"Represent. Always Represent."
Title: I Am Batman Vol 01
Author/Artist: John Ridley, Various Artists
Publisher: DC Comics
Category: Superheroes
Review by Brayden (they/them)
Other Favourite Titles Include:
I just read my issues I’ve been collecting of this, and since the Vol 1 has just released in a Hardcover, I finally sat down and dived in. I also read the Future State Next Batman 4-issue book but that basically just felt like a proof of concept of what this series would be able to do.
This is doing everything I love about modernising comics and characters, and I assume that some older Batman comic readers will not enjoy this like I did.
We follow Jace Fox (formerly Tim Fox) as he returns to Gotham and his family to work with his dad Lucius at Foxtech. His dads company has taken a hard turn into helping create an above the government offensive force to stop the actions of “Masks”, a position that Lucius has fallen into recently since he was apparently tortured by Punchline in the Joker War Saga? I really don’t know since I didn’t read that 🤷🏻 Anyhoo, I really enjoyed it! I like the character and the bits of family drama, the writing and dialogue from John Ridley feels real (people actually f%&*#$^ swear!) and the art holds up even if the stunning Olivier Coipel was only the artist on issue #1 🥺
Seeing them tackle such modern events can be a little confronting which is good! Seeing police brutality, protesting on both sides of the political spectrum, corrupt governments and organisations and conspiracy theory fear states all feels like the kind of problems that I want to see a modern superhero of colour work through.
Part of this is due to so early in this book being forced into the Batfamily of comics ‘Fear State’ event, but even without knowing anything about that crossover I feel like it wasn’t much of an interruption and instead managed to hold onto its own plot without getting lost in whatever scarecrow and the gang are up to against White Batman.
They play really well into that space of the Miles Morales problem, “oh it’s not Spider-Man it’s the other Spider-Man”, and by the end of the book I’m super interested to see what happens next away from Gotham and into New York.