At the end of the issue, Ottavio clicks on the Bat-Signal. If this is canon, it may very well be the first time it’s been used! So many canons, so little time!

Oh yeah, and Bruce Wayne is having a lot of Dead Dad dreams, causing him to sob nakedly in his four poster bed while Alfred soothes him with a giant frown on his face. That’s funny as hell.

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #7 [May, 1990]
Written by: Grant Morrison
“The Death Ship”

Gotta love the barely-post-Crisis covers. “LOOKIT DA BAT. DURRRRR!!”

That Bat-Signal glows brightly in the sky like a big, eye-ruining searchlight. “What did I tell you, Ottavio?” says Morgenstern, puffing his ugly cigar. “This is the dumbest thing I ever saw.”

Shut the HELL up, Morgenstern. We’re summoning bats. Zip the lip.

The last person Morgenstern wants to show up is Batman. I don’t know why, but he’d rather the gruff guy in tights stay away from this one.

Too late! He showed up. Ottavio and Morgenstern are like “GAH!!”. I’m like “BUH!!”. Batman is like “BRRT!!”. Elsewhere, Joker is like “AWOOOGAH!!”.

“You called me? How dare you call me?” Batman growls menacingly, which is weird and out of character for this particular superhero. “It’s not good to see me. For scum like you, it’s never good to see me. How dare you bring me here?”

Dude, you didn’t have to come. You could’ve just continued hanging out in the sewers like you love so very, very much to do. “That!” he snaps, pointing up at the signal in the sky. “What is THAT?”

Ottavio says it’s a genius invention! It’s a Bat-Signal! I mean, it’s not like Jim Gordon didn’t already create it himself, but hey. Let’s bend the canon constantly as everyone sees fit!

“Look, it was the only way. We need help,” Ottavio pleads. “We want to make a deal with you. A bargain. This thing that’s happening, we can’t handle it on our own…”

Aw hell nah. No way. No deals, no bargains. That’s worse than the giant lightbulb! He – wait a minute… a deal? Well, why didn’t you say so!

Ottavio starts explaining the grim accounts of the one Mr. Whisper. He was killed twenty years ago. He, Morgenstern, the Kane brothers (dead), Graziano (dead), they all slaughtered his butt. “We had to kill him before he did it again.”

Mr. Whisper killed eight kids. I wonder if he gave them exploding chocolates? Well, this Mr. Whisper is supposed to be dead and he seems very much not really at all such as dead. AND, one by one, Whispery is exacting his terrible, justified revenge on the lot of them. “The Man with No Shadow”.

“And you want to make a bargain?” Batman snarls, his face less than four inches from Ottavio’s. He can smell Ottavio’s breath. Just cigarettes and ham sandwiches and a gallon of mouthwash. And yes, Ottavio has a bargain. No more shady dealings; a suspension of all their nefarious street crimes and drug trafficking. For now. Just until Whisper’s dead. Then they’ll start it all back up again! lol. So what do you say?

“Clean? You’ll never be clean,” Batman snarls and sneers and growls and gruffs. “Drugs. Prostitution. Protection. Corruption. Assassination. This city is sick. Its people are sick with fear. Now you know what it feels like.”

Yes, a fair point, sir. But, uh –

Batman walks away at this point and tells them both to rot in the Hell they created in the city. Morgenstern puffs his cigar sumgly. “I told you, didn’t I?”

Elsewhere, in a large Gotham cathedral, the short-haired woman who disembarked the train gets hassled by a security guard. “Get the hell out of here! Come on! The cathedral’s closed to the public until next week.”

The woman responds creepily: “God’s not at home. And he’ll never come back here. The cathedral is God’s rotting refuse. People dig and burrow like maggots.”

The guard is not entertaining this complete wacko bullshit. He grabs her and shoves her out of the building while she rants about marrying God and how she can’t be thrown out of God’s house and that she’ll be back. SHE’LL BE BACK!

A man asks the guard what was the matter. He says that this crazy lady was claiming to be a nun and that he threw her ass to the curb. “A little nun?” the man says, looking like Mr. Whisper. “There’s a certain symmetry here. My life’s path becomes a circle. And a circle is forever.”

Yeah yeah yeah, weirdos are everywhere in this comic book. Bruce Wayne is having another dead dad dream. Here’s the rundown: They’re on the beach and a large, unfamiliar ship with a black sail heads toward shore. Dad still has his mouth sewed shut and is writing “UNLOCK THE ROSE” in the sand in huge letters. Bruce, a child dressed up in his huge Batman clothes, does not understand.

A circle of suited-up zombies sit at classroom desks and sing Ring Around the Rosie while Batman stumbles around the room. “Set us free,” one says. “Unlock the rose,” another says. “The worms build tunnels and galleries in our corrupted cryptic flesh,” another says a little too dramatically.

“Wayne? You’re nothing but a dirty little sneak, Wayne,” a man who looks like Mr. Whisper stands behind him. “I have ways of dealing with dirty little sneaks.”

Whatever. Aaaahhhh. Wake up.

Later, out on the giant, uh, for lack of a better word, “patio”, Bruce sits pensively at a table and regales Alfred with more dream talk. There’s nothing much worse than someone talking to you about your dreams. Alfred, as always, maintains professionalism against all odds. “Always the same; my father, the old school, a warning I can’t quite understand. I’ve tried to write it down, but it all slips away like smoke.”

Hmmm. Have you tried taking Ambien and driving a forklift at 3:30am? No dreams guaranteed! Barring that, maybe your dreams are telling you something about Mr. Whisper! Ha, wouldn’t that be awfully convenient? Convenient like a venereal disease.

