pretty textually into Bruce, so I choose to read this as Anton already having found Bruce attractive, kept an eye on him since he arrived, and waited for an opportunity to swoop in and save him, making that rescue his first impression. This is something Anton does consistently throughout BtK; Bruce gets in some kind of trouble, and Anton shows up to act as his knight in shining armor (including when saving Bruce from assassins that he set on him), ensuring that Bruce makes it out okay.
On the surface, it’s cute, and in general, it’s gay. It shows that Bruce benefits from having someone to look out for him, and establishes Anton as a helpful person who wants Bruce to succeed.
The problem with this is that BtK Bruce has done nothing at all to earn Anton’s interest, and more crucially, his respect. It doesn’t matter how hot Bruce is - if Khoa saw one of his fellow students trip and fall, he would scoff and keep walking right past them. I don’t even think he’d catch a Bruce who he’s already friends with! He’d tease him and expect Bruce to stand up and take the long walk back to the spring to get more water, because that’s what Khoa would do if he slipped. He’d address and fix his mistake, resolved never to repeat it. And in any world where Ghost-maker and Batman are allies, Bruce would do the same.
As I’ve said, Ghost-maker’s fixation on Bruce Wayne is borne out of solidarity and perceived equality. Ghost-maker is an incredibly difficult person to impress, and an even more difficult person to ensnare longterm; he holds himself in the absolute highest regard, so for him to consider someone as being like him is not only a compliment, but an unparalleled honor. The position Bruce maintains in Khoa’s life is entirely exclusive, then, not only because he matches Khoa in skill, intelligence, and goal, but because he challenges Khoa in a way that ensures he will improve, and continue improving for as long as they’re together. This is the reason I consider them to be counterparts, rather than foils— their respective strengths and weaknesses are complementary to the other’s, which is what makes them so compatible. They’ve got that yin and yang shit going on; the point isn’t that they contrast each other, it’s that they balance each other out.
Anyway, all that to say that Khoa would nottttt give one single fuck about BtK Bruce. He isn’t even short-term fascination material, he’s just bumbling, boring, and overemotional - the three worst traits to have if you’re looking to impress Minhkhoa Khan. And yes, that assessment is rooted in evidence beyond BtK Bruce simply losing his footing in view of Anton.
I could go on my billionth rant about Anton and Khoa being completely different characters, taking issue with Anton dropping a bunch of his own lore completely unprompted, including where he’s from. I could complain that unlike what we hear about Ghost-maker in Batman #104, Anton seems not to have trained with anyone else around the world before Kirigi, which sets him up as less experienced than Bruce - something confirmed by his shortsightedness in issue #6 regarding Bruce’s training before they met. I could make fun of them both leaving the water they just carried all the way down there out in the open to freeze. And I just did all those things, albeit in minimal detail, because apparently I can’t help myself.
But in this segment focused on Bruce, I want to focus on one specific problem:
Why is all the crimefighting talk here coming from Anton?
Sure, this is Anton’s introductory scene, and having him just dish out a bunch of exposition unprompted is certainly one way to establish his goal/motivations. But this isn’t just a character introduction. It’s two characters being introduced to each other.
Why doesn’t BtK Bruce confide in Anton about his goal straightforwardly? Why does Anton have to pose a dichotomous question for Bruce to choose one or the other answer from, rather than being told outright that Bruce intends to be a crimefighter, just like him?
I…can’t think of a good answer to this question. Even without taking into account ghostbat’s actual dynamic, it’s just a bizarre choice not to give two supposed friends any solid, substantial ground on which to meet each other. We don’t witness the development of BtK Bruce and Anton’s friendship after this scene; there’s only the page-long montage of them training and hanging out together, and then boom! Kirigi’s already bringing in the assassins.
Where is the solidarity? Where is the mutual recognition of something wholly unique, the “I had never met another person who thought like I did”? In this meeting scene, I don’t see two people understanding that they are alike - that the crazy, uncommon goal they each have is genuinely shared by someone else, and even someone their age. What I see instead is a clueless guy with resources he is ill-equipped to utilize, and the competent guy who has a big fat crush on him. And that really never stops being the case in Batman: the Knight. From issue #5:
“You don’t have to be the best at everything,” spoken without a lick of sarcasm, is crazy coming from Ghost-maker, especially as a response to “I’m on a--a mission, but I don’t even know toward what.” It’s totally fine for Bruce not to know the specifics of his future as Batman - there’d be no need for “yes, father, I shall become a bat” if Bruce already knew exactly how he would come to approach Gotham’s criminals. But Bruce made his oath to his parents when he was eight years old, swearing to dedicate his life to fighting crime. He always knew what his mission was working toward, and his decision to train reflected that certainty.
