Spoilers for Future State and The Next Batman #1 below!
DC’s Future State is here, glitching out of the remnants of Dark Nights: Death Metal. With it comes a new timeline, status quo, and yes… a new Batman. Tim Fox has taken up the mantle of the Bat, patrolling the streets of near-future Gotham in Bruce Wayne’s stead. Using a day-in-the-life style framework, The Next Batman #1 serves as an introduction to the new Caped Crusader. The issue showcases the new Batman’s circumstances, philosophy, and potential stumbling blocks in being the new protector of the city and its people. It’s a surprisingly familiar and back-to-basics approach for the Dark Knight - and creative team John Ridley and Nick Derington. Batman catches a criminal, avoids the police, drops smoke, helps some kids in need, and neutralizes potential gang warfare. So what makes this Batman different from Bruce Wayne's? The answer fittingly lies under the cowl.
A fraction of The Next Batman’s pages focus on the Fox family. Tim’s familial life, already complicated enough, is made more complex by taking up the mantle of the Dark Knight. Tim’s parents, longtime Batman ally Luscious Fox and his wife Tanya, are aligned with The Magistrate and the new mayor. His mother is searching for a legal justification for the city’s draconian new anti-mask laws as she blames them (good and bad) for her daughter - Tim’s sister Tamara - being in a coma. Tim’s brother Luke is suspicious of Tim, who has been absent from the family since his teens. This is absolutely a new dynamic in terms of Batman’s personal/familial life.
Bruce Wayne, we all know by now, is also driven by family. Theater, mom and dad, gun, pearls, tragedy. The imagery of Batman’s origin will be forever ingrained in the cultural consciousness. Bruce’s relationship with the notions of family, friends, love… human relationships in general, has been a long theme of Batman stories, from his classic comic eras, to the Dark Knight trilogy and the Lego Batman movie, to modern runs on the comic from Tom King, Grant Morrison, and Scott Snyder. Declaring literal war on crime as a child, spawned from the absence of family, Bruce tragically struggles with emotional attachment. His Batman is an avenging figure so dedicated to his cause, so singularly obsessed, that his personal life becomes merely a façade. He becomes so committed to preventing what happened to him from happening to others, that he denies himself any chance of that same goal.
That goal - the curating, fostering, and shepherding of human connection - is a priority for Tim Fox personally. The Next Batman makes this clear in those few, but important, panels of the Fox family and Tim outside of the suit. Tim is unmistakably estranged from his family. Digging into the Fox family history in Batman comics will reveal this, but it is ultimately unnecessary to understand it. In an argument with Tim at their sister’s bedside in the hospital, Luke heatedly explains “You got out of that military academy years ago. You could’ve come home,” before calling Tim out for being absent for so many years, and now suddenly showing up and