Batman, Volume 2: The City of Owls (Review)

Batman, Volume 2: The City of Owls continues the story that Scott Snyder began telling in Batman, Volume 1: The Court of Owls. The first volume introduced us to the Court of Owls, a ruthless cabal of powerbrokers who have been operating in Gotham City for centuries. The Court kicks off the plot when it targets both Bruce Wayne and his alter ego, the Batman. Severely underestimating the gravity of the threat, Batman is beaten and Wayne is nearly killed by the Court's deadly assassin, the Talon. While Wayne recovers, the Court unleashes an army of Talons upon an unsuspecting Gotham City, and the first volume ends with the Talons emerging from the shadows, ready to ensure the streets of Gotham run red.

Batman, Volume 2: The City of Owls

The story picks up as the Talons assault Wayne Manor, where Bruce is still recovering with his trusted friend and butler, Alfred Pennyworth, by his side. What ensues is a harrowing sequence in which the Talons attempt to finish what they started, killing Wayne and therefore ending Batman. But never to be outdone, Wayne discovers a means of defeating the seemingly invincible Talons through sharp detective work, dispatches them, and quickly returns to his role as Batman. For the remainder of this horrifying night, Batman and his allies battle the Talons across Gotham, successfully staving off their attack and saving a number of their targets, but the victory is not without casualties. Many of Gotham City's most important political figures are killed in the attack, including the promising mayoral candidate, Lincoln March.

This is a rather straightforward conclusion to the story begun in the previous volume, standard comic book fare. What's interesting is that this portion of the story is wrapped up early in this second volume. For a twist in the narrative propels a story threatening to stall out into personal territory with incredibly high stakes. Previously, Snyder dealt with the theme of pride, framed in the mythological context of Theseus and the Minotaur. Here, he pushes the thematic envelope even further, dealing with the concept of forbidden knowledge, in the mythological context of brotherhood. The story even goes so far as to reference Romulus and Remus as underpinning the narrative, itself a mythological construct pointing back to the account of Cain and Abel.

It has been a long-held belief in the Batman mythos that Bruce Wayne was an only child. His parents were killed in front of him when he was just a boy, the defining event of his life that put him on the road to becoming Batman. But Snyder subverts expectations once again by revealing that Bruce's parents, Thomas and Martha, had another child that had been born with defects due to a car accident, and had only lived for twelve hours. But through the usual comic book outlandishness of secret serums and other such things, Snyder suggests to both Batman and the reader that perhaps the child had survived. Perhaps that child had been found and raised by the Court of Owls, honed into a lethal weapon who, when the time was right, would ascend to the top of Gotham's social hierarchy as Thomas Wayne, Jr. and effectively depose Bruce as the city's golden boy—the jealous brother who attempts to kill the honorable brother. We learned in the previous volume that the Court's assassins, the Talons, had remarkable healing abilities. This Chekov's gun fires on all cylinders in the second volume, as the supposedly dead mayoral candidate Lincoln March is revealed to not only be alive, but a member of the Court of Owls with regenerative abilities—more than this, he claims to be the long-lost second son of Thomas and Martha Wayne.

This is certainly an interesting wrinkle in the Batman mythos. Wisely, Snyder never actually settles the issue of March's parentage definitively. Of course, Batman and March have a fierce battle that sorta-kinda ends in a stalemate. Batman escapes with his life, and March's body is never recovered, suggesting that he is still alive. But as Bruce reflects on these apparent revelations, he points out that the Court of Owls could very easily have taken in any orphan and brainwashed him into believing he was the younger Wayne brother. Usually, this kind of ambiguity bothers me, but in this case I think it works to benefit the story. See, another major theme running through both volumes has to do with secrets and trust. Early in the first volume Wayne learns that his first adopted son, Dick Grayson, was originally slated to become a Talon for the Court of Owls. Wayne elects to hide this information from Grayson, until the two have a heated argument. Dick, angry at Bruce for hiding this from him, walks away. At the end of the second volume, as the storyline featuring the Court of Owls is wrapped up, Grayson returns and talks with Wayne again. This time, it is Wayne who is certain that, had his brother actually survived, his parents would have told him, that they would not have kept hidden from him the truth that they very well might have sent the boy off to a children's home. But Grayson tells him that he now understands the value of keeping some terrible, painful truths a secret from those whom it might hurt more, and suggests to Bruce that his parents could very well have kept that secret simply because Bruce was, at the time, too young, and it was not his place to know.

