In the previous storyline, we are regaled with a big, racist tale about why Bruce Wayne continues to be Batman after just starting out being Batman. There’s Alaskan Inuit tribal masks and Caribbean cult ritual killings and, best of all, lots of Alfred Pennyworth snark. That was worth the price of admission alone!

Since this ongoing series does not have a continuous narrative, who knows what wacky hijinks await ahead? It could be about anything! Maybe Bruce Wayne gets food poisoning and accidentally poops his suit! That would be exciting.

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Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #6 [April, 1990]
Written by: Grant Morrison
“Man Without a Shadow”

Gothic Dance! Gothic Dance! Everybody Gothic Dance!

“Well, ready to talk, Martin?”

The Martin fellow hangs upside down gettin’ tortured. He saw the shipment go on the boat himself! He swears! It must have been those dastardly Colombians what stole them!

Martin is getting accused and punished for some shifty business. A very large man wearing a wife-beater with jeans holds a bat. A very small man wearing an awful mustard-yellow suit is watching the guy with the bat do his thing. Martin begs the guy with the bat to not hit him with the bat again, please.

“You know what they call me?” the large man grins. “The Bat-Man is what. Pretty funny, huh?”

Actually, that is kind of funny. I like that joke! Martin doesn’t seem to, but he needs to lighten up. Bat-Man cracks him again with his bat, man. “WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SHIPMENT?” he bellows. And, still, Martin doesn’t no nuthin’! Nuthin’ at all! He’s half-naked and bruised and please, sir. The bat hurts! Ouch, etc.

Harry is the man in the suit. Bluto over here asks Harry for some lighter fluid; maybe he’ll start yapping when he’s on fire. He’ll be incoherent, but he’ll yap all the same. Off in the distance, someone is singing “Oranges and Lemons”, a nursery rhyme I’ve never heard of before. Harry hands Meathead a can of lighter fluid and leaves to find the source of the singing.

Harry’s gone awhile. Surely too long! After Brutus empties the can all over Martin, he leaves him hanging to go find out where Harry went.

“Harry? What’s going on? Where the hell are you?”

The lummox spots a record player playing the nursery rhyme. On the floor by its side is a note. “Like one that on a lonesome road, doth walk in fear and dread…” he reads, miraculously. I guess there’s only one word with two syllables. “What’s going on here?”

A man emerges from the shadows. Big Fat is named O’Rourke, and he suddenly looks very nervous.

A shriek is heard. Then silence.

“…help me,” mutters the upside-down Martin. “Help me, please.”

“Help you?” incredulously sneers the shadow man. “And how can I help you? What would you like? A cigarette perhaps?”

The man flicks the cigarette on Martin. You can figure out the rest.

*jolly Muppet Babies intro music*

Let’s enter a happy-go-lucky Bruce Wayne dream sequence! He is a child walking down the halls of a boarding school with his identically-dressed friend! I think his identically-dressed friend is another identical Bruce Wayne. “Why did you bring me here, Bruce?” asks Bruce. “Why have I come back?”

Bruce #1 suddenly turns into Big Bruce. “I shouldn’t be back in school. I feel stupid in these clothes.”

It’s not a school, dummy. It’s a cathedral. And it’s very bright and there’s a big, scary cross straight ahead. That means Jesus, and you know it’s trouble when that little scamp is around!

A man named Mr. Crane sits in a chair hoisted up twenty feet above Bruce’s head. Bruce is now dressed as Batman. “So you’re a teacher, are you now, Mr. Wayne?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Crane. I’m a master now, yes.”

Poppycock! Bruce Wayne doesn’t know his ass from a hole in his ass! But, nonetheless, his father will be pleased! Which father? His dead one of course, LMAO!

“Father? Father, I missed you so much!” shouts a child Bruce and he runs toward a figure. The figure turns around…

BUH! WUH! AAAHHH!! WAAAHH!!

