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Description
THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS.
Written by: Scott Snyder.
Illustrated by: JOCK.
Based on the long running Batman comic published by: DC Comics.
Rated: 15 (contains scenes of violence, gore, murder and horrifying imagery).

One of my biggest criticisms of DC Comics is the refusal to paint Batman as anything but an antagonist, while having no issues depicting Superman as Space 1940s-Man. Maybe it's my own personal biases sneaking in here, but I've never bought the idea that the all powerful boy scout who rescues cats out of trees to be a goose stepper, while the paranoid billionaire who uses his money to beat up poor people and spy on everyone as a heroic figure. At least Marvel we're willing to take a gamble and portray Iron Man as an authoritarian, or Spider-Man in a darker light on occasion.

So you could imagine I gravitated very heavily around the concept of The Batman Who Laughs: an alternative universe (because comics) where Batman becomes a nightmarish version of himself and decides “I wanna kill everybody, because no one can stop me!” When you really look at the concept of The Batman Who Laughs, it sounds like a fan-character somebody on DeviantArt would come up with (no offence). “Part Joker, Part.Batman. All supervillain” is an interesting idea, but it’s a shame DC drove him so far into the ground he burst out the other side and started speaking Chinese.

I think that’s also a testament to one of the greatest sins regarding superhero comics: Their inability to leave something the fuck alone. You'll get unique and interesting ideas like Venom, Deadpool, or The Batman Who Laughs and then suddenly they just have to repackage it, pollute it and constantly put it out there with pointless editions and side characters. Suddenly, you have things like The Superman Who Laughs, The Wonder Woman Who Laughs, the Harley Quinn Who Laughs, The Michael J. Fox Who Laughs, The Man Who Actually Laughs At Amy Schumer Jokes and many other needless offshoots.

There's only one Vazul for a reason.

It's actually quite fascinating to watch the DC fandom go from "this is a really cool character", to "kill this fucker off already!!" in such short succession. While he truly did overstay his welcome, I decided to take a look at one of the earlier Batman Who Laughed stories to see where this character went wrong.

Also: To help differentiate the two, I’ll refer to our Batman as 'Bruce Wayne.'

The story is written by Scott Snyder, who actually had a decent run on Batman for a while, while the artwork is by a UK artist known as JOCK. To comment on his art quickly, he does handle the gritty, dark horror aspects of The Batman Who Dabs well, but the human characters have these Ken doll-like eyes and it's really off-putting. This is a man who was intended to draw horror comics, not superhero ones.

While the story is more or less told competently, there’s a lot of batshit ideas in here that really feel like pointless faffery for the sake of it. Early on, Bruce Wayne states that “Joker's heart contains a super toxin that will be released when he dies to create the next Joker.” I’m sorry, what? Snyder, sweetheart, he’s not a Green Lantern, okay. I’m pretty sure you can just snap Joker’s neck with ease and his magical super blood won’t turn you into him.

How about, just throwing this out there, he became The Batman Who Wiggles because it was a version of The Dark Knight that killed the Joker, in retaliation for the death of Jason Todd. He truly snapped, went over the edge and broke his one rule because he lost what he felt was his son; kind of like how Injustice Superman turned to the dark side because of the death of his wife and unborn child. There you go. I've just given you a more convincing backstory for this character. No super toxins or magic voodoo blood required. People have these things called EMOTIONS, that can be twisted and warped at the slightest bit of trauma. Then again, I’m not a superhero comic writer, I suppose.

I should quickly mention that this story is a slight continuation of the DC event "Dark Knights: Metal" that saw Batman and Joker team up to face down their bastardised doppelganger. Since that story, The Batman Who Dribbles teleported himself to the main DC Universe (because comics) and is out to prove to Bruce Wayne he’s “the worst Batman ever.” Instead of just, I don’t know, killing him or something.

Joker comes up with the 'genius idea' (sarcasm) that in order for Bruce to beat the Batman Who Never Loses Because The Writer Said So, he must become the deranged smiling idiot to begin with. An interesting idea, but allow me to propose an alternative one: Have Superman sniped this jabroni all the way from Metropolis with his heat vision. Problem solved. Roll credits. This also has no lasting consequences when you consider this is the main DC Universe Batman. While granted, we never did see the timeline of how long it took The Batman Who Always Pays His Taxes to transform into the drooling idiot, yet every time the comic informs us Bruce is “about to become him!” He never actually does and drags this shit out longer than Return of the King.

