Cowan/Giordano are awesome. I too felt this storyline was all on its lonesome – a nice done-in-one, and on reflection, a wider sense of involvement in the main continuity would’ve been nice.
I re-read 1 of the trilogy recently & thought it held up. Doesn’t part 2 (599) go into the origin stuff, to be fair to the story?

Did this arc really deconstruct the Batman character? He was wheelchair bound and under indictment for treason – under those exceptional circumstances, he accepted the aid of an able-bodied adult. Personally, I find this far less jarring than bringing a teenage sidekick along on his adventures. Yes, Roy Kane dies as a result of this decision, but that’s the way supporting characters have been treated in adventure fiction for 150 years – how many of Dirty Harry’s partners or James Bond’s lovers survived to the end of the picture?

The same goes for Bruce Wayne not realising that the Wayne Foundation is being used as a front for the CIA. It has always been written that Batman’s priority is his crime-fighting career and that he takes a rather hands-off attitude to the running of his company, so I don’t think it stretches credibility to suppose that he doesn’t know exactly what is going on in every single department. Anyway, for seventy years, Batman has been constantly walking into traps and allowing people to sneak up behind him and cosh him over the head. If he never made mistakes, then his adventures would be very very dull.

I have always felt that post-Dark Knight Returns, DC allowed Batman to be painted into a corner. He became very one-dimensional – a humourless, arrogant obssessive with no outside interests and subsequently the stories became very repetitive. One of the reasons that so many Batman stories have been set at the beginning of his career is that the mature, never-makes-mistakes, knows-all-the-answers Batman is nigh on impossible to write in an interesting way.

Blind Justice was a successful attempt to broaden the scope of Batman’s adventures. I think that it is a shame that other writers haven’t tried to imitate it.

Oh dear…my boss ought to know that I’ve spent most of Monday morning writing about a twenty-year-old comic.

The negativity is in no small part because the price of that dark tension is to deconstruct a character we need to be the star and protagonist in #601 and beyond; this is a Batman who sends a naive young man to his death by commandeering his body, who’s so detached from his own wealth that the villains are using his company — his inheritance — to carry out their schemes, and who’s monomania makes him a total joke in the eyes of a worldy fellow like Ducard.

It’s not a Batman who’s a heroic figure of any sort; many readers will now sagely nod and tell me that Batman is of course not heroic, but rather a fascist loon and a shallow playboy. In this story, that’s true. But as the spine of countless stories across many years, that’s not a sustainable vision. Eventually enough dead bodies are added to his name and enough petty arrogances that narrative logic demands a lasting comeuppance. And then you’ve got no Batman #651 to publish.

In the hands of a poorer artist, this story could have been extremely hard to follow, but Cowans tells the story clearly, creates a gritty ambience and ensures that all his characters are distinct. How many artists draw their figures exactly the same, the only way to tell them apart being their costumes or hair colour?

I’ve often wondered what Sam Hamm’s original screenplay for Batman was like, before it was “improved” by producers, accountants, studio executives, toy manufacturers, Tim Burton and Jack Nicholson.

Then Denny left editorial, and Ducard duly showed up again in a couple of stories thereafter.

I can also see why it was never made a film. The plot involves a mad scientist who develops a sound-based weapons system..tha allows mind-transfers, enabling the mad science villain to survive physical death by bodyjacking someone else. With ultrasound. Even by comic-book standards, that’s very ropey science. And it clashes rather badly with the realism and politics of stuff like Ducard.

In both these regards, it’s got the same problems as Sam Hamm’s script for the 1989 Batman movie; that, too, had some rather weirdly campy elements dressed up in heavy Goth makeup. And it, too, was great in 1989…but seems vaguely silly in some of its segments today for viewers raised on the Nolan/Bale cinematic take on Batman.

If so, I’ve read that one.

I must say that Blind Justice is my favourite Batman story EVER. Highly underrated and ignored by the public.

I was ten years old when Batman forever came out… I remember watching that piece of crap in the theatre thinkig: why don’t they just go ahead and make a fim out of BLIND JUSTICE? That would be the greatest Batman movie ever!

Do yourself a favour and check out Blind Justice whenever you have the chance. You will not regret it. It’s great.

And before you guys ask: I’m not related to Sam Hamm in any ways.