So, in this week’s Earth 2 Annual #2, the identity of the mysterious new Batman that’s been floating around the last several months – since before writer Tom Taylor took over the book – was finally revealed to be Thomas Wayne, the father Bruce Wayne thought was dead. While my esteemed colleague Iann Robinson decried this revelation as a rehash of an idea we’d already seen in Flashpoint, I felt compelled to contend that it remains an idea with a lot of potential for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, Flashpoint sucked and Earth 2 doesn’t, so if any decent concepts can be salvaged from the former, the latter is a good place to dust them off and see if they’ve got true legs. The “Wayne Casino” version of Thomas Wayne as Batman from that lamentable story that bridged the gap between the old world and the New 52 – a reality warping event triggered because Barry Allen missed his mom and now we can’t have the Secret Six anymore – was one of the bright spots, even if it overextended its premise by forcing Martha Wayne into becoming the Joker. But that was three issues of exploration, and then a clusterfudge that ended badly. Earth 2 is one of the better books in the New 52, refreshing at least because it’s only tangentially related to that New 52, and thus bringing Thomas Wayne back as Batman becomes a notion deserving of a bit more panel time in a different context.
That context – that it turns out Thomas is a deluded killer who thinks he’s being righteous – ties into the second reason that this revelation is interesting, namely that Batman is now also Hourman. He’s 65 years old, which means the only way he can keep up the fight is to pop Miraclo and get super powers for an hour. So that makes him a drug addict, a former drug supplier, a deadbeat father, a murderer and a guy who shot his own son – a son who immediately calls him on all his bullshit, predicting it before he can even sling it, and who goes from worshiping his sainted father’s memory to despising the selfish disappointment he lived to become in the span of a couple of pages. In any other story, Thomas Wayne would be the flawed antihero we’d root for in his quest for revenge against the Falcone family, but in a Batman story, he’s just a sorry old bastard who has to watch his family from afar because they wanted nothing to do with him.
This is the man who is wearing the cowl now, as the only way he could think of to honor the life and sacrifice of the son who disowned him. There’s a lot of grist for the mill there, and “grizzled old Batman” is usually an interesting kind of Batman. Hell, he shot the Joker in the head. Things are different with this Bat.
Now, would I have preferred it to be someone else entirely? Maybe Dr. Pieter Cross or Dr. Charles McNider, former Dr. Mid-Nites who could very well fit the Bat-bill, being blind as bats and all? Someone as new and unique as Lois Lane in the Red Tornado robot body? Sure. Hell, I’m not thrilled with the focus being on Superman and Batman in this book that’s supposed to be the only place where we can get the Justice Society characters that were purged from the rest of the New 52, but at least it’s a different version of both of them. Superman’s been corrupted and driven mad by Darkseid, Fury – daughter of the late Wonder Woman, as revealed in Worlds’ Finest Annual #1 – was a lackey of Steppenwolf’s, and now Batman is now his father’s Caped Crusader, literally. It’s interesting and different.
I’m sure the next big tale in Earth 2 will be ‘how Superman survived and became a Darkseid goon,’ and then more about Fury, and I’m sure it’ll be solid stuff. But sooner rather than later, this book has to get back to the characters it was founded on. The new Dr. Fate is fine, The Atom, the Sandmen, Green Lantern and Flash are solid, Hawkgirl and Red Tornado are cool, and even the new-school Mr. Terrific (and the evil version of Terry Sloan, the Golden Age Mr. Terrific) are fine. But we want Dr. Mid-Nite. We want Wildcat. We want maybe a less bratty Captain Marvel that maybe is still called Captain Marvel instead of Shazam. Starman. Cyclone. Jesse Quick. Hell, the Freedom Fighters, the All-Star Squadron. Let’s keep the focus where it should be – on the characters who can ONLY appear here, and not the ones who have several other books devoted solely to them.