Bruce wakes up in his giant, stupid bed with the curtains. “Nightmares again, Master Bruce?” Alfred enters the bedroom without knocking, which isn’t cool because I can see Bruce’s butt. Alfred really should’ve knocked, not that it would’ve made a difference. Bruce doesn’t know how to make himself decent. “It was the same dream,” Bruce cries. His father. A dream about his father. ALIVE. Eek! What could it mean? I’m positively ejaculating with anticipation and suspense.

The next scene is confusing. What I presume to be a man is dressed as a woman, acting as a call girl to another man. They’re getting ready for some big gala downtown.

“Nice wig… but it’s a little tight. I don’t know why you go to all this trouble. All this pretense. I mean, everybody knows about you.”

“I hear one more word out of you, I break your legs, you understand me?”

Pleasant.

The “woman” finds a card and asks where it came from. “Came in the mail,” the man responds. “Somebody’s idea of a joke, I don’t know.”

They head out to the elevator. After pressing the button going down, I assume it breaks or the bottom drops out or something similar. A man in his own suite checks the elevator and sees that they had both crashed down, landing on some wooden rafters. The wig fell off. They’re both dead.

Somebody is out to get some of these people, eh? GOTHIC!

It’s 8:25pm. That’s what his 900 clocks strewn about the room show, at any rate. Bruce Wayne is sitting in his thinkin’ chair. He’s doing some thinkin’. He frowns. Thinking is hard sometimes.

Alfred enters with a tray of food. It looks like Bruce’s favorite foods: blueberry waffles, chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs, a giant bottle of whiskey, and dirt pudding with those gummy worms. “All this morbid introspection in a roomful of stopped clocks must surely give one a rampaging appetite,” Alfred snarks. That’s the stuff I’ve been waiting for!

Bruce doesn’t want to eat. Not even that big bowl of pillow mints! He’s gonna grab his Batman clothes and go do Batman stuff outside now. Sorry, Alfred. Feed that shit to the birds, ok? Feel free to not eat anything yourself. Bruce doesn’t pay you to sit around and enjoy any semblance of nourishment during your 22-hour work day.

“…well, how do you think I feel? I mean, I hated the guy, but nobody wanted to see him crushed in a falling elevator.”

There are too many fucking people in this issue. Another man talks on the phone, looking quite happy that someone was crushed in an elevator. “And the way he was found… there goes the macho reputation.”

This man doesn’t want to be involved. It’s the fucking O’Rourke guy. He had to get killed like an asshole. The man on the other end of the line says that, just like his brother, O’Rourke was killed by the same man. “It’s Whisper. Mr. Whisper is back.”

Nice name for a villain. “Mr. Whisper”. Like, shhhhh I’m gonna kill you shhhhhhhh.

Mr. Whisper is back and that makes this O’Rourke Understudy guy mad as the dickens! The other guy is like, aren’t you fucking listening. Mr. Whisper is back, and he wants revenge for what they did! “How many other guys have no shadow?” he argues. “It’s him!”

OK, well, does anyone have any ideas? Yes, the not-mad-but-actually-scared guy does. They’re going to call… someone. We don’t know who.

The scared guy is named Jack, and the other guy thinks Jack is out of his dang mind if they think they’re going to call… someone. We don’t know who. However, after he argues to Jack that Mr. Whisper is dead and gone, Jack is suddenly silent. “We killed him back in… Jack? Jack, are you there?”

Jack’s bloody hand streaks against the phone booth. Another man starts speaking. “Mr. Kane is here. With me. I’m afraid he can’t talk right now. He can only whimper.”

The other guy is like “BALRH BALRH WHO ARE YOU? RAAABBRBR WHO AM I SPEAKING TO??” This guy is named Ottavio. I finally have both names. I hope you’re keeping up, because I certainly am not.

“Oh, poor Jack. What a mess.?” There’s blood on the phone’s receiver. “Your turn soon.”

Mr. Ottavio isn’t mad anymore. Mr. Ottavio knows Whisper isn’t really dead now. Storyline over!

Nope.

