It’s good to see that DC haven’t entirely forgotten how to generate an opportunistic spin-off miniseries for their events. It’s something that Marvel have been a lot better at recently, with ‘Dark Reign’ and ‘Secret Invasion’ spawning minis and ongoings all over the shop, taking story elements from the main event and creating titles with, to a lesser or greater extent, their own identity and appeal.
With ‘Azrael: Death’s Dark Knight’, writer Fabian Nicieza deftly picks up a number of threads – the ‘high concept’ that whenever Batman falls an Azrael turns up, the suit of armour from a recent Pete Milligan-scripted story, and the three ex-cop substitute Batmen from Grant Morrison’s run – and weaves them together with his own concerns as a writer to create something that feels like an organic extension of the current storyline.
In short, an Order of St Dumas splinter group called the Order of Purity have their own Azrael, but are having difficulties finding a candidate who can wear the Suit of Sorrows without going raging nuts. They think they’ve found a viable candidate in, Michael, the last surviving replacement Batman from Dr Hurt’s experiments, but their recruitment evening is interrupted by Talia Al Ghul’s goons, sent to retrieve the suit.
The Azrael concept has two great strengths: the idea of a superhero whose motivation/weakness comes from religious fervour and visions, and Joe Quesada’s excellent costume design. The religious angle is all here, and plays to Nicieza’s strengths as a writer, as he’s always good with characters who are self righteous to the point of lunacy (see also Zemo, Baron), while the Azrael costume, always great to look at but a bugger to draw, here gets a very nice, streamlined new look: the mask, the spiky cape bits and the flaming sword are in place, but the armour, gauntlets and underlying clothing are more simplified and practical.
It’s a good look. In fact, it’s a good looking book in general. Artist Frazer Irving is one of the finest talents to emerge from the ‘2000AD’ thrill farms in the last decade or so, but is a tough fit for US superhero gigs – only his collaboration with Grant Morrison on ‘Klarion’ has really used Irving’s gift for grotesquerie fully. ‘Azrael’ isn’t a perfect fit for Irving, but it is a good one – while it’s quite urban compared to Klarion’s gothic landscape, Irving is well-suited to the twisted mental landscape of a religious visionary. Nicieza writes the character with a kind of disturbed detachment, and Irving’s off-kilter art has a similar effect.
Nicieza’s script won’t blow anyone away with formal experimentation and bravado storytelling choices, but it manages the difficult job of recapping the Azrael concept, retelling a bit of recent continuity, setting up Michael, all while telling an actual story and having room for some action. We don’t have much feel for the new Azrael as an individual yet – we know Michael’s history, and that he’s deeply broken, but at the moment he’s just another traumatised gung-ho badass – but there’s room for that later. What this first issue does entirely successfully is make an entertaining case for the ‘Azrael’ concept, why it offers something different to other superhero comics, and why we should read more. Hopefully the next two issues will deliver on that initial promise.
