Batman, Volume 7: Endgame (Review)

Batman, Volume 7: Endgame

In Scott Snyder's Endgame, the Joker returns to Gotham with a vengeance. Having been rejected by Batman in the previous story to feature the mad clown, Death of the Family, Joker feels the time for cheap laughs and elaborate parlor tricks has passed. Like a deranged former flame who comes back to key the car to let you know they're not happy with how things turned out, Joker slips back into Gotham and begins making Batman's life a living hell, turning his allies against him, and ultimately unleashing a deadly toxin upon the entire city. Worst of all, it's clear that Joker has deduced Batman's identity—Bruce Wayne is compromised. Reconciliation is not in view here, and Joker isn't subtle about it. Whereas before Joker staged an elaborate madhouse that led Batman through a dark and twisted version of medieval legend in an effort to make a point about the symbiotic nature of their relationship, here Joker comes out with knives and a chainsaw. The point of it all? Batman rejected him, and now he's going to make the hero pay.

Snyder recovers his mythic touch, opening the volume with a story about the ancient Greek tragedy of Orestes and how, at the end of the play, Apollo descends from the heavens to save the characters from destruction. This motif of the "god coming down to help" is the through-line of the story, and is first paralleled in the early pages when Batman is pitted against Superman, the god-like alien descended from above, who has been infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Joker's toxin, turning the iconic hero into a madman. It is here that the seeds of Batman's mortality are planted, as he is nearly killed by the Man of Steel. Though he survives the encounter only through his wits, the point is made quite clearly: the idea of Batman, of all that Batman represents, might be immortal, but Bruce Wayne most certainly is not. Batman can, in fact, be killed. And if there's one character who thinks he has earned the right to do the dirty deed, it's the Dark Knight's greatest foe.

In Death of the Family, Snyder portrayed the Joker as a kind of forlorn, demented lover. He took that peculiar relationship between Batman and his archenemy and explored it in ways both fascinating and disturbing. Endgame is the fallout of that twisted relationship, the sifting through the pieces of the broken glass and trying to figure out the state of things now. And his take on the Joker here is something truly sublime. Because the story moves so quickly—the whole thing is a race against time as Batman tries to reverse the effects of Joker's toxin on the city's residents before it's too late—it is easy to miss the incredible work Snyder has done with the Joker character. Again, Snyder makes astonishingly good use of myth and symbolism here. As the sleuths work to figure out how to stop him, they begin to uncover hints that the Joker is actually much older than anyone could imagine, that he might just be immortal. There's a particularly arresting sequence early in the story in which Batman's ally James Gordon discovers an old photograph, and believes that he sees the Joker's face shrouded in the shadows. Greg Capullo draws this scene and others like it brilliantly, inching the genre into something closer to horror. There were several points at which I was gritting my teeth in nervous anticipation.

This question of the Joker's immortality is set against the realization of Batman's mortality. This is the Dark Knight's dark night of the soul, as he is faced with the horror that the Joker might always be there and has always been there, while he himself will not. Suddenly the Joker is no longer a not-so-funny man with bad jokes in need of therapy; instead, he becomes something like the literal face of evil, the devil incarnate. In Death of the Family, the Joker shows up wearing shabby work clothes with the skin of his old face buckled onto his skull. In Endgame, he shows up wearing a simple black suit. He's got a new face and a no-nonsense haircut. It's everything you might expect from the devil in sleeker, slimmer form—if he decided to turn his skin a chalky white and dye his hair green. There are several panels rendered in jaw-dropping detail by the art team that suggest the Joker is something more than human, that he is an evil as old as time itself, or at least its representative on earth.

Cover art for Batman #40 by Greg Capullo

This imagery is intentional. Take, for example, the brilliant cover art for the original issue #40 of Snyder's Batman run. The image, done by Capullo, uses the old Christian motif of St. George slaying the dragon, only the Joker is cast as the dragon, and Batman is the spear-wielding St. George. The story is clear: Batman is going up against evil itself—and there's only one way this story can end. Snyder is a darn good storyteller who knows how to spin his yarns around themes. There's not a wasted page, as every panel serves to further the plot, and all the literary motifs are brought to the fore. This is the story of how the Batman dies, sacrificing himself to ensure that the Joker, the embodiment of evil, will not rise again. Throughout the story, Bruce Wayne comes face-to-face with his own mortality, and must come to accept his own death. The final brawl feels more like a clash between titans than a scuffle between men. But this is not just pure spectacle, as there is a certain emotional heft that comes with Bruce knowing he is likely going to die here. The question is whether or not he'll be able to stop the Joker from rising again.

Endgame very much feels like a period at the end of the sentence Scott Snyder began way back with The Court of Owls storyline. There are some unresolved plot threads involving a mysterious substance that may be the key to immortality that come back into play here. Much in the same way the Court of Owls are able to raise their Talon assassins from the dead, the Joker seems to have found a way to preserve his life, or at least put himself back together, considering how he met his apparent end back in Death of the Family. So Batman ventures back to visit with the Court of Owls and battles another Talon, all in an attempt to find out how to stop the Joker and his deadly toxin. His investigation also takes him back to the research done by Dr. Karl Helfern, a villain Batman battled during the Zero Year storyline, which puts him on the trail of Dr. Paul Dekker, a genius in regenerative sciences. Dekker's research becomes the key to helping Batman understand the significance of "dionesium" (named after Dionysius, the ancient mythological figure associated with rebirth and ritualistic madness), the substance that has been present in all of Snyder's stories, and the apparent means by which Joker has managed to regenerate.

It is, admittedly, hard to see where Snyder could take the story from here. He has explored Bruce Wayne's early years as Batman, put his own definitive stamp on the character's life with the introduction of the Court of Owls and Lincoln March, and now he has told the tale of how the Batman sacrifices himself to ensure that evil is finally beaten. But anyone who is a student of myth knows that something feels incomplete. Though it appears that the Joker is gone, evil will rise again. The people of Gotham are left without hope. Indeed, the story cannot end here. There must be a resurrection.

Batman: Endgame is a crackling good story, propelled with a sense of urgency and made emotionally resonant by pulling together the threads of all that has come before. It works both as Snyder's most literary story yet involving these characters, and as a stunning finale to his Batman epic, even though we know there is more to come. As always, the art by Capullo, Miki, and Plascencia is wonderful. By using this team of four consistently, there's a kind of visual continuity present in Snyder's run that isn't common to ongoing comic titles like this one. It's a nice thing to see, and helps readers really immerse themselves in this unique world that has become its own kind of modern mythology, complete with its own tropes and iconography. But by taking a literary sledgehammer to the Batman status quo, Scott Snyder has taken an icon of pop culture and reinvested him with a sense of mythic scope and purpose. The end result is a brilliant piece of literature that can stand in the annals of comic book history as one of the greatest Batman stories ever told. In many ways, Snyder's work here is the answer to both snobbery and cynicism, as the former doubts that comic books can be taken seriously as works of literature, and the latter suggests that one must only look to Alan Moore or Grant Morrison and "postmodern deconstructionism" to find solid literary reflection in the world of graphic novels and comics.