The themes of pride and forbidden knowledge are admirably interwoven in Snyder's tale. Bruce's pride in knowing Gotham City better than anyone is undone by the existence of the Court. By the story's end, he comes to learn that not only did he misjudge the city, he could very well have misjudged his own family. Some secrets are worth being left in the dark, some knowledge is better left unlearned.

But perhaps the best illustration of this theme comes not from the main plot. Interestingly, after the main storyline has wrapped up, this volume features a collection of shorter backup stories that help to flesh out the world and events surrounding the main story. One of these stories, entitled, "The Fall of the House of Wayne," is written almost completely devoid of dialogue. Instead, the story is recounted in the context of a letter penned by Alfred's father, Jarvis Pennyworth, who was the butler to Wayne's own parents. In the story, which flashes back to when Bruce was just a boy and Thomas and Martha were still living, we learn that Jarvis was present during the car accident that injured Martha and supposedly resulted in the death of the youngest Wayne. In fact, Jarvis suggests the car accident was no accident at all, that it had been orchestrated by someone who wanted to see Martha dead because she was willing to stand up to corrupt city officials. Jarvis believes the Court of Owls is responsible, and the story ends with Jarvis being hunted down and murdered by one the Talons.

This backup story by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, and Rafael Albuquerque, is economically and thoughtfully written, and beautifully illustrated. It is also surprisingly moving, penned as a father's final words to his son, revealing himself to be the keeper of dark secrets concerning a noble family. There is a nice little coda at the story's end that finds Alfred standing at his father's grave, wondering whether or not the Court had anything to do with his death. Bruce comes out to comfort him, and we get a nice contrast between the two men. Bruce, younger, fueled by rage, is concerned about finding the "truth" behind Lincoln March and the Court of Owls. In other words, he just can't seem to let it go. When he says as much, Alfred quips, "You'll find the facts. The truth is that even if you and Lincoln share the same blood, you still lost your brother in a car accident when you were just a boy." Alfred, older and wiser, suggests that the best thing for both of them to do is leave the past buried with their lost loved ones, to grieve in all the necessary ways, and to move on. It's a heart-rending moment that one does not expect to find when picking up a comic book. It's enough to make one wish the whole affair had been framed and penned in this way.

So, the second volume wraps up the story begun in the first. There is closure here, an ending that leaves the plot pretty open (it's the nature of the comic book medium), while offering a satisfying resolution to the story's emotional beats (a harder trick to pull off).

To make a personal connection here, I recently learned that my mother miscarried before I was born. It was something of a surreal experience. I was shocked to have learned it, and my mother was shocked I hadn't known. So much of my life has been defined by my only-childness. I do have a half-sibling, but she and I agree that our childhoods were so vastly different, our experiences so opposite, that we do not think of ourselves in the way, I would assume, normal siblings with common experiences do. We are our own people, more like childhood friends. And, for what it's worth, I think our relationship is stronger, better for it. I have often wondered what different trajectory my life might have taken had I lived in the shadow of a true, full-blooded brother or sister, present in my life from either my birth or theirs. But those kinds of thoughts were flights of fancy until that conversation with my mother. I eventually asked one of my older friends (she's basically my second mother) exactly how I should feel about it. But she, like my own personal Alfred, reminded me that processing such things could elucidate some worthwhile emotions, but in the end, some specters are best left to rest undisturbed. I would be a very different person, probably a bit less self-absorbed than I am, but probably a lot more of a jealous person as well.

I remember reading this Batman story years ago, when it first arrived on store shelves. It seems to me to carry even more significance now. Like all good myths, this is a story that ages gracefully alongside us. A story to come back to time after time, if only to rediscover something that catches us all over again. For now, it's going back on the shelf. I look forward to rediscovering it later on down the road.