Batwing #27

Batwing's covers continue to be twelve times more interesting than the story inside.

Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na Batwing? Batwing? Bat. Wing?

How do you get to be a writing team at DC? Why would DC want to pay two writers when they could just hire one really acerbic and cynical piece of shit blogger to do all the writing by himself? Or herself if I were female. I mean if the blogger they decided to hire was female. Maybe Jimmy and Justin simply split the standard pay for a single writer doing the same job? Perhaps Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti cannot physically be separated without great harm or possible death to one or the other? Maybe Justin Gray is simply a puppet that Jimmy Palmiotti believes is alive and so DC gives him writing credits to keep Jimmy Palmiotti from breaking down and collapsing into a world inside his own mind? I wonder why Justin Gray didn't get a credit on Harley Quinn? Does Amanda Conner lock Justin away in a trunk in the attic when she wants to spend time alone with her husband?

I suppose I could ask Lord Google about Justin Gray but then I might be disappointed that he isn't a puppet and I'd have to go lie down for awhile and rethink everything I know about the way the world works. So I guess I'll just read Batwing which was at a nice point in the story where I don't really need to remember what was happening last issue. Clean slate! Or as they say in Latin, "Benicio del Toro!"

This issue begins with Batwing remembering that he was once Flying Fox but then Gotham City became the safest city in America and now GOTHTOPIA! I forgot all about Gothtopia when I said this issue was going to be all Benicio del Toro! I wonder if every time Lucas Fox would drop down in front of the criminals and yell, "The Flying Fox will stop you!", he'd give a little wink and giggle about how his vigilante name was playing off of his secret identity name! And as he did that, the criminals would stop and look at each other confused and say, "What the fuck?" and "Did he just say Flying Fox?" and "What the fuck is a Flying Fox?" and "Actually, a Flying Fox is a type of bat, one of the 'megachiroptera' or 'megabat'!" That last guy was the smart-ass bitch of the group that none of the other criminals could stand because his stupid name was Lord Google.

Gotham City! Now with Hot Air Balloons instead of menacing Black Blimps watching your every move!

I thought about scanning this whole page because it demonstrates nicely how Gotham is not what it seems and how Lucas Fox is oblivious to what's really going on and how he hasn't shaved in a week. But I really wanted to focus on the hot air balloons and not the dog attacking that guy and the person committing suicide by jumping off of a roof. I wonder if you tried to masturbate in Gothtopia, you'd actually just wind up punching yourself in the genitals over and over again?

Lucas remembers four days ago at the Gotham Knights versus the Coast City Emerald Warriors game how he and his father got totally gay for each other in Bruce Wayne's private box. It was the feel good moment of the year! But in reality, they were probably sitting in a dumpster watching cockroaches fight over a crust of pizza while some itinerant vagabond sucked them off.

You know what they were really knocking together! GOTHTOPIA!

Lucas Fox finally realizes something might be wrong when he checks his phone and realizes it's Wednesday instead of Monday. Fuck, that happens to me all the time! Except I don't have a phone to let me know what day it really is. I just wander around like a vacant-eyed zombie until I turn on the television and wonder why Judge Judy is playing golf and think, "What the fuck? Oh! It must be the weekend!" But Lucas Fox doesn't usually have that problem, so he runs back to his lab to run some tests. Also, the phone that told him it was a different day was probably actually a piece of dog shit and his lab is probably an overflowing honey bucket.

Meanwhile, The Victimizer and Rat Catcher are busy in their actual lab creating Viper to sell on the streets. The Victimizer has taken control of four Gotham Gangs (Anubis, The Corpse Corps, Speaker Heads, and The Darklings. Too bad he couldn't get The Shuteye Train on his side. Those guys are bad ass!) to help him distribute Viper across Gotham. And this is the perfect time to sell it because everybody will think it's a delicious bag of Pop Rocks that they get to take intravenously!

The Victimizer's plan is to make a lot of money. But with Rat Catcher's help, he also wants to punch Lucas Fox in his smug face. Neither of these fellas is affected by Scarecrow's Gothtopia Gas. The Victimizer because of reasons and The Rat Catcher because he's wearing a jar on his head with a rat in it. He calls his invention "Bell Jar Gas Breather Rat Pal." Fuck it. I'd buy one.

Meanwhile Lucius Fox is about to blow his brains out in the boardroom at Wayne Enterprises. Since Gothtopia shows the happy-go-lucky side of everything, I can't even begin to imagine what he's really doing that this is better! Fucking a corpse? Tearing the heads off of kittens? Punching a baby in the nuts?

