Batman Beatdown #3

You can't win 'em all, even if you're Batman, and you therefore win about 99-percent of 'em.

In our ongoing efforts to chronicle the best ass-kickings that Batman, one of comicdom's premier assk-kickers, has endured, we've previously seen Deathstroke totally take him apart, and watched Etrigan, The Demon beat the hell out of him. Clearly Batman has a little more trouble dealing with metahumans and supernatural beings than your plain old regular joes.

There is one regular joe who has suceeded in taking Batman down, however—one Joe Dredd.

It happened in this comic book,



1991's Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgment on Gotham, which was written by John Wagner and Alan Grant, and fully-painted by Simon Bisley.

This is Fourteen-Year-Old Caleb's favortie comic book, and even Thirty-Year-Old Caleb still sees a lot to like about. It's significant for several reasons. Personally, it was my fourth Batman comic and my first Judge Dredd comic. Less personally, it was the first of the three prestige-format comic book meetings between Batman and Dredd, and the only good one.

The plot involves Mean Machine Angel coming to Gotham City via somekind of teleporting maguffin machine. Judge Death follows him, and meets up with the Scarecrow, and it takes the combined forces of Batman, Dredd and Judge Anderson to settle the villains' collective hash.

But first, Dredd and Batman meet, when the latter is accidentally teleported to the future or alternate dimension or alternate dimension's future or whereever it is exactly that Mega City One is located in relation to Gotham City.

They come into conflict immediately, and, unlike 'Stroke and Etrigan, Dredd drops Batman without even exerting himself at all.

Let's watch:


(Click to mega-size it)

Oh my God! Did you see that?! One hit! He knocked Batman out with just one hit! From conscious to unconscious and unmasked in the space of just three-panels!

Now, Dredd may be as human as Batman, but he's no slouch when it comes to beating people up. While he doesn't have any superpowers or robot parts in him, he was born and bred specifically to beat up lawbreakers. Still, taking Batman out in one panel? Pretty damn amazing.

Now to be fair to Batman, this did occur at a point in his career when he was quite used to working with law enforcement officials, so chances are he had his guard down and wasn't expecting that nightstick to the head.

Later in the same book, he does punch Dredd in the face and knock him on his ass, and even has a sweet moment where Dredd's like, "Assaulting a judge, that's ten years!" and Batman responds curtly, "Make it twenty" while kicking Dredd.

Of course, while Batman does knock Dredd down with one hit, he doesn't knock him out. And it was something of a sucker punch, since Dredd was arguing with another character when Batman hit him. So we may never know whom could take whom in a fair fight (Unless that's settled in one of the two sequels to this story, whcih I've completely forgotten the contents of, on account of them not being very good).

But for now, let the record show that Judge Dredd once totally beat down Batman.

Friday Night Fights: Batman Beatdown #2

Slade Wilson isn't the only one who has handed Batman a severe beating. Being one of the world's greatest martial artists, wearing a belt full of bat-shaped anti-personnel weapons and being a bit of a psycho, a bit of a dick and a bit of a cheater may be enough to make the Dark Knight the king of most hills, but whenever he ventures outside his own weight class, he increases his chances of getting his spandex-clad ass beaten.

And you don't get much more out of Batman's weight class than Etrigan, the Demon.

I'm not sure if or when the two caped Gothamites found themselves at odds prior to tonight's fight, but I know they've crossed paths repeatedly since, and, as far as I know, this is their best battle (and all around best story). It also happens to be one of the best Batman stories I've ever read. And one of the best Etrigan stories.

It comes courtesy of Alan Grant, who, I've recently learned, was writing Etrigan for the very first time (Grant would go on to write him a lot more, when DC launched a Demon monthly with Grant in the writer's chair). His portrayal of the yellow-skinned, flame- and rhyme-breathing demon hewed close to that of Alan Moore's version of Etrigan in Swamp Thing, only rather than a sort of buddy-cop team policing the borders between hell and earth, Grant presented Jason Blood as a brooding, conflicted, cursed man, and Etrigan as completely mad—a pretty scary proposition considering his powers.

The art is provided by Norm Breyfogle, whom I consider the definitive Batman artist. Breyfogle found the perfect balance between the realistic portrayal of Batman as a normal man in a costume and the more expressionistic, symbolic/iconic take on the character as a mysterious, almost supernatural creature of the night. Breyfogle's Batman was recognizably human in his expressions and musculature, but his cape and cowl would flare out menacingly and blend into shadows to reduce Batman into a pair of angry white triangles and a set of sneering teeth when he needed to be scary. There have been so many great artists to handle Batman over the years that picking a "best" seems foolish, but I don't think anyone has accomplished as much characterization through the imagery alone as Breyfogle has; certainly not within the last few decades.

