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Comics - Ongoing - Batman - Issue #673

BATMAN #673
COVER TAGLINE: None
TITLE: Joe Chill in Hell
STORY ARC: The Three Ghosts of Batman

RELEASE DATE: January, 2008
COVER DATE: March, 2008

WRITER: Grant Morrison (special thanks to Bill Finger)
ARTIST: Tony Daniel
INKER(s): Jonathan Glapion; Sandu Florea
COLORS: Guy Majors
LETTERS: Steve Wands
EDITOR(s): Mike Marts; Jeanine Schaefer
COVER: Tony Daniel

PRICE: $2.99 U.S.

CHARACTERS: Batman (Bruce Wayne); Robin (Dick Grayson); Dr. Simon Hurt; Joe Chill; Third Batman (Officer Lane); Alfred Pennyworth; Barbara Gordon; Clark Kent; Oliver Queen; Tim Drake

COVER ART:

INTERIOR ART:


Continued From Batman #672
Continued In Batman #674

PLOT:
Suffering from a heart attack after being shot in the chest, Batman's mind races through the images of his life.

In his comatose state he recalls the murders which drove him to become a costumed vigilante. He recalls how he kept a record of ever case in his journals at Alfred's behest. The Wayne family servant's reading taste always leaned more towards the grittier crime noir and Bruce tailored his notes to Alfred's liking.

The hallucinations take him back to his experiences with fear as a boy. Bat-Mite reminds him that the dark isn't so bad once you make friends with it. Young Bruce looks over his shoulder and glimpses at his own funeral. Perhaps, Bruce thinks, he is flashing back to his experiences while spending seven weeks sealed in a cave as part of the Thogal Ritual on Nanda Parbat. Or is this a memory of something else?

Bruce remembers signing up for a psychology experiment which involved spending time inside an isolation chamber and how the experiment nearly ended his days as Batman. Looking back on the experiment, Batman realizes the danger he put his career and life into just in an attempt to better understand the mind of his greatest foe - the Joker.

Finally Bruce's mind settles on the memory of another enemy. The man responsible for his parent's death - Joe Chill.

Though he started his life as the son of a prostitute, the low-level thug that killed the Waynes would eventually work his way up the food chain eventually building a successful land, sea, air transport company.

He views his life's fortune to be the result of hard work taking him up from the gutters. He justifies everything he did as class warfare - taking on the rich doctors and lawyers of society that he feels get a free pass in life.

Thinking back on the murder of the rich Wayne family, he laments only that he did not kill the boy too. He says however that his reason for not killing the young Bruce Wayne was because it reminded him of his own son that he was forced to give away.

But now his entire life's work is threatened by the nightly presence of the Bat-Man vigilante. Each night the masked hero stalks outside Joe Chill's window keeping the self-made man wide awake unable to sleep. He wonders what he ever did to earn the ire of the Batman, never once realizing that the surviving Wayne child and Batman are one in the same.

Using the techniques he learned from the Shadow Masters and the Ghost Tribes of the Ten-Eyed Brotherhood, Bruce infiltrates Chill's inner-sanctum. He hands him back the gun he used to kill Bruce's parents - one bullet left in the chamber originally meant for Bruce. The message delivered, Batman walks away. Fearing that the word will get out that he created and brought upon the menace that is Batman, Chill takes his own life.

Finally Bruce is brought back to life in the present day to find himself strapped to a torture chair with evil Third Batman.

SUGGESTED ADDITIONAL READING:
Detective Comics #121 ("Commissioner Gordon Walks a Beat")
Batman #156 ("Robin Dies at Dawn")

 

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