Detective Comics - Before 2011 Renumbering #840

Detective Comics #840 presents an interesting conundrum, and I can’t tell if I’m being Crabby Fanboy by even mentioning it, but whatever: Would Batman really think it was cool to kick Ra’s Al Ghul out the window of a skyscraper? Granted, I’m not totally up on every chapter in the decades-long Batman vs. Ra’s saga, but I do seem to recall Batman’s whole “I don’t kill” thing, and given that the Joker racks up body counts in the hundreds within twenty-two pages of story, and Batman has no problem carting him to Arkham without a second thought, this same Batman effectively killing Ra’s with the aforementioned skyscraper window kick rings…false? Stupid? Ill-conceived?

It’s weird, because there’s something sorta dumb about the whole issue, but I was willing to cut Dini some breaks, since it’s got Ra’s and Bats playing a wacky round of supergenius oneupsmanship. It appealed to the necessary sense of absurd inherent in superhero comics, something that’s become a bit of a theme for Dini’s run on the title.

Then the kicking, and the news that Batman’s sneaking into Arkham to inject Ra’s with some kind of crazy debilitating drug, and it’s like…really? Seriously? Would Batman really do this? Should Batman really do this? And at the end of the day, did Ra’s get brought back to life just so that one issue later Batman could effectively trap him indefinitely in Arkham? Wouldn’t the point of bringing a dead villain back to life be to then use that dead villain in stories?

Ugh. A great run piddled away by piss-poor writing.