It probably helps that the Grant/Breyfogle team was together for so long—From their run on TEC through Batman and then their own Shadow of The Bat, and a handful of specials. Was there a writer/artist team on the character for that length of time before? There certainly hasn't been since.

Breyfogle's style is as well-suited to the Demon as it is to Batman, for the exact same reasons. His Etrigan seems physically real and unreal at the same time, and his bearing whips from mischeivous to noble to horrifying from panel to panel, while remaining consistently the same character (Breyfogle would again draw Etrigan in the Anarky miniseries, also written by Grant).

So, the fight.

It goes down in the last issue of three-part story "Tulpa," which ran from 1989'sTEC #601 through #603. Some criminal types have been shaking Gothamites down for protection money, and one of their targets turns out to be an occultist who summons a demon to protect him, and, like most demon summonings, things go awfully awry—the four-armed, axe-weilding, crown-skulls-wearing giant calling itself Mahakala is too much to control, andit soon starts cutting a bloody swathe through Gotham.

Batman goes to Jason Blood for help, but Blood's all like, "What? No way am I summoning Etrigan to fight that guy! That's like fighting a grease fire with a forest fire!" (I'm totally paraphrasing, by the way). So Batman soldiers on solo. When our fight begins in TEC #603's "When Demons Clash!", Batman has already gone a few rounds with Mahakala, "The Great Black One-- The Angry Destroyer!", which accounts for his battle-damaged look (You know Batman's been getting his ass-kicked when he loses an ear from his cowl.)

Just as he's about to take a battle axe to the face, Etrigan swoops in and saves the day (Blood had caved), making short, short work of Mahakala.

It's worth noting, for our purposes here (i.e. watching Batman get beat down) that Bats is therefore going into this likely weary and a little wounded. So while Batman in top form probably couldn't hang with Etrigan's inhuman speed and endurance, super-strength, flame-breath, energy bolts, magic and poetry, a tired-out, roughed-up, one-eared Batman doesn't have a prayer.

Etrigan's in the middle of gloating over the pile of ashes that was until recently Mahakala, when Batman rolls up to thank the heroic demon and shake hands (Grant's Batman is a little serious and driven, but he's not a sociopath social incompetent). Click on the images to read the dialogue, and better appreciate the unbridled awesomeness that is Breyfogle's Batman.




Etrigan's not here to save Batman or shake hands though, he's here to eat bad guys.



Batman steps up and sets a stern hand on his shoulder, but instead of pulling a Hal Jordan on Batman, Etrigan just free-styles a rhyme while his skin burns through Batman's glove (no one talks shit like Etrigan!) Note an art mistake in above panel—Batman places his right hand on Etrigan's shoulder, but is then shown clutching his burning left hand.

Demon or no, Batman isn't letting anyone get away with murder (unless it's Jason Todd or Cassandra Cain; Batman makes exceptions for people he's personally trained when it comes to getting away with murder). So it's time for a judo throw into a pile of cinder blocks.



What a great page. See how elegantly Grant and Breyfogle detail Etrigan's speed in relation to Batman's—he clears twenty yards in the space of a second, and we get one word thoughts in each panel, to place further context for the rate of the actions. Wow. And that face...see how quickly Breyfogle has Etrigan's face twist from "Did Batman just throw me into a pile of bricks for some reason? That's rather irritating" to "GAAAR! DROOL! FOAM!"





This is another great page. Note how the panels are starting to reflect the action. While the first scenes of their encounter are rigid, straight and formal, now they grow angles and shift perspectives—the page is falling apart and slipping towards oblivion, just as Batman is.

He summons his waning strength for one last strike because if Batman's going out, he's going out with a double-barrelled ear boxing.



Batman's blow accomplishes his goal, but in an unpredictable way. Etrigan finds it so adorable that Batman would even try punching his way out of the situation that Etrigan just cracks up at the thought. This leads to my second favorite Batman panel of all time, wherein Etrigan throws his arm around Batman to tell him he likes his style, and Batman is just completley bewildered.




And there's my first favorite Batman panel of all-time. The one in which Etrigan concludes their conflict the way a raving lunatic from Hell might—with a smek.

In fact, that's so awesome, let's see that again:



Recognizing that Bruce Wayne, like Jason Blood, has a demon living within him, Etrigan sees the Batman as a kindred spirit and spares him, forefeiting the fight.

WINNER: BATMAN

Friday Night Fights: Batman Beatdown #1

It's been said that the Internet is like high school, and, if that's true, that means this is like my second time in high school. And this time, I want to be popular, damn it! And if that means doing what all the cool kids are doing, up to but not including jumping off bridges, well then, look out bandwagon, because I'm jumping on!

