Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.

PART 3: KnightsEnd

Here we are, the penultimate chapter of the entire book. This and next chapter are it, and we’ll be moving on to another book.

I had a revelation about the thing that has nagged me about the book. I hadn’t thought about the storyline as being a discussion of why Batman doesn’t kill, why a killing Batman isn’t as cool as it sounds, until the Owen Likes Comics discussion of the whole arc. However, I can at least theorize why the novelization really doesn’t focus on that, although of course I can’t ask Dennis O’Neil himself. He passed away in 2020.

The bulk of the chapters that make up the Knightfall storyline take place over three to five different titles, plus ramifications in other titles, from May, 1993 to September, 1994, with a number of contributing writers. That’s a lot of content to push into a novelization that’s only slightly larger than average. We’re talking around 100+ stories that had to be condensed. You know how movies are condensed versions of novels and movie novelizations are expanded takes on the (latest available draft for) the movie? Well, this is a case where the novelization had to do the condensing to be all one book. So O’Neil focused on Bruce trying to get stronger but still leaving enough of “Jean Paul sucks at being Batman” to make his return necessary. This should be the big fight in the Batcave, one of the issues I have and made a Friday Night Fight out of back when I was part of that gathering. Let’s see how the novel handles it.

The first part has Jean Paul Not-Batman resetting the alarms and wiring them to weapons. He’s totally lost it now. He’s gone from thinking Bruce is the false Batman to believing he might responsible for his father’s death. Then “St. Dumas” pops in stating that there’s only one Batman–meaning Jean Paul–and that anyone can be Azrael (careful, Dumas, or you’re going to give Hollywood and comic writers more bad ideas) but Batman can serve him more than Azrael. Even if this wasn’t just a mental delusion brought on by “The System”, if his version of Dumas is accurate, then I could see him willing to turn the symbol of the Bat to his cause. As it is it’s just Jean Paul’s messed up mental state screwing around and trying to further tie him to his interpretation of Batman.

Bruce arrives at the Manor and gets a full introduction to what Jean Paul Valley has become. Valley does try to kill him, treats Bruce like his public persona, and even destroys the picture of Bruce’s parents, which is definitely the last straw for Bruce. Not-Batman is going down. Luckily he knows one entrance into the Batcave, thanks to an event in his childhood when he fell down a hole that led into the network of caves and his father came to his rescue. So he returns to the cave, but he’s still hiding HIS Batcostume under his Bruce clothes. One interesting note is a moment that seems unnecessary as he replugs the hole, but he notes that listening to his instincts over logic has saved him before. Sometimes the truth isn’t so logical, after all.

Not spotted by Valley, Bruce uses the cave network to echo his voice. At first Valley thinks it’s Dumas again (as someone raised Catholic I’m not going to give a false saint, even a fictional one, a title he doesn’t even deserve within the fiction) but while Bruce contemplates using that he ultimately decides not to lie to him. For one, Bruce is a proper Batman, a proper superhero, and using his opponent’s mental state and religious views against him like that doesn’t seem right. For another, if Jean Paul figured out he was tricked he’d go further into rage mode. He’s already nutty enough to have made his mental image of Dumas call him the one, true Batman. Instead, Bruce tries to convince him that Dumas is dead and even Batman is the fiction. That surprises him because even he bought into the “Bruce Wayne is the mask” idea, which as you may recall I do not. I thought we were going to get the big battle but that’s where the chapter ends.

So what happens? Next time the final chapter and epilogue to Batman: Knightfall.