And yet, despite referencing his supposed oath/mission on several occasions, BtK Bruce inexplicably treats it as insubstantial! Rather than being his driving force - his purpose, the foundation of the entire character of Batman - it is the loose excuse a little rich boy made up to justify leaving home. An excuse that falls apart at every sign of trouble, because BtK Bruce does not have what it takes to be Batman.
Even if BtK Bruce was overplaying his own insecurities to get Anton within pickpocketing range (which I don’t think was his intention right out the gate, but that’s up for interpretation), sharing these - established, genuine - fears would have the complete opposite effect on Khoa. It would revolt him.
Following a not-even-that-significant defeat, BtK Bruce isn’t just frustrated and stumped— he’s resigned, straight up saying that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, revealing that if he fails hard enough, he’ll turn right around and go back to where he started, convinced that he can’t do any better.
…Man, Khoa wouldn’t even care to hear this guy speak, let alone spend years of his life trailing after him.
I’ll say it again: it doesn’t matter how hot Bruce is. Ghost-maker would never compromise his own training for the sake of an aimless, inept manchild, especially not one so scarcely willing to recognize his own weaknesses, and so quick to concede to them whenever he does.
In part two of this analysis, titled All Tell, No Show, I said “Zdarsky uses narration to cheat— particularly when communicating two important things: BtK Bruce’s competence, and BtK Bruce and Anton’s friendship.” I covered the latter there, and it’s about time I got into the former.
BtK Bruce is so fucking stupid.
Like…sorry. But he is. I went into his dumbass move at the embassy in part two, but it isn’t remotely an isolated incident. BtK Bruce is Lego Batman level convinced of his own superiority while making an abject fool of himself. You just can’t make this shit up (from issue #10):
“I’m the best at everything now.” And then he proceeds to get snuck up on and stabbed mid-meaningless speech, immediately accept death, and pass out while Anton drags his unconscious body to safety. Not only that—
—he thinks this kind of failure is completely acceptable! He literally goes back to Gotham because he’s got “nothing left to do”. Not because he’s judged himself to be ready. Not because he’s proven a capacity to take on one of the most corrupt, crime-ridden cities in his universe. Not even because he misses Alfred, or something sentimental like that. He’s simply run out of shit to do, and has nowhere else to go. WHAT!!!!!!
I made a meme that I would very much like to have included here, but I’ve maxed out the image limit. So please imagine the, “They don’t even have dental” Shrek meme with the caption, “He isn’t even singularly, obsessively focused on Gotham City.”
I know I said that my idea of Bruce isn’t the “realest” version of him. But I don’t think it’s an assertion of personal opinion to say that Batman loves Gotham. It’s a defining feature of Bruce Wayne as a character, as integral to who he is as the loss of his parents. People disagree constantly on Bruce’s intricacies - his view of criminals and his subsequent approach to crimefighting, his relationship with violence, his opinion on killing, his dynamics with other characters, his proficiency as a parent, the likelihood of him beating Goku with prep time, etc etc etc. But whether you’re talking to a massive comics fan or a person with only passing knowledge of him, everyone who’s heard of Batman knows that Gotham is his city. It’s the place he has been dedicated to since day one of his existence, the fictional setting specifically created for and around him. You can take the Bat out of Gotham - indeed, you can send the Bat to the bottom of the ocean, and to the outer reaches of space, and to Las Vegas, Nevada - but you can’t take the Gotham out of the Bat.
So why the fuck is BtK Bruce thinking shit like this in issue #9?
Like…yeah, man! That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do! Because that’s exactly what Batman does, and, lest we forget, this is a Batman origin story.
In relation to ghostbat, I think it’s especially cuckoo bananas, because this is so much closer to what Khoa spent years and years trying to get Bruce to agree with him on. I try to use mostly Tynion-written stuff when making big statements about Ghost-maker’s beliefs, but I think the direct contrast between the above panels and this dialogue from Batman Annual 2022 is too overt to ignore:
If Bruce agrees that his potential would be wasted as Gotham’s protector - that he would be most effective if he utilized his skills to change the whole world, not just his stinky yucky home town - then he and Khoa have no quarrel with each other. I’m going to straight up copy and paste my own words from part three of this analysis, because I like the wording I already used there, and apparently I’m lazy:
“The persisting conflict between Batman and Ghost-maker is ‘would Bruce Wayne, specifically, be better off dedicating his life to protecting Gotham City, or letting go of his past to stop crime on a wider, international and impersonal level?’ That is it. That is the entire thing. When they argue about methodology, it is always just about the two of them - about whether Khoa should ‘let’ Bruce go back home to Gotham and only make use of his training there. It isn’t about Khoa being a psychopath. It isn’t even about whether or not killing is essential to successful crime-fighting. It’s about Bruce choosing Gotham over Khoa, and Khoa being unwilling to accept that choice.”
