Batman and Robin Eternal #13

I wish I had a mark of Cain!

Who doesn't want a mark of Cain?! If I'd had a brother, I would have totally murdered him so that I would fall under God's protection too! Lucky Cain! Not only was Cain given God's protection, he was also driven out from under God's sight so that he didn't have to worship him! So he got out of going to church too! And that's just the beginning of the gifts Cain got! Cain was also "cursed" to not be able to do farm work! I wonder how many people you have to kill to be cursed to not have to do any labor at all?! Can I just declare that I did something so bad that I'm cursed even worse than Cain the way Lamech did?! "Oh shit! I totally took God's name in vain like a billion times! I'm cursed seventy-thousand fold more times than Cain. Now I need to go on disability!"

Maybe the assumptions I just made about The Bible are part of the reason the church didn't want any old stupid piece of shit peasant reading and interpreting it on their own. How angry must the church have been at John Wycliffe when he first translated the Latin into English and they began hearing the same stupid questions from ignorant dolts over and over again. Questions like "Where did Cain's wife come from if it wasn't totally his sister and since I haven't read Leviticus all the way through because--let's face it, guys--it's ficken boring, it's totally okay to bang my sister because it had to have been Cain's sister, right? Can you give me an answer quickly because the tip is almost in and I don't want to go to hell in...oh god yes it was worth it!" Also "How angry must the church have been at John Wycliffe?" is totally a question that can be answered because they were this angry at him: 44 years after Wycliffe died, the Pope ordered his bones dug up, crushed into powder, and tossed in a river. You might be thinking, "Holy shit! That's horrible!" But look at it from the church's point of view: now people like me are reading The Bible and pointing out how silly it is. I would never have taken the time to learn Latin just to make fun of The Bible!

Too bad for the Church (capital "C" because it's the one that killed millions to keep itself all powerful. We know which one that one is, right? *huge manga wink*), desecrating Wycliffe's body wasn't warning enough for the many people over the following centuries who continued his work of making The Bible accessible to the masses. It's a long list of people banished, excommunicated, burned at the stake, martyred, and discredited in an effort to keep people from realizing that the story of Abraham and Sarah scamming Pharaoh out of his donkeys in Egypt was repeated at least two more times but in different places and with Isaac and Rebecca as the con-artists. Oh, they were also trying to keep people from knowing a lot more than that! The things in Genesis that make no sense according to Church Doctrine is just the tip of the conspiracy. The part I'm most angry about is where Onan's sin is said to be attributed to spilling his seed on the ground when the real issue is that he broke a contract. Isn't that always the way though? Let the corruption of big business off the hook while blaming the few and simple pleasures of the common people.

I should find some illustrated Bible comics and do commentaries on those! That would be fun! Until then, maybe I should stick to Batman and Robin.

Cassandra Cain begins this issue by reprogramming an ARGUS spy plane to fly over Mother's nursery, stowing away aboard it, and then bailing out when it flies over a Russian pit to Hell. The ARGUS pilots recognize the pit because James Tynion IV was all, "I once heard about how a Russian diamond mine dug too deep and let loose Durin's Bane which killed them all but not before one of them recorded the sounds of the damned because the pit reached Hell unless that was a totally different thing but anyway I'm going to mention it in a comic book because it's so fucking cool, Scott!" And Scott Snyder was all, "Mmmpphhh-ffumffle-mmmbble-fummfffle!" I don't know what that means because Google Translate doesn't have an option to translate "James Tynion's Dick In Your Mouth" into English.

I kid! I know Scott Snyder is a happily married heterosexual who only spent a small fraction of his life dressing up as Disney characters and hanging out in the men's showers at Disneyworld. Besides, if I was really being serious, it would have been James Tynion IV sucking Scott Snyder's dick because Snyder is the one that was hired by DC for his ability and it was James who was hired because of whose dick he knew.

I hope Snyder and Tynion never read this! Or if they do, I hope they have as good a sense of humor as Sterling Gates and not as poor a sense of humor as Cullen Bunn.

