TITLE: Batman: Dead to Rights
AUTHOR: Andrew Kreisberg
PENCILLER: Scott McDaniel. Cover by Stephanie Roux.
COLLECTS: Batman Confidential #22-25, 29-30
FORMAT: Softcover
PUBLISHER: DC Comics
PRICE: $14.99
RELEASE DATE: December 1

By Rob Siebert
Editor, Fanboy Wonder

As you may have guessed, Dead to Rights is a Joker story. And it’s a decent Joker story. Not a great one, but a decent one. What holds it back is that it forces you to suspend your disbelief a little more than your usual superhero story does.

Dead To Rights has more than a few echoes of The Dark Knight in it. It’s set shortly after Batman apprehends The Joker for the first time. He spends the entire story in prison, so we get a lot of talky scenes between he and various characters, most notably Batman. This is obviously reminiscent of the incredible scenes between Heath Ledger and the other actors in Dark Knight.

The story kicks off after our Harlequin of Hell uses his one allowed phone call to convince a newlywed cop’s wife to hang herself because she (supposedly) has a rare blood disease that will cause her to be a burden on her husband. It’s a really strong opener, in the sense that you believe the characters would be asking themselves: “What kind of monster is this?”

The rest of the story deals with the police officer’s reaction, and subsequent transformation into a vigilante called Bad Cop. We also see The Joker on trial, as Gotham City officials are baffled by his pure unadulterated evil. He even manages to pull off a couple of murders while in captivity.

That’s where things start to get a little too far-fetched for me. For instance, there’s a scene where he’s on trial, facing a judge who has a severe peanut allergy. So The Joker manages to flick a peanut into the judge’s water glass without anyone else in the courtroom noticing. Later, we get a scene where he shakes a banana peel out of his pants leg so a prosecuting attorney can slip on it and break her neck. These moments fit The Joker’s twisted sense of humor very well, but even as a kid I would have rolled my eyes a bit.

But the real kicker comes in the second half of the book, when our Bad Cop is put in prison…in a cell NEXT to The Joker’s. What, did they put Joker in charge of prisoner placement or something? I’ve seen this trick before, and I’ve never understood it. I know it provides plot convenience, but even in the most fantastic of fantasy worlds, how do you justify putting a prisoner next to the man that killed his wife? That boggles my mind.

Cover to Batman Confidential #30. Image from comicartcommunity.com.

In the second half of the story, we see Renee Montoya as a rookie cop, as well as a young Barbara Gordon. I was fine with Montoya, but I really wish they hadn’t put Barbara in this story. I feel like that’s a card which has been played too many times, even though I can only recall it being done twice. That in itself should speak volumes. How many times in one story can you get away with winking at your readers like that? “Hey, see this girl? She becomes a superhero later on!” ” *head on table* Yes, we know. Now on with the story…

Also, I don’t like Scott McDaniel. He’s been a fairly regular artist on Batman titles for the past several years, so I’ve had plenty of exposure to his stuff, and it’s just not to my liking. Sorry, Scott.

On the up side, some of the dialogue in this book is very strong. Kriesberg writes a good (borderline great) Joker. As I noted, it’s reminiscent of The Dark Knight, but not so much that it takes you out of the story. Kreisberg takes it a bit too far though. He implies, and even flat out states on one of the covers, that the other supervillains that would show up in Gotham, specifically The Riddler, are the product of his presence. They are his “legacy,” so to speak. This is an idea I’ve never agreed with. I think of The Joker as the first and the worst, but I don’t connect his influence in any way to the origins of villains like Riddler, Scarecrow, etc.

Oye, this book is more of a mess than I remembered it being. It’s an unpleasant surprise, as I was very happy with Kreisberg’s work on Green Arrow/Black Canary. Hopefully he’ll get another crack at Batman someday, because this book was a sad disappointment.

RATING: 4.5/10

Front page image from comicartcommunity.com.

For more from Andrew Kreisberg, check out Green Arrow/Black Canary: Big Game and Green Arrow/Black Canary: Five Stages.