Batman: Nightwalker

Bruce Wayne is a young man with his whole future ahead of him. He has everything he could ever want at his fingertips except the parents killed by a thief when he was a child. While testing out a prototype car, a police chase passes him by involving the notorious Nightwalkers responsible for terrorizing Gotham City. Despite the police telling him repeatedly to stay away, Bruce decides to chase down the Nightwalker car and disable it so the police can catch it. The police give him community service that entails cleaning Arkham Asylum, home to hundreds of the most notorious criminals the city has seen. He's immediately drawn to a young girl named Madeleine imprisoned for murder and working for the Nightwalker gang. She only speaks to him and the police agree to allow him to try to get information from her, but she is more than she seems.

Batman: Nightwalker isn't like any other Batman incarnation because he isn't Batman yet. Bruce is the most innocent and naive you will ever see him. His intentions are pure and he still acutely feels the pain of his parents' absence. Unfortunately, he also is heavily influenced by his own arrogance and the assumption that he knows everything. Even when warned of Madeleine's methods of manipulation and reading people, Bruce assumes that he's just too competent to fool. (Spoiler alert: he wasn't.) He succeeds in feeding her information and making himself look like a fool. His whole attitude around Madeleine frankly disgusted me. He invented an entire senario in his head where she is truly innocent because she's female, young, and attractive. I was doubly disgusted when his sexist theory was correct to a point. The entire narrative only proved to reinforce his arrogant and sexist ideas.

Many plot points in this novel are hard to believe or unnatural feeling. The police having a teen work at Arkham Asylum is like having one work at a maximum security prison. No one would do that because that teen would be at risk. They also wouldn't ask him to do exactly what he was being punished for: interfering in police matters even when he thinks he's helping. It kind of ruins the whole point of his community service. The drones Lucius Fox made seemed more like something out of Robocop than something made today. The whole situation with them was completely predictable. The most egregious part of the novel for me was Madeleine's turnaround from bloodthirsty killer to reluctant criminal in love with Bruce Wayne. The entire time they spoke, she was manipulating him (too much like Sherlock Holmes if you ask me), but somehow she grew to like him? I didn't see it at all and it came out of nowhere.

Batman: Nightwalker did not meet my expectations. The most natural feeling parts of the book are between Bruce and his friends. These parts are unfortunately few and far between. Very little of the book is believable and I found myself exasperated and annoyed most of the short book. Bruce didn't really learn anything by the end of the novel and his arrogance is reinforced. I would not like to see this Batman in the future.

My rating: 2/5 fishmuffins