Warning: This article contains spoilers for Batman: Beyond The White Knight #1
It’s days of future past in Gotham City again, and writer/artist Sean Murphy weaves a tale like no other in the new DC Comics Black Label series, Batman: Beyond The White Knight #1. The 5th entry in the long-running Batman: White Knight alternate universe of kitchen sink realism, Beyond The White Knight continues Murphy’s deconstruction of Bruce Wayne. In a neon-lit Gotham City where, following over a decade of imprisonment, the once-revered Caped Crusader must swing back into action to protect his legacy against a new Batman donning a stolen suit, Terry McGinnis, also known as the classic Batman Beyond.
Since the days of Frank Miller’s seminal series The Dark Knight Returns, the issue of the effects of Batman’s violence on future generations of Gothamites (especially the vigilante ones) have become a staple of the Batman mythos, particularly the occasional post-apocalyptic yarns such as those in the White Knight universe. Batman: Beyond The White Knight is the third series in the main continuum, following Batman: White Knight and Batman: Curse of the White Knight, gracefully pivoting from the deaths of most major Bat-villains in the previous series into a futuristic Beyond-era timeline. With the old Gotham rogues’ gallery now dead, the issues opens highlighting a young Terry McGinnis who steals the Beyond suit, as per his cartoon origin, but this time at the behest of evil industrialist Derek Powers.
What Murphy seems to be setting up, clearly preparing to twist the classic Batman Beyond narrative, is a discussion over how Bruce Wayne should be viewed in light of the dangerous legacy he has left behind. He breaks out of prison with the aid of former Robin and current prison guard Jason Todd to stop Terry once he discovers Powers’ plot. Previously depicted as an increasingly reckless, but ultimately accountable man with genuine empathy hiding underneath his stony exterior, Murphy sets up this older Bruce as a man who regrets his choices after seeing their disastrous consequences, consequences he has been deaf to while behind bars.
Though Bruce will likely be hunted by his former protégés, including Commissioner Barbara Gordon and Gotham Terrorism Oppression officer Dick Grayson, there’s a suaveness to Murphy’s approach to this aspect of the Batman mythos. It feels refreshingly untethered while exactingly precise in its discussion of what kind of a future Batman will leave once he’s no longer able to fight against the city’s ills. Though he previously pledged to serve his debt to society in the name of law and order, the Gotham Bruce returns to demonstrates that all that his efforts have sown is chaos. Chaos so intense and harmful that it put Jason Todd’s life in mortal jeopardy at the hands of The Joker, and has now generated a new vigilante who works at the behest of a ruthless weapons dealer.
It is these kinds of multilayered approaches to the timeworn Batman tropes that highlight newer and sometimes riveting concepts from within the franchise, and Murphy has shown his dedication in turning the Batman mythos on its head. Can Batman: Beyond The White Knight push his Bat-breaking ballad of betrayal and bone-breaking even further? Only time will tell.
