For Your Consideration: DC’s Batman Vol. 01: The Court of Owls HC
Batman Vol. 1: The Court of Owls
by Robert Greenberger
Batman has faced many deadly threats over the decades, none moreso than the writers who seek to add their own pieces to the mythos. It’s hard to reconcile that the New 52 Batman adventures still acknowledge the previous continuity since Grant Morrison’s conceit is that the previous 70+ years of stories really happened. Also, Grant built up the death of Batman by giving us the preposterous and out-of-leftfield Black Glove as the big bad, the meta villains who have been pulling his strings.
With that in the past, now the new resident scribe, and heir apparent to the mantle of the Bat is Scott Snyder, who made a splash in Detective Comics and now writes Batman. Snyder has been feeling his way through the continuity, doing bizarre nonsense like Jim Gordon Jr. being a contemporary of Dick Grayson but also nicely weaving in the Cobblepots to the history of Gotham City as seen in Gates of Gotham.
When he took over Batman with #1, he began laying the groundwork for the next meta villains to be pulling the strings. Forget the Black Glove, they were posers compared with the Court of Owls.
Snyder’s handiwork will be collected in Batman Volume One: The Court of Owls, a hardcover collection of the first six issues. With some really lovely art by Greg Capullo, this will no doubt be a more satisfying read in one sitting as the threads all come together and make more sense.
Ostensibly, the story is about a series of murders that implicate Dick Grayson but Batman digs deeper and finds the Court. As Snyder explained to Comic Book Resources, owls and bats are natural opponents and oddly, this had been rarely played up over the decades. Snyder is rectifying by picking up the few such instances, beginning with Batman #107.
“I’ve always loved the idea of the owl as an antithetical symbol to the bat and the way that that exists in current Batman mythology, given all the different versions of Owlman and him being a kind of reverse Batman in the anti-matter universe. I love those stories.
“My feeling was that the owl is a symbol that has a lot of potency in Batman already, and I wanted to build a story around the Court of Owls as something that creates a real and tangible threat in the physical Batman world – in the main continuity of the DCU. I wanted to do something that maybe hadn’t been done before that brings all that terror to bear on Batman now so that you do feel, I hope, this creeping sense of dread. You feel a bigger plan at work and that the owl is a symbol of not only a rival to the bat now but also something that’s been laying claim to Gotham for centuries. The owl and the bat almost can’t coexist.”
The Court has its avatar, The Talon, and he is a new creation, poised to challenge Batman both physically and mentally. In Snyder’s mind, it’s all personal with the Court being connected in some way with Lew Moxon, the man who ordered Joe Chill to kill the Waynes, and Chill himself. According to the writer, the Court has been interacting with the Wayne family going back generations, dating back over a century to the events depicted in the current incarnation of All Star Western. Not only that, he’s revealing how they have been involved with the Flying Graysons as well, before their untimely deaths.
“So as much as I’m saying ‘No, this isn’t a story that will revamp how his parents were killed in Crime Alley’ there are connections to that time and connections to what made Bruce who he is and Batman who he is and Nightwing who he is and Alfred who he is and the Wayne family and what they stand for. I think it’ll be very earth-shaking to Batfans as well. We would never change things just to be sensational or anything like that, and certain things to me are sacred, but fans can probably guess what those things would be, and they hold them sacred too.”
The 11-issue arc continues to unfold but clearly, this redefines Batman, Bruce Wayne, Gotham City and the rest of the core cast. Snyder has been confident that editor Mike Marts has been coordinating the new threads and connections so all the other bat-titles reflect what has been going on, leading to future crossovers and no doubt new wrinkles.
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February 7th, 2012 at 5:43 am
Seems very promising. My only problem with this edition will have to be that the story goes on for another 5 issues (which I’m sure will be collected in a second volume), apart from the back-up stories in the ‘Night of the Owls’ cross-over, thus potentially spanning 3 collected editions.
Personally I would therefore wait to see if a collected edition would group all these together in future before getting this.