I know! I know! I read that fucking huge Detective Comics already! You don't have to explain to me how the Gothtopia Toxin is causing people to go mad and commit suicide. But you wouldn't think a place where people were committing suicide in droves would ever be labeled the safest place in America. No, wait. I'm wrong about that. Our media fucking sucks dead donkey assholes. Of course they wouldn't tell the whole story! Although they might replay a viral video of a kitten riding a dolphin for the 0.05% of people that don't have access to the internet and still think newscasters and journalists are not total fucking puppet whores.

Now I've completely been derailed in my reading of Batwing #27 because distractedbyshinyobjects posted David Foster Wallace's Tense Present, an essay on grammar and more grammar. I bring this up because my fascination with grammar does not help in any way with my ability to ever get any of it right. I love to read about improper usage but fuck all if anything ever actually sticks. Grammar rules are like names, you either have an innate ability to remember them or you simply blunder about pretending that you could call the person you're talking with by their given name if you only wanted to. I suppose if I had somebody constantly pointing out my errors (full-time job, anybody?), I'd eventually learn the grammar. As David Foster Wallace points out, most SNOOTs (grammar Nazis, Language Police, you know. Read the article! He explains it) become SNOOTs because they had at least one parent pointing out the flaws in their language skills on a daily basis. One of my few bookmarked "read when I get a chance" pages (should "read when I get a chance" have been hyphenated instead of quotatated?) is Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage. It's sometimes helpful but mostly I just find it entertaining. Now I really think I need to pick up Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Maybe I'll learn me somethin'! Of course, I still haven't made it very far through Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, so maybe I should start by finishing that up! Or finishing that! Or finishing it? Fuck you, English!

Anyway, back to GOTHTOPIA to see if Lucius Fox kills himself!

Surprise! He doesn't! The Flying Fox stops him by crashing through a steel-reinforced window! Or windowpane! Fucking English! Looking up "windowpane" via TheFreeDictionary.whatevs, I see that it's also slang for "LSD." My friend Bob and I used to call doing LSD "carving pumpkins" because we had once planned to do that while on LSD. It's probably a good thing that we never did or one of us would have had a really scary, gory Jack-o'-lantern and the other one would have been dead.

Once Lucas Fox has his dad safely tucked away in his Honey Bucket, The Flying Fox creates a serum to ward off The Scarecrow's Gothtopia Gas.

Hey! Speaking of carving pumpkins!

Lucius Fox doesn't remember anything that happened while he was drugged because amnesia is "a byproduct of surviving withdrawal from the drug." But I think Batwing and Batman are able to remember! Maybe they go through the withdrawal. There is a single panel of Batwing falling to one knee and saying, "Well, that sucked." That must have been the withdrawal which he didn't want anybody else to go through so he changed up the serum for civilian ingestion.

This is the same logic that should have everybody suspecting that Bruce Wayne is Batman! And there are even more clues to Batman's identity with the links between his sidekicks and Bruce's wards!

When Lucius heads back to administer the cure to his daughters, he finds his daughter Tam is missing. But Lucas is there to get his dose! Batwing should have given his father a placebo dose for Lucas. It would have been easy to label all the syringes with who they were for seeing as how Batwing could have convinced Lucius that different body weights needed different doses. He wouldn't want to give Luke's dose for a 190 pound man to his daughter Tiff who is a seventy-five pound little smart-ass. But Batwing wasn't thinking clearly. Who does after they've just come down off of a hallucinogenic? I'm surprised he's not just sitting vacantly on the couch drinking lots of water and stuffing pork rinds into his mouth as he watches old reruns of "In Search Of."

Luke and Lucius head off to find Tam but they're not going to find her this issue because she's been kidnapped to be used as cheese bait to draw in Lukas Fox so The Victimizer can destroy him!

I suppose Rat Catcher and Mouse are going to have to have a rat-off at some point.

Batwing #27 Rating: +2 Ranking. I don't know what it is about people with Rat Powers but they really pull at my heartstrings. And also my G-string. Don't mistake this comic book getting a +2 Ranking as being anywhere near equivalent to a comic book in the top fifteen getting a rating of "No change." I rank on a curve! A Deadman's Curve! Also, pro-tip for DC Comic Book creators that want to get into my good graces: images of lots of cute little rats really help lighten my mood!