Looks like we get to hear all about Bruce’s pantswetting days of yore. No one wants to hear about this. Least of all Alfred. Least of all me. “I was sent to a private school. Upstate. I hated it.” Oh, whine whine whine whine whine. Alfred was sent to Butler Boarding School where they paddled you if your bowtie was askew.

“I can’t imagine what possessed my parents to send me there. I used to think they wanted me out of the way.” Well, Brucey, I think you answered your own question. He reflects upon the dreadful Mr. Winchester, who whipped his ass ruddy with a barbed cane! Or, since that would’ve been criminal, he was just involved in a scandal. The school was rife with scandal. Debauchery, gossip, viewing parties of episodes of the show Scandal. “In my school, you didn’t say ‘scandal’. You said ‘tradition’. It was ‘traditional’ to live in fear of bullying prefects.”

Skinny teenagers in short shorts are chasing little kids down the hall with batons, holding them upside-down in toilets, chewing on their tender little penises. “It was traditional to be beaten and humiliated and to fight off the advances of degenerate old teachers with doctorate degrees.”

Bruce had a little wiener friend who hated the place too, plus his mother was dead and he had asthma and he peed himself a lot! lmao. Robert had told Bruce that Mr. Winchester was the devil. He has no shadow. He hangs the toilet paper the wrong way. He smokes the weed. And so on and so forth. Well, soon enough, Robert wasn’t showing up to class anymore. Nobody was surprised – the incontinent little whelp was sickly and he probably died and no one cared.

Mr. Winchester caught wind of these rumors emanating from the mouths of insolent babes, and inclined to beat this kid’s ass bloody. But, ah, Alfred my boy, getting caned like we were in Singapore wasn’t the worst part of it all, oh no no no, far from it. IT WAS THE ANTICIPATION OF GETTING CANED. No, the worst part was what he didn’t see while he was bent over (oh god I hope it wasn’t an erect PENIS). No, it was the anticipation. That was worse.

No, actually, it appears that Robert’s decapitated head was in Winchester’s waste bin. That’s 100 kinds of fucked up.

Alfred is sympathetic, but I’m sure in his head he’s telling Master Bruce to cork his pie hole. He does compliment Bruce on growing up “radiantly normal”, which is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard someone say about the guy who hangs out in the sewers for a living. “Prepare my uniform, please, Alfred,” Bruce concludes. No, not the sexy nurse outfit this time, Alfred. The one with the bat stuff, please.

Elsewhere, Ottavio is pacing up and down his suite all paranoid and terrified. “I can’t live like this, Tully,” he addresses his underling. “I don’t trust that wine. I shouldn’t have drunk the stuff.”

Tully assures Ottavio that Morgenstern gave him the wine personally. Tully drank it too! Don’t be flustered. Here, have a Werther’s!

Ottavio cannot be calm. He had received a poem; Mr. Whisper’s calling card for the people he’s going to murder shortly. It’s a death certificate is what it is, no matter how flowery the cadences and the stanzas are! There once was a man from Nantucket! Music to the ears.

Ottavio spots his assailant outside the balcony window and acts accordingly.

It doesn’t work. “You’ve ruined my coat,” Whisper smiles congenially. “Is that any way to treat an old friend, Ottavio?”

Before Whisper has a chance to do the killing thing that’s going to do, Batman enters with force into the suite. He broke more glass than the gun. “Stand away from that man,” he growls, standing tall, dark, and handsome. Brain filled with scary thoughts about Mr. Winchester, but Ottavio and Whisper needn’t know that. Not until they’re ready to hear about it!

Whipser runs away going “I’LL GET YOU NEXT TIME, GADGET. NEXT TIME…”

Batman tells Ottavio to stay put as he chases Mr. Not-Whispering-Much. Ottavio thanks the dear Lord God Our Savior and Benevolent Chessmaster for being alive, but Tully stands there like a statue. Like a dead statue with a stupid frightened look on his face. “Oh no,” Ottavio mumbles, clutching his throat, staring at the wine. The wine that turns you into a statue.

“There’s nowhere to hide,” Batman mutters on the rooftop. “Do you hear me? There’s just you and me and a five hundred foot drop to the sidewalk.”

Then Whisper hits him with a stick. They punch a bit. Batman is evenly matched, probably because he has no actual superpowers and his utility belt is filled with jelly beans. Then the masked guy gets punched right off the roof like a dumbass.

Luckily for him, as he plummets to his death, his cape gets snagged on the 40-foot long spear of a cherub statue halfway down the skyscraper. It tears up his cape something horrible, but he’s alive. Alive and kicking. Too bad, because maybe if Batman died we’d have gotten those Alfred comics I want so badly.

Batman is able to grapple and swing his way back up to the roof. Winchester is fucking floored that this cocksucker is still alive. Then, in a perplexing three panels, Winchester looks Batman square in the eye, says “I know you…” , and steps backwards from the ledge. He falls toward the street. Batman’s like “NOOOO!!” and, as you can imagine, yelling “NOOOO!!” doesn’t stop gravity. Try as he might.

Still alive, miraculously, Whisper groans on the street. Batman scrambles and asks Ottavio for the quickest way down (jump off yourself), but Ottavio is too busy grasping his neck and choking like a real cuck. “Damn,” Batman says, staring passively at the dying man in front of him.

Batman picks up the piece of paper on the ground and reads the pretty poetry.

“I know you,” he smiles devilishly.

Final Thoughts

Befuddling! The last few pages are crazy, man! Why do Mr. Whisper and Batman know each other. IS MR. WHISPER ACTUALLY MR. WINCHESTER??

I’m calling that buffoonery now. You heard it here first. Like it’ll be a fucking surprise.

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