Batman #29 Review and *SPOILERS*

Never Talk About Politics or Religion At The Dinner Table, Just Murder

Written By: Tom King

Art By: Mikel Janin, Hugo Petrus, June Chung, Clayton Cowles

Cover Price: $2.99

Release Date: August 16, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Time to get back to the War of Jokes and Riddles and hope to god that it starts being something that I care about because each issue in my mind seems to be getting worse and worse and it's not only that we really don't get to see anything from the war and that it's only told to us, it's that nothing seems to make any sense in the timeline that Tom King has presented to us.  In our previous issue we saw Deadshot and Deathstroke go to kill Batman for each of their teams, but once they saw the other it turned into a bloodbath that lasted five days and killed over a hundred people...........even though Batman's supposed to be so good at superhero-ing, that Riddler and Joker had to start this war in the first place.  Let's jump into this issue and see if Batman goes on the offensive here and starts acting a little more like Batman instead of sitting on the sidelines the whole time.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with me being shocked as hell because it seems that Batman's big play to stop the War of Jokes and Riddles is though his secret identity Bruce Wayne, where Bruce invites both opposing sides to this war to Wayne Manor for a nine course dinner, in which the two sides will discuss their reasons behind the war and at the end, Bruce will decide who he's going to back with a billion dollars to make sure that the right side wins............ Batman everybody!

So throughout this issue, the conversations go as the courses are delivered and what I get out of this is that the timeline means fuck all to Tom King because nothing, from the characters personalities to the reasons they have for hating Batman make a lick of sense.  It seems that both the Joker and the Riddler want to kill Batman because he's problematic....... even though the Riddler has faced him once in Zero Year at this point and we have no idea what the Joker's been up to at this point, but the strangeness continues when Riddler describes how he wants to kill all of Batman's Family with him watching before he ends the Bat himself and as it's shown here, it looks like Batman already has the Bat Family going on, which doesn't really add up........... All of this is going on too while I'm just sitting here wondering why the fuck Joker or Riddler would agree on this meeting...... Yeah, a billion dollars is a lot of money, but to have all of the villains show up to Wayne Manor and play nice while Bruce hosts a dinner party for them seems completely fucked up and off to me.  

In the end, Bruce tells them that dinner is over and that he'll decide who he's going to give the money to at a later time, as to keep himself from getting killed by the losing party and as our issue closes we get more lame ass jokes from Joker and Batman talks about how disappointed his mother would be in him because he didn't offer his guests coffee or sherry after dessert.  What happened to my Batman?

That's it for this issue of Batman and I don't know what I'm reading anymore because Tom King has taken these characters so far off the reservation that I don't even recognize them and really, this whole thing can be summed up from a line that the Joker has here, who really seems to be speaking for Tom King himself, "Who cares about the Riddler?" and really, that's a fucked up thing to say because you've made the Riddler this way Tom King and after this is all said and done I'm thinking that a lot of people may say who cares about all of these characters because they're nowhere near the characters that people once fell in love with........ especially Batman.  This is a boring ass issue that just throws continuity to the wind and makes our characters come off less than they should and that aggravates the hell out of me and while I'd like to say that the art was great, even that felt less than it normally does and it might be just because we had our characters sitting at a dinner table the whole issue, but it still felt less.  I'm so ready for the War of Jokes and Riddles to be over and hopefully with that, a new writer coming on board soon.

Bits and Pieces:

If you've thought that the War of Jokes and Riddles was stalling up to this point.......... well, you haven't seen stalling like this before and while it stalls, it also throws continuity and timelines to the wind and makes our characters look terrible in the process.  I'm so ready for the War of Jokes and Riddles to be over because it seems that each issue keeps getting worse and worse.

5/10