The Four Color Media Monitor

The Valdosta Daily Times gushed over the Batman Who Laughs, which is connected with one of DC's overbearing crossovers:

“The Batman Who Laughs” is a follow-up to the DC mega-crossover event from a few years ago, “Dark Nights: Metal.”

You don’t have to read “Dark Nights: Metal” first to follow “The Batman Who Laughs,” though people who read “The Batman Who Laughs” may want to go back to read “Dark Nights: Metal.”

Again, we have here a backhanded promotion of a wide-spanning crossover that took up too much room gratuitously in both storytelling capacity, and in spending costs. Why do these MSM publications continue to sugarcoat company wide crossovers despite how they've long dragged down the quality of storytelling considerably, as did the far-left politics that became a sad staple in the past decade or so? I vaguely recall a time in the early 2000s when the now very ultra-liberal IGN was willing to argue against crossovers, but now, here we are over 2 decades later, and nobody complains anymore about what hurt mainstream superhero universes in the long run, ever since Secret Wars debuted in 1984.

From reading “The Batman Who Laughs,” a metal has opened portals to a multiverse and varying versions of DC characters are falling through it.

In “The Batman Who Laughs,” those characters include several Bruce Waynes who opted to stop being Batman at various points in their lives ... those lives are snuffed out upon arrival here.

Two other characters are a heavily armed Batman known as the Grim Knight – in his world, the robber who killed the Waynes dropped his gun, young Bruce picked up the gun and killed the robber – and the Batman who Laughs – poisoned by a toxin released upon the Joker’s death ... turning him into a cross between the Batman and the Joker.

The Batman here not only must deal with these two rogue Batmen and the murders of alternate universe Bruce Waynes but he also has a ticking time bomb within him – he’s been poisoned by the Joker toxin that will turn him into a second Batman Who Laughs.

This unfortunately looks more like an excuse to depict Bruce killing for real, just for shock's sake. Presumably, writer Scott Snyder also wrote this tale to please the fans who're supposedly demanding this. But in the end, it's no more impressive or necessary than seeing Spider-Man, Capt. America, Wasp, Flash, Atom, Iron Man or even Superman killing criminals. It's just plain pathetic, as is the now tiresome overuse of the Joker as an antagonist in these tales.

Labels: Batman, crossoverloading, dc comics, dreadful writers, golden calf of death, msm propaganda, violence