Oh! Pictures! I should distract everybody with pictures after that doubly horrible start to a comic book review!

Is Mother supposed to be an accurate representation of all mothers because she's almost exactly like my own!

This is the part where everybody has to forgive me for all of the horrible things I constantly say because they realize I was raised by a horribly manipulative woman who constantly showered love upon every child around her except her own! That's why my heart is a shriveled piece of turkey jerky! Unless it's like that because of all the horror movies I watched and horror books I read and all those things I hid under the front porch.

Oh! Look at this! I don't know which one to rub my dick on first!

You've got to think that after nine seasons and two movies, maybe the truth isn't fucking out there after all, hmm?

What the fuck is television trying to do to me?! I don't have this much time! I'm going to have to give up comic books if television is going to spend this much time turning them into shows.

Cassandra Cain has come to save Mother's children before they're all purged in the move. While she runs about, she remembers learning how to hug a person. She hugs The Sculptor who is appalled because Cassandra wasn't made for hugs. That's Wonder Woman bullshit. At that moment, The Sculptor should have known that Cassandra wasn't right for The Orphan's project. I would be better suited because I not only hate hugs, I also hate shaking hands and nearly every other form of human contact ever invented by humans who, for some reason, need more themselves!

Cassandra does not find any children. But she does find her father, The Orphan! He's got a new bionic arm and possibly a new foot since Harper mentioned he'd lost his leg even though that was probably just her misremembering what happened because the writer of that script didn't really fucking care about the comics written by the other writers.

Cassandra is captured and dumped in a pit full of the corpses of Mother's murdered children. So I was totally wrong that the comic book wouldn't lie to me last week and try to make me believe something that wasn't true! I totally and completely fell for it and super believed that Cassandra had just murdered all of the children! How could I be so dumb?! How could anybody be that dumb as to believe that Cassandra had killed the children or that Batman had murdered some kid's parents?! I mean, who am I? Dick Grayson?

The Orphan reminds Cassandra that the death of these children is on her shoulders because she left Mother and ran to tell Batman. But Batman was too busy battling The Joker so he had to give his Batgum to Cassandra to give to Dick if he died. Which he kind of did. But first he had a message of hope for Cassandra that ended with this vile act.

Ugh! Batman is so fucking touchy-feely!

Cassandra attacks The Orphan but before she can prove to him that she's a better fighter, Dick and Harper show up to help out. Cassandra hugs Harper because she's weak and then a hologram of Mother appears to set up the cliffhanger ending!

Look at it this way, Orphan. You've now earned a chance to redeem yourself now that Mother's betrayed you! Die with the thermonuclear device as you delay it long enough for your daughter to escape and we'll all pretend that the murder of thousands of children and their parents can be forgiven!

Batman and Robin Eternal #13 Rating: No change. I'll say this about this weekly in comparison to the Batman Eternal weekly: at least each week seems to be giving up a piece of the story. Batman Eternal was all about red herrings and rungs in some bad guy ladder leading up to Lincoln March (or, um, the actual villain who wasn't Lincoln March if you haven't read it yet and don't want it spoiled. It was totally somebody else and not Cluemaster at all). It's been a bit of origin overload the last few weeks but at least it all has to do with the main plot of Mother trying to take over the world and Batman trying to beat her by pretending to order a personalized Robin and Cassandra being at the center of it all. And now as I say that, next week will probably be an issue where Alfred deals with getting Titus neutered.

This has been a free taste of my wonderful reviews! This one is free to, you know, try to get people interested in spending one dollar per month to read the rest of my commentaries. As ConfusionGrows said once about some comic book I actually quite liked for some reason (probably because I was on Vicodin): “If Tessatechaitea says this much good about a comic it must have something going for it.” I think the subtext of that is that I'm usually a huge asshole. If you’d like to support me and maybe get me to offer even more freebies (sure, why should you pay when other people will get them for free? Probably because you’re a totally terrific and swell person!), please head on over to Patreon and sign up for one dollar (or more!) per month. It’s totally worth it for the email notifications of new posts alone!