A slight criticism with the story is the rather poor choice with certain word and thought balloons. I get that the comic needs to differentiate the words of both Bruce and The Batman Who Saves Money On His Car Insurance, but there had to have been a better way than this barely readable red text on black or grey background. There are moments with the black background that the text is just about readable. I just wish they put it in a font that wasn't so stylized. It’s the text with the grey background that makes things almost impossible to read. I get it, we want The Batman Who Says NUH UH to be all creepy and disturbing, but when I’m having to squint to read what the goober is even saying, you’ve made a mistake. An easier way to differentiate the two is to have Bruce's dialogue with a white background and black text, but have The Batman Who Can Do The Fandango's dialogue with a white background and red text. The way they've done it is painful to read.

The other downside to the method of storytelling here is that Scott Snyder feels he has to fill every page with a million words. Page after page is littered with all these thought balloons that serve as either a massive exposition dump, or informing the reader exactly how he wants you to feel about this situation. It became such a bother after a while that I stopped reading them. Not that it really mattered because, without reading the small essay of thought balloons, the story is shite regardless.

The grand master plan of The Batman Who Has Something Stuck In His Teeth is to kill a bunch of Bruce Wayne’s who had happy lives, drain some of their blood to mix with a Joker toxin to infect the entire city of Gotham - all to make everyone as petty and one dimensional as he is. Here's my question: Why exactly does he need alternate reality Bruce Wayne's blood, but specifically Bruce Wayne’s that have had happy lives? Why not just a sample of his own blood mixed with the Titan formula from the Arkham games would have made more sense and would have been less convoluted. I'm not entirely sure why he needs to kill six happy Bruce Wayne’s specifically and present him with the corpses. It's like watching a cat bring its owner dead mice or frogs.

"look hooman! I brought you a present!"

I'm not joking when I say this, but you could literally chop out half of the plot of this comic and it would have been improved by 100%. Snyder spends far too much time trying to justify the actions of The Batman With Tooth Decay, that it became a chore to read this. I’ve had to put this book down on 3 separate occasions, because I felt like I wasn't making any headway with the story at large. It just goes round and round in circles and never seems to go anywhere. There's two separate moments in this book where The Batman Whose Lactose Intolerant decides to start shit with the Penguin and murders the Court of Owls for no reason whatsoever. I get that Scott created the Court of Owls, but this segment came across as nothing but pure egotism and self-indulgent tripe.

If you're wondering why I keep coming up with all these stupid nicknames for the main villain, It's because I'm really tired of typing out The Batman Who Laughs. I'd say make a drinking game out they say it in the book, but you'll be dead within five minutes.

To say something positive briefly about The Batman Who's Into BDSM, I think it's a pretty good character design. You really get the feeling this is a Batman if he was a creepypasta, and if he was he'd probably called something like Batman.exe. Unfortunately, a good character design cannot save flat character motivation.

The real low point of this story is how invincible The Batman With All The Prep-Time truly is. Every single time Bruce Wayne has this backseat boy dead to rights, he simply goes: “Well ACKCHEWALLEY!! This was part of my plan all along!" and it becomes more infuriating each time he does it. He's essentially that kid you all knew growing up that would invent special powers or special armour to get out any bullshit while you're playing cops and robbers or something.

youtu.be/JPA9bKz2meI?si=YMme4N…

Oh yeah, I completely forgot, he also teams up with another alternate universe Batman who is essentially if Batman was the Punisher. In fact, the graphic novel contains an entire chapter to explain where this guy came from. I really didn’t need the life story of this paper thin and shallow as shit character. What would made it a little bit sweeter, and more personal to Bruce, was if The Batman Who Hired Sweet Baby Inc brought along an evil version of Jason Todd that became Batman at the end of the Battle for the Cowl storyline. Though I get the suspicion that Scott Snyder felt rather pleased with himself for writing "Batman, but Punisher" onto a piece of paper.

While it is nice to see Bruce on the backfoot for a change, it really cemented how insufferable he’d become if he was evil; the comic even calls him “The Batman Who Always Wins.”

Now I know what someone's going to say at this point: "This is rich coming from the guy who created Vazul!" That’s a pretty fair argument, but I will counter it with the basis of execution. The real appeal of Vazul’s character is he is a complete mockery of overpowered characters and Gary Stu/Mary Sue villains. He simply doesn't give a shit and does whatever he wants - That's the joke. But with The Batman Who likes Hawaiian Pizza, they're being serious with it and it comes across as more infuriating and childish.