For eleven weeks now Bahlactus has been ordering comics bloggers to fight one another for his amusement. If you've been to any comics blog beyond EDILW, you've seen some of these epic throwdowns before, and know that they're known as Friday Night Fights.

Well, this Friday night, the EDILW is ready to join the battle. Because no one kicks ass quite like Batman, that means that any fight in which Batman gets his ass kicked is pretty much a guaranteed awesome fight, right? Which is why our first foray into the fray will be a Batman beatdown, provided by none other than Slade Wilson, the hard-ass with the dumb-ass handle of "Deathstroke, The Terminator."



Now, 'stroke has been dying of over-exposure lately, popping up in somewhere beteen six and ninety-one different comic books every single week between Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis. During that time, Geoff Johns, Judd Winick and others have reduced Wilson to just another supervillain, a weirdo with weird motivations working with other villains like those in Alexander Luthor-pretending-to-be-Lex-Luthor's "Society."

Familiarity has bred ineptness in Wilson, and these days he's likely to be deafeated one-on-one by Oliver Queen (Ha! Like that would ever happen!) or engage in The Worst Plan In The History of The Supervillainy in Teen Titans (Say you buy the motivation for his machinations in "Titans East;" did he really need to brainwash Batgirl, find and recruit Match, Inertia and the rest, build an evil version of Titans Tower and fill it with statues commemorating past Titans' greatest defeats?)

There was a time when Wilson was just a mercenary with a dumb codename and an awful costume. When he wasn't a bad guy, just a bad man with a bad job. He wouldn't go out of his way to kneecap Kid Flash, he'd just do what he was hired to do. He was even something of a hero—well, an anti-hero—coming to the aid of Superman and the other heroes during world-threatenting crises and getting along famously with the likes of Hawkman.

He didn't hit it off so well with Batman though, at least not at first, which lead to them fighting. Now, everybody knows that Batman could beat up just about any normal person in the DCU (excepting Lady Shiva, Batgirl and, I don't know, maybe Richard Dragon and Connor Hawke). Not only is he a huge man, a great fighter and a complete lunatic, not only is he a dirty fighter, but he's loaded with high-tech gadgets and weapons designed to hurt you from the bat-shaped treads on his boots to the tips of his pointy ears.

But he's still just a man. Wilson is pumped full of a super-soldier serum which makes him a Captain America-level physical specimen, complete with a healing factor that has even brought him back from the dead. In a fair fight, he could mop the floor with even the best fighters in the world, because in addition to being a swell-fighter himself, dude's metahuman.

This is the first time I ever saw he and Batman go toe to toe, and I think it's their definitive fight. Sure, neither is really into it. Bats just wants to talk to Wilson, and Wilson just wants to escape, but they still hand one another one hell of a holy beating. The fight spills over a five-page sequence in Marv Wolfman, Steve Erwin and Will Blyberg's story "City of Assasins" (Deathstroke: The Terminator #6-#9).

It was pretty strange reading today. Not only because of how different this Deathstroke is from the one I was just reading a few weeks ago in Teen Titans, but because of how good the story is. The fight is only five pages long, but there are dozens of panel. The fight is full of blows thrown, taken, dodged, parried, blocked and countered. The flow of the action is natural, with one move flowing into the next (Sure, they get off a little more dialogue than is realistically possible during various actions, but that's a convention of comic book time passage that tends to improve rather than detract from action scenes, as it forces you to spend more time in the panel, as The Absorbascon pointed out when declaring decompression it's mortal foe). And good God, just look at that architecture!

And no, "City of Assassins" is not collected in trade. And yes, you should seek out the back issues. Click on the pages to make them bigger, and don't lean in too close, or you may get some Batman blood in your eye.

Ready?

Ding ding ding!



Hey, how come 'stroke never uses that little gun/quarter-staff combo thingy anymore? I used to love that Fwoom!-making thing.



This is the point in the fight where Batman apparently decides he's not going to get anywhere talking to Wilson. It's almost like he flicks a mental switch from "Reasonable But Forceful Empathy and Persuasive Rhetoric" to "Sarcastic Remarks Accompaned By Kicks in the Face."

I think Deathstroke really hates being kicked in the face, because here's where he starts to lose his shit a little and, if he wasn't a decent and honorable man (and Batman not such a valuable character property) he might have killed Batman right then and there.







No one, but no one gets a second wind like Batman does. One minute he's unconscious and being pulped, the next he's on his feet, swinging through the air and kicking dudes through windows.

It was all for naught though, since one final kick from Deathstroke was all it took to KO Batman.

WINNER: DEATHSTROKE.