Man-Bat

A straightforward, self-contained five-issue story arc by Dave Wielgosz that has Batman sort of fighting and sort of teaming up with Man-Bat (Dr. Kirk Langstrom) to take on Scarecrow.

I don’t really know much about Man-Bat but he struck me as a very similar character to Marvel’s Lizard: another doctor with a monstrous alter ego he keeps trying to find a cure for. But then I guess you could take the same model further back to Dr. Bruce Banner and the Hulk, and before that to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There’s some truth, maybe a lot of truth, to the idea that there are only a handful of stories and characters that we keep recycling. This one expresses the notion that we all have a dark side or primal id that we try to control but that keeps erupting in violent and dangerous ways.

The Freudian model or myth (which can be taken as another version of the same story) is useful here because Langstrom/Man-Bat is literally put on the couch by Harley Quinn (a trained psychologist, she reminds us), and subliminally conditioned by Scarecrow (Dr. Jonathan Crane being another doctor of psychology). Is Langstrom barking up the wrong tree in trying to find a cure for his Man-Bat condition in a lab? Maybe all he needs is therapy. Then again, therapy doesn’t seem to have rid Batman of any of his demons, which are released here by a sonic gun Scarecrow invented that unleashes the basest instincts of all the citizens of Gotham.

It’s not a ground-breaking comic in any way, but I found it quick and entertaining. Sumit Kumar’s art has a bit of a manga flavour to it, and the covers by Kyle Hotz and Alejandro Sánchez are great. I even had to laugh at the cover for issue #1, which clearly has the silhouette of the Bat Signal looking like Man-Bat’s balls hanging down from his crotch. I don’t think that was an accident. They knew what they were doing!

Graphicalex