Batman is my absolute favorite character. He has been since I was a kid. Now I sit here, two decades later saying something I never thought I would say: what a pointless issue. Rather than driving the Knightmares narrative forward with another deep dive into another part of Batman’s brain, we get a filler issue of nothing more than a chase. I normally put a spoiler warning in my reviews, but I’m not sure if there’s even anything to spoil. The entire issue is Batman chasing a masked man across and into buildings after committing a murder. The issue barely has any dialogue throughout the entire book. Then at the end, Batman tackles the man into the sewer waters below Gotham and unmasks him to reveal the Joker. When Batman asks him why he killed that man, he replies by pulling out his toy horn and saying, “Beep. Beep.”
Ok. I get that Tom King wants to drive the point home of Batman being trapped inside his own mind, and that the Dark Knight is falling deeper and deeper into a pit in his own mind, but seriously? What was the point of this? I have never felt like I wasted my money on a Batman comic ever until this issue. Wait a second…Batman said that the murder victim’s name was William Ernest Coyote, and Joker only responded with “Beep. Beep.” If you turn back to the beginning of the issue, the murder victim doesn’t look human. Are you kidding me? Joker killed Wile E. Coyote and is all of a sudden the Roadrunner? Is this supposed to be part of the Looney Tunes crossovers or is this literally just a pointless issue? Tom King has a habit of making issues that don’t make much sense unless read at the same time with the rest of a story arc, but I find it hard to believe that Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner have anything to do with Bane’s master plan. I hate to say it, but I kind of want my money back.