For BtK Bruce to be so unattached to Gotham as to concede immediately to the vague plans presented by Ra’s, brutally fight Anton to become the Demon’s Heart, and consider it a “good death” simply to stop Ra’s, without ever having returned home…
The final thing I want to dig into when it comes to BtK Bruce, at least in this segment, is the way he thinks about Joe Chill.
The phrasing here, from BtK #6, is paralleled at the end of the same issue, after Anton has spared and abandoned Bruce in his unconsciousness:
I’ve seen people treat this as romantic heartbreak - like Bruce being left by Anton was so devastating as to be comparable to the loss of his parents. But I really don’t think that’s what’s happening here. For BtK Bruce to draw this specific connection, he has to have placed Anton firmly in the role of the killer. The criminal, and therefore the enemy. The man who shattered his heart. Joe Chill.
In theory, I don’t actually have any problem with that. I think it’s tasty. “He was so mad, he tried to kill me” is a crucial moment in ghostbat lore, and I loooove the idea of Bruce being in full PTSD hell while it’s happening. That’s why I initially adored the change to make ghostbat’s breakup involve guns, where Bruce is a passive, enabling bystander while Khoa shoots and kills someone who posed a lethal threat to himself. I love the idea of Bruce Wayne choosing to fire a bullet at another human being in order to save Minhkhoa Khan’s life. I love Bruce crying after making that impossible choice.
1) How quickly Bruce gets over his PTSD episode. He, like I said, just shot a gun at a person, and now that person is dead. Older Batman? Sure, he could force himself through a state of emotional devastation to lock in for combat. But a Bruce who bursts into tears upon shooting someone in the wrist is not a Bruce who I think has learned to repress his feelings to remotely that extent.
2) Anton’s unwillingness to talk things through. The second Luka is dead, he turns the gun on Bruce, and I just…don’t think Khoa would do that! I think he’d put significant effort into convincing Bruce of the perpetual threat posed by Luka, and the necessity of Khoa killing him. Having him immediately resolve to regard Bruce as his enemy - in effect giving up on their friendship, and on any possibility of Bruce understanding him - just leans right into evil awful psychopath territory again. Which directly relates to—
3) BtK Bruce’s focus being entirely on Anton’s “insanity,” rather than on his own complicity in Luka’s murder. Batman is a character rife with guilt, especially when it comes to other people dying. “You made me shoot him!!” (yes, with two exclamation points!!) takes all the responsibility off of himself in favor of further vilifying Anton. And I think that sucks! I think that’s surface level, and boring, and reflective of how little BtK Bruce cares to keep Anton in his life. Which fully betrays the genuine, prevailing friendship that defines ghostbat.
As soon as Luka is killed, BtK Bruce and Anton are enemies, full stop. Their friendship is all past tense; there is no grace period, no fallout from a fresh, mutual loss. Just instantaneous vitriol, and BtK Bruce being a dick - rubbing Anton’s loneliness in his face while chalking up all his faults to a mental illness he cannot help having.
This goes back to BtK Bruce’s utter lack of care for anything outside of himself, and the absence of character development in his story. Despite creating an obvious opportunity to challenge/change its protagonist’s worldview, the Knight gives Bruce no interest in understanding why a person might kill another person— even when the murderer in question is meant to be his friend. Because to BtK Bruce, murderers are, by definition, unsalvageable. That’s why he has no interest in criminal reform. He literally just wants criminals gone. From issue #9:
This isn’t even something exclusive to the Knight. It’s a sentiment carried over into Zdarsky’s Bruce’s full adulthood, as seen in Batman #138:
It’s important, then, that we ask… Who are “the Joe Chills of the world”?