Then again, when you really think about it, The Batman Who Smells Like Lavender feels like a mockery of everything people hype up or imagine about Batman. He’s an overpowered Gary Stu, has every gadget, every contingency and all the prep time in the world to beat up everyone from Superman to the Robotic Richard Simmons. The fact he all but says “BECAUSE I’M BATMAN!!!” when confronting Penguin all but submits the idea to me. If that is the intent, though I must say the joke wears a bit thin after the second chapter of this book, as the character really began to get on my tits.

Also, Batman purists are not gonna like this, but I think this book really amplifies all of my key issues with Batman as a concept. This idea he can beat up everyone with practice and prep time is just a bit ridiculous because when you really break it down. This is just a billionaire with daddy issues in a fursuit. What’s stopping Superman from punching this fucker into orbit, smacking him back down and watching him turn into a red smear on the pavement… Besides being a sweet farm boy who is his best friend of course?

Superman: Hi, best buddy (hugs)
Batman: (grumbles) I am the night.

I get it. Batman is DC Comics' biggest and greatest cash cow, but even Marvel makes Spider-Man incredibly fallible on multiple occasions. I think I finally understand why they killed The Batman Who Screwed Brett Hart off as fast as possible - Because the audience quickly turned on him at a lightspeed. Even Roman Reigns was jealous of how much people were hating this fucker. As a dark and quirky evil Batman, it’s a passable idea that needed time to breathe. However, he eventually fused with Doctor Manhattan to become THE DARKEST KNIGHT. By that point, the damage had been done and people actively cheered when Wonder Woman yeeted him into the sun.

Green Lantern: You couldn’t have done that earlier?
Wonder Woman: … I hate you.

(Conclusion)
As a concept, The Batman Who Laughs is a nice idea on paper. In practice, it’s a bloated mess and made me actively dislike the idea of an evil Batman. This graphic novel is a tangled mess of stupidity that badly tries to justify what’s happening, when it could have kept the focus on Bruce Wayne against The Batman Who Asks “Fucking Magnets, how do they work?” (okay one last one).

This is not a book worth reading and I’d suggest you wait for the inevitable animated movie adaptation down the road. At least that might be able to salvage this utter bollocks.

Description
THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS.
Written by: Scott Snyder.
Illustrated by: JOCK.
Based on the long running Batman comic published by: DC Comics.
Rated: 15 (contains scenes of violence, gore, murder and horrifying imagery).

One of my biggest criticisms of DC Comics is the refusal to paint Batman as anything but an antagonist, while having no issues depicting Superman as Space 1940s-Man. Maybe it's my own personal biases sneaking in here, but I've never bought the idea that the all powerful boy scout who rescues cats out of trees to be a goose stepper, while the paranoid billionaire who uses his money to beat up poor people and spy on everyone as a heroic figure. At least Marvel we're willing to take a gamble and portray Iron Man as an authoritarian, or Spider-Man in a darker light on occasion.

So you could imagine I gravitated very heavily around the concept of The Batman Who Laughs: an alternative universe (because comics) where Batman becomes a nightmarish version of himself and decides “I wanna kill everybody, because no one can stop me!” When you really look at the concept of The Batman Who Laughs, it sounds like a fan-character somebody on DeviantArt would come up with (no offence). “Part Joker, Part.Batman. All supervillain” is an interesting idea, but it’s a shame DC drove him so far into the ground he burst out the other side and started speaking Chinese.

I think that’s also a testament to one of the greatest sins regarding superhero comics: Their inability to leave something the fuck alone. You'll get unique and interesting ideas like Venom, Deadpool, or The Batman Who Laughs and then suddenly they just have to repackage it, pollute it and constantly put it out there with pointless editions and side characters. Suddenly, you have things like The Superman Who Laughs, The Wonder Woman Who Laughs, the Harley Quinn Who Laughs, The Michael J. Fox Who Laughs, The Man Who Actually Laughs At Amy Schumer Jokes and many other needless offshoots.

There's only one Vazul for a reason.

It's actually quite fascinating to watch the DC fandom go from "this is a really cool character", to "kill this fucker off already!!" in such short succession. While he truly did overstay his welcome, I decided to take a look at one of the earlier Batman Who Laughed stories to see where this character went wrong.

Also: To help differentiate the two, I’ll refer to our Batman as 'Bruce Wayne.'