Elsewhere, a news correspondent stands next to a construction site. He reports that, during the reconstruction of the Gotham Cathedral, a time capsule was discovered within its foundation. “The Mayor himself will officially open the capsule as part of the reopening celebrations.” Certainly, though, is this reconstruction just for the votes during the upcoming election? THE PEOPLE WILL DECIDE.

A couple of ruffian thuggish ne’er-do-wells ambush the news correspondent with some knives while Batman lurks high up in the building’s framework. We’ll see how this plays out in a minute. We’re at the opera now for some reason while a rich guy and his pretty nail-filing wife are in the good seats. Whatever those seats are called. The ones high up on the side walls that fit two people and are probably $180,000 per ticket. A man accepts a gift of a box of chocolates from an unknown opera-attendee. “See that the chocolates are delivered directly to Mr. Graziano,” he instructs this small lump of a man.

“I’ll do that. Straight away, Mr… ah…”

“Whisper. Mr. Whisper.” And he walks away. The chocolates are poison or they have little testicle-destroying nanobots or something. Or they explode when you bite into them, creating a mushroom cloud that will level the entire eastern seaboard.

What now, goddamnit? A woman with a literal Moe Howard bowl cut disembarks a bus. “Here, Kitty,” says the leader of a group of assholes. He looks like Ross from Friends. “Here, Kitty Kitty. New in town, huh? Runaway, maybe? Come over here. Come on. Let me see your…”

Then they see something, all right. I don’t know what they see, but it’s something. And it makes them back off. “…ah…it’s okay. Never mind. No problem. Okay? No problem.” And she keeps on walking. Is this going to be Catwoman? It’s probably going to be Catwoman. Calling it now. Catwoman.

Back to the news correspondent! He tries to throw these guys money, but they don’t want his stinkin’ money! “We just want to cut you into little bits,” they smile. Then one – his name is Shadey – disappears suddenly. The other turns around to talk, but he’s not there. “Some joke, Shady,” he says, chuckling at the wonderful joke. Is this what criminals do for entertainment around Gotham City? What a weird little town.

Don’t worry about the news correspondent. The King of Hell shows up.

The King of Hell has made short work of these two. The correspondent is terrified of this new guy, but the King of Hell skedaddles. He doesn’t have time for wimpy news correspondents.

“Something for you, Mr. Graziano, sir.” The little weasel proffers the box of chocolates to the man sitting in the opera house’s good seats. “Compliments of the house. I think.”

“Let me tell you, I’d die for chocolates!” Graziano jubilates, shortly before dying from chocolates. There’s a note along with them: “He who dines on heavenly food has no need for the food of mortal.” This Whisper guy sure is loud with the poetry.

“Close your eyes and count the calories,” Graziano says as he shoves a poop chocolate down his lady’s gullett.

The angry Ottavio guy, he has called a guy named Morgenstern to lay down some serious business matters at hand. O’Rourke’s dead. The Kane brothers are dead. Someone blew up (!) Graziano at the opera house! I was right about the exploding chocolates! Wile E. Coyote’s favorite Acme product! Morgenstern thinks this is all poppycock, but he’s mistaken. It’s no poppycock at all, sir. This ain’t even baloney. Mr. Whisper’s back and he’s not being very whispery about it at all!

Morgenstern! This guy thinks Ottavio is off his fucking rocker! “We’ve had peace in Gotham for years!” he cries! Morgenstern! “If you’re trying to start something here…”

That Morgenstern! Very skeptical! Ottavio needs this to be taken seriously. How do you explain all these dead guys within, like, six hours? Whisper’s back! WHISPER’S BACK!!!! WHISPER!!!!!

“Either you explain this to me – and fast – or I’m calling a psychiatrist…” Morgenstern! What the fuck, buddy? Just believe the guy, man.

He’ll prove it, but first he’ll show him something.

*turns on a light*

Final Thoughts

This wasn’t even about Batman! All he did was have a stupid dad dream! I want to see him fighting the Joker and slapping Robin across his pretty mouth!

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