In the post-bailout scene from BtK #1, Alfred described the other fighters in the ring as, “Scared men with nothing, doing things most people wouldn’t imagine…like the man who shot your parents for 150 dollars and scattered pearls.” From the beginning, then, the comic itself openly recognizes that Joe Chill was just a poor person with a gun. Not a monster. Not a maniacal, evil villain. And yet to the end of BtK and beyond, Zdarsky’s Bruce holds up Chill as the symbol of all the crime he wants to eliminate. The worst that the world has to offer. A kind of person that, in “paradise,” would not even exist.
Let’s go back to “the man who shattered my heart,” in issue #6:
Here, we see BtK Bruce struggle as he draws comparisons between Chill and Luka, trying to determine the difference between them, and the murders they committed. Then he brings up himself, saying that the ambiguity is the reason why he can’t take a life. But…I don’t find that line of reasoning to be coherent. At all. I don’t think the concepts that “Chill and Luka are both murderers, and therefore comparable” and “Bruce, as a crimefighter, would be best off never killing anyone” have any legitimate connection here. The through line, obviously, is the concept of murder. But that only serves as a sloppy segue that results in Bruce coming off as confused, more than anything.
For one, as established in BtK itself, Chill only killed Thomas and Martha Wayne out of poverty-stricken desperation. He wasn’t passing judgment on anyone, neither as a hired assassin nor as a crimefighting vigilante. He wasn’t seeking vengeance, catharsis, or justice. All he was doing was committing a mugging-gone-wrong, which resulted in second-degree murder.
Chill’s actual relevance to Batman’s rule is as a target of Bruce’s war on crime. When it comes to murder, the question is hardly, “Would Batman be like Joe Chill if he killed people?” especially not when Chill’s homicide wasn’t even premeditated. It’s, “Would the likes of Joe Chill, a 100% guilty murderer, be rightfully punished if they were killed by Batman?” And BtK isn’t particularly interested in answering that question.
This isn’t to say that BtK doesn’t dabble in moral grayness. Strangely enough, the act of killing is handled in a much more nuanced and complex manner than the simple fact of Anton being mentally ill. Where Anton’s psychopathy is treated like an innate evil that he is unable to overcome, his status as a murderer is treated as something fixable or otherwise dismissible. It’s a really weird double standard to have, but whatever. I already complained about BtK’s ableism in part three; let’s talk about killing!
In issue #9, there are a few instances of BtK Bruce grappling with the concept of Anton having killed people. In the campfire nonsense scene, Bruce thinks, “I can even convince myself to forget…that Anton’s a murderer.” Then later, when speaking to Talia - who brings up Anton’s body count in response to Bruce being uncomfortable with Ra’s training assassins - Bruce says, “Anton… He can be saved. He’s made mistakes. But I know he’s good, deep down.”
Of course, in the very next issue, he then proceeds to shout at Anton that there’s nothing else to him beyond a “killer’s instinct,” among all the other cruel shit he says in his tirade that makes me want to erase BtK #10 from existence.
Ultimately, what I’m trying to communicate here is that regardless of the comic’s flirtation with moral grayness, its protagonist remains staunchly unmoved by the complexity of any killer he encounters. BtK Bruce does not care to empathize with murderers, full stop. They are at best a cautionary tale, and at worst inhuman monsters that he must defeat at all costs.
What can we make, then, of BtK’s attempted parallel between Bruce and Luka?
I want to dig into the reasoning behind BtK Bruce’s “line.” Batman’s infamous one rule, that he will never take a life. In the page above, Zdarsky exclusively provides what very much reads to me as a “murder is a potato chip” explanation, even though it masquerades as something more complex.
In the previous scene, Bruce asked Luka why he quit being an assassin, and it wasn’t anything to do with the “bad men” Luka was being paid to shoot. It was due to Luka’s job leading him to kill two people who were indubitably innocent - the wife and son of one of his assigned targets. Luka never fancied himself a crimefighter; he was an agent of the state who followed orders because he was good at shooting, viewing it as a game until he could no longer detach from the horrors he was committing.
Instead of having anything to do with ethics/morality, the hangup that influences BtK Bruce’s no-kill reasoning, “I can’t take a life. And I can’t use guns on anyone because, God help me, I’m good at it,” is in much closer alignment with this:
The attempted parallel is rooted in apathy. In the context of BtK Bruce’s established sadism, his unquenchable thirst for vengeance, and his ultimate disinterest in any form of justice, the resolution that he cannot let himself shoot people because he’s good at it easily ends up reading as, well. Murder is a potato chip. If BtK Bruce starts killing, he won’t be able to stop. He’ll see it as the best solution to eliminating evil, by virtue of his own skill and the ease of murdering as a marksman. Doling out death will turn into a game for him to play. Maybe one that he’ll even enjoy.