The story is written by Scott Snyder, who actually had a decent run on Batman for a while, while the artwork is by a UK artist known as JOCK. To comment on his art quickly, he does handle the gritty, dark horror aspects of The Batman Who Dabs well, but the human characters have these Ken doll-like eyes and it's really off-putting. This is a man who was intended to draw horror comics, not superhero ones.

While the story is more or less told competently, there’s a lot of batshit ideas in here that really feel like pointless faffery for the sake of it. Early on, Bruce Wayne states that “Joker's heart contains a super toxin that will be released when he dies to create the next Joker.” I’m sorry, what? Snyder, sweetheart, he’s not a Green Lantern, okay. I’m pretty sure you can just snap Joker’s neck with ease and his magical super blood won’t turn you into him.

How about, just throwing this out there, he became The Batman Who Wiggles because it was a version of The Dark Knight that killed the Joker, in retaliation for the death of Jason Todd. He truly snapped, went over the edge and broke his one rule because he lost what he felt was his son; kind of like how Injustice Superman turned to the dark side because of the death of his wife and unborn child. There you go. I've just given you a more convincing backstory for this character. No super toxins or magic voodoo blood required. People have these things called EMOTIONS, that can be twisted and warped at the slightest bit of trauma. Then again, I’m not a superhero comic writer, I suppose.

I should quickly mention that this story is a slight continuation of the DC event "Dark Knights: Metal" that saw Batman and Joker team up to face down their bastardised doppelganger. Since that story, The Batman Who Dribbles teleported himself to the main DC Universe (because comics) and is out to prove to Bruce Wayne he’s “the worst Batman ever.” Instead of just, I don’t know, killing him or something.

Joker comes up with the 'genius idea' (sarcasm) that in order for Bruce to beat the Batman Who Never Loses Because The Writer Said So, he must become the deranged smiling idiot to begin with. An interesting idea, but allow me to propose an alternative one: Have Superman sniped this jabroni all the way from Metropolis with his heat vision. Problem solved. Roll credits. This also has no lasting consequences when you consider this is the main DC Universe Batman. While granted, we never did see the timeline of how long it took The Batman Who Always Pays His Taxes to transform into the drooling idiot, yet every time the comic informs us Bruce is “about to become him!” He never actually does and drags this shit out longer than Return of the King.

A slight criticism with the story is the rather poor choice with certain word and thought balloons. I get that the comic needs to differentiate the words of both Bruce and The Batman Who Saves Money On His Car Insurance, but there had to have been a better way than this barely readable red text on black or grey background. There are moments with the black background that the text is just about readable. I just wish they put it in a font that wasn't so stylized. It’s the text with the grey background that makes things almost impossible to read. I get it, we want The Batman Who Says NUH UH to be all creepy and disturbing, but when I’m having to squint to read what the goober is even saying, you’ve made a mistake. An easier way to differentiate the two is to have Bruce's dialogue with a white background and black text, but have The Batman Who Can Do The Fandango's dialogue with a white background and red text. The way they've done it is painful to read.

The other downside to the method of storytelling here is that Scott Snyder feels he has to fill every page with a million words. Page after page is littered with all these thought balloons that serve as either a massive exposition dump, or informing the reader exactly how he wants you to feel about this situation. It became such a bother after a while that I stopped reading them. Not that it really mattered because, without reading the small essay of thought balloons, the story is shite regardless.

The grand master plan of The Batman Who Has Something Stuck In His Teeth is to kill a bunch of Bruce Wayne’s who had happy lives, drain some of their blood to mix with a Joker toxin to infect the entire city of Gotham - all to make everyone as petty and one dimensional as he is. Here's my question: Why exactly does he need alternate reality Bruce Wayne's blood, but specifically Bruce Wayne’s that have had happy lives? Why not just a sample of his own blood mixed with the Titan formula from the Arkham games would have made more sense and would have been less convoluted. I'm not entirely sure why he needs to kill six happy Bruce Wayne’s specifically and present him with the corpses. It's like watching a cat bring its owner dead mice or frogs.

"look hooman! I brought you a present!"

I'm not joking when I say this, but you could literally chop out half of the plot of this comic and it would have been improved by 100%. Snyder spends far too much time trying to justify the actions of The Batman With Tooth Decay, that it became a chore to read this. I’ve had to put this book down on 3 separate occasions, because I felt like I wasn't making any headway with the story at large. It just goes round and round in circles and never seems to go anywhere. There's two separate moments in this book where The Batman Whose Lactose Intolerant decides to start shit with the Penguin and murders the Court of Owls for no reason whatsoever. I get that Scott created the Court of Owls, but this segment came across as nothing but pure egotism and self-indulgent tripe.

