The thing about this page is that it’s never used. We’ve had this site for nine years, and I have written here five times, not since 2017… where I apparently advocated for the first six episodes of Netflix’s Iron Fist. Ouch. And the thing about me is that I want to write. I want to write and never make time. I want to write and can’t get out of my head when I try to commit. I want to write but refuse to practice… ridiculous. So I’m going to write here about things I like, and I might even try other formats elsewhere. Short stories sound fun. Maybe a novel. I felt like if I verbalized my desire to write to enough people, I might not be able to back out. It hasn’t worked yet and I’ve been doing it for years now, but there’s a chance I’m finally reaching a critical mass where my only recourse is action.
Anyway, one of those five measly previous posts was about Tokyo Ghost, a series by Sean Murphy and Rick Remender and Matt Hollingsworth; I wrote the post before the series was released because the art previews had me pumped for the story. I found Murphy’s art for the first time in The Wake, a Vertigo series he created with Scott Snyder, and it was more than enough to get me to follow him from Chrononauts to Tokyo Ghost, and then there was his Batman. When Batman: White Knight came out, written and drawn by Murphy, it lived up to everything I wanted: a fresh story with costumes and vehicles and action that were all uniquely styled. And then his Batman universe expanded into continuing storylines, what Wikipedia (and I’m guessing many other people) call the Murphyverse.
In July of 2019, I picked up the first issue of Batman: Curse of the White Knight. It had Azrael, a character with an awesome costume that I hadn’t seen since I was a kid following the breaking of the bat storyline, and he was wielding a sword on fire. Obviously, I was in. But then, a week later, I deployed to Iraq and I just never made it back to the Murphyverse. At least, not until Beyond the White Knight started coming out in March of this year. I like this book a lot, for all the reasons I liked White Knight and then some. There are a lot of familiar Batman characters in unfamiliar roles, but my favorite by far is the Joker (or Jack, if his preference is observed). The corporeal Joker of the Murphysverse is dead, but the character in Beyond is a version of his personality that has been artificially distilled onto a microchip in Bruce Wayne’s head. The banter between Bruce and Jack is some of the funnier stuff I’ve seen in a Batman comic. There are three issues of this series out now, and the fourth of eight should be out this week. There’s so much going on in these books, I haven’t even mentioned the titular Terry McGinnis/Batman Beyond storyline. I’m looking forward to catching up on all things White Knight and would recommend it to anyone who is interested.