As you’ve probably guessed, I don’t care for this at all. I easily consider Luka to be the strongest, most compelling of Zdarsky’s original characters in BtK, because he is perfectly designed to create Batman conflict. I don’t think a parallel between him and Bruce would have been amiss at all. We could have gotten valuable insight into Batman’s decision not to take any life, even those of guilty criminals - bonafide “bad men” - because where Luka never needed any moral justification to kill, Bruce absolutely would.
But there is no attempt at nuance in BtK’s treatment of murder as justice. No, “hey, maybe not all the people Luka killed were ‘bad’. Maybe someone’s right to live or die shouldn’t be left up to the government, or to a single, self-appointed vigilante. Maybe killing is the incorrect solution to stopping crime in general, not just a bad personal decision for Bruce Wayne.”
And like, I know— comic books are not obligated to get philosophical. Batman stories don’t have to take an explicit stance on punitive vs. restorative justice (though most certainly take an implicit one).
But the thing is that Tynion’s Bruce…does. And that stance is the one that Ghost-maker chooses to recognize and honor on Batman’s behalf. From Batman #105:
This is the kind of Batman I love. I love a Batman who refrains from killing not solely because he fears it’ll make him just like them, but because he believes in the human capacity for change. A Batman who is invested in the rehabilitation of “the Joe Chills of the world,” who believes that perpetrators should answer for their crimes, but still be given the opportunity to do better in the future. A Batman who offers jobs to those driven to crime by poverty. A Batman who funds support for those struggling with mental illnesses. A Batman who genuinely wants his rogues to recover and eventually reenter society, instead of rotting away forever in prison.
Of course, his methods are far from perfect. For all that he desires societal change, Bruce still upholds the systems that perpetuate the very injustice he is trying to fight (e.g. working with the GCPD, sending people to Arkham, leaving the sentencing of criminals up to courts ridden with judicial corruption). But his mission, the “war” he’s fighting, has always had the ultimate goal of peace. Of restoration, and within it, absolution. If Bruce can save enough lives, prevent enough death, guide enough people onto paths that won’t result in violence, then he can make all the pain make sense. He can fill the emotional void inside himself enough that his loss doesn’t devour him whole. While he can never convince himself that he’s a good person, he can act as a force for good, and through his own darkness, make the world just a tiny bit brighter.
There is a critical difference between a Batman who is fighting to save his parents, and a Batman who is fighting to punish Joe Chill. BtK Bruce is very much the latter, while Tynion’s Bruce - Khoa’s Bruce - is the former.
Excluding Batman Annual 2021, this is (a page from) the final scene Tynion wrote for his Batman run, at the conclusion of Batman #117:
The Bruce we see here is simply not the same as the character who Zdarsky, 20-ish issues later, wrote brainwashing Jason à la A Clockwork Orange in Gotham War. This is not a man who, before he was even Batman, would have resolved to abandon Gotham out of blind endorsement of Ra’s al Ghul’s worldwide eugenics movement, regardless of if he knew it involved mass murder or not. And - most relevantly to my analyses - this is not someone who would say or remotely believe that there is nothing to Minhkhoa Khan beyond “a killer’s instinct”.
For all that Zdarsky’s Bruce is compelling to Anton, he would not interest Khoa in the slightest. He is incompetent, directionless, and genuinely weakened by his emotions in a way that Tynion’s Bruce is simply not. He doesn’t care about making a positive impact on the world. He doesn’t even care about stopping and preventing crime. He only cares about himself, his trauma, and securing a means by which to vent his omnipresent anger.
My next segment will be a little different, in that rather than analyzing Anton just to measure him against Khoa, I want to delve into Anton as a character independent of any comic other than the Knight. I think he has a lot going on, despite my firm belief that he is not Minhkhoa Khan, and I want to delve into the narrative’s weird treatment of him. Hopefully it won’t take me several months to finish, like this one did, but as was the case with my last segment, I’ve just been writing fic rather than writing analysis whenever I’m free.
If you want to see how @bellandeano and I are in the process of reimagining BtK, please consider checking out The Knight Rewrite on ao3! We’ve got two installments up so far, rewriting issues #4 and #5 respectively (though we’ve written so much for issue #5 that it’s grown from a comic-adjacent oneshot into an ongoing, multichapter monstrosity 😅). As always, thank you for reading! This part was especially long, so I appreciate anybody who made it all the way to the end. See you in the next one 🦇