If you're wondering why I keep coming up with all these stupid nicknames for the main villain, It's because I'm really tired of typing out The Batman Who Laughs. I'd say make a drinking game out they say it in the book, but you'll be dead within five minutes.

To say something positive briefly about The Batman Who's Into BDSM, I think it's a pretty good character design. You really get the feeling this is a Batman if he was a creepypasta, and if he was he'd probably called something like Batman.exe. Unfortunately, a good character design cannot save flat character motivation.

The real low point of this story is how invincible The Batman With All The Prep-Time truly is. Every single time Bruce Wayne has this backseat boy dead to rights, he simply goes: “Well ACKCHEWALLEY!! This was part of my plan all along!" and it becomes more infuriating each time he does it. He's essentially that kid you all knew growing up that would invent special powers or special armour to get out any bullshit while you're playing cops and robbers or something.

youtu.be/JPA9bKz2meI?si=YMme4N…

Oh yeah, I completely forgot, he also teams up with another alternate universe Batman who is essentially if Batman was the Punisher. In fact, the graphic novel contains an entire chapter to explain where this guy came from. I really didn’t need the life story of this paper thin and shallow as shit character. What would made it a little bit sweeter, and more personal to Bruce, was if The Batman Who Hired Sweet Baby Inc brought along an evil version of Jason Todd that became Batman at the end of the Battle for the Cowl storyline. Though I get the suspicion that Scott Snyder felt rather pleased with himself for writing "Batman, but Punisher" onto a piece of paper.

While it is nice to see Bruce on the backfoot for a change, it really cemented how insufferable he’d become if he was evil; the comic even calls him “The Batman Who Always Wins.”

Now I know what someone's going to say at this point: "This is rich coming from the guy who created Vazul!" That’s a pretty fair argument, but I will counter it with the basis of execution. The real appeal of Vazul’s character is he is a complete mockery of overpowered characters and Gary Stu/Mary Sue villains. He simply doesn't give a shit and does whatever he wants - That's the joke. But with The Batman Who likes Hawaiian Pizza, they're being serious with it and it comes across as more infuriating and childish.

Then again, when you really think about it, The Batman Who Smells Like Lavender feels like a mockery of everything people hype up or imagine about Batman. He’s an overpowered Gary Stu, has every gadget, every contingency and all the prep time in the world to beat up everyone from Superman to the Robotic Richard Simmons. The fact he all but says “BECAUSE I’M BATMAN!!!” when confronting Penguin all but submits the idea to me. If that is the intent, though I must say the joke wears a bit thin after the second chapter of this book, as the character really began to get on my tits.

Also, Batman purists are not gonna like this, but I think this book really amplifies all of my key issues with Batman as a concept. This idea he can beat up everyone with practice and prep time is just a bit ridiculous because when you really break it down. This is just a billionaire with daddy issues in a fursuit. What’s stopping Superman from punching this fucker into orbit, smacking him back down and watching him turn into a red smear on the pavement… Besides being a sweet farm boy who is his best friend of course?

Superman: Hi, best buddy (hugs)
Batman: (grumbles) I am the night.

I get it. Batman is DC Comics' biggest and greatest cash cow, but even Marvel makes Spider-Man incredibly fallible on multiple occasions. I think I finally understand why they killed The Batman Who Screwed Brett Hart off as fast as possible - Because the audience quickly turned on him at a lightspeed. Even Roman Reigns was jealous of how much people were hating this fucker. As a dark and quirky evil Batman, it’s a passable idea that needed time to breathe. However, he eventually fused with Doctor Manhattan to become THE DARKEST KNIGHT. By that point, the damage had been done and people actively cheered when Wonder Woman yeeted him into the sun.

Green Lantern: You couldn’t have done that earlier?
Wonder Woman: … I hate you.

(Conclusion)
As a concept, The Batman Who Laughs is a nice idea on paper. In practice, it’s a bloated mess and made me actively dislike the idea of an evil Batman. This graphic novel is a tangled mess of stupidity that badly tries to justify what’s happening, when it could have kept the focus on Bruce Wayne against The Batman Who Asks “Fucking Magnets, how do they work?” (okay one last one).

This is not a book worth reading and I’d suggest you wait for the inevitable animated movie adaptation down the road. At least that might be able to salvage this utter bollocks.