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 read-along book club.

PART 3: KnightsEnd

And so we come to the last “part” of this novelization of the story arc that explored what a more violent Batman would actually be like…except we haven’t really explored that. We’ve gotten glimpses of Jean Paul Valley as Batman but most of this darker Batman’s questionable actions were told to us by Tim Drake, with most of the focus of part 2 being the injured Bruce trying to rescue his metahuman doctor from a madman who wanted to use her powers. I know O’Neil couldn’t adapt everything given how many different Bat-Titles there were at the time and that’s not even counting potential cameos elsewhere. (The Justice League at the time featured mostly unknown characters and wasn’t the A-Squad of previous incarnations.) If Owen Likes Comics is right about what the Knightfall storyline was supposed to be about thematically then the novelization has already lost something compared to actually reading the comics. It might have been necessary for the format change for all I know since I wasn’t there when deciding what stories to adapt, but it still loses some of the theme of “Batman doesn’t kill and you really don’t want him to” that the story is supposedly going for.

So Bruce has found his doctor, his back is functioning again…but that’s only half the battle Bruce is back on his feet but he’s not reclaimed the cowl yet. KnightsEnd, which I hope includes stories from Knightquest: The Crusade, should be about him working to regain what made him Batman. We see his detective mind and all the tricks of Batman are still with him. However, Batman does need to fight, to use the shadows, to do more than thrown a Batarang or break out a little gadget in order to win. Bruce reclaimed his body, but his mind still needs healing. That’s what this part of the storyline should be about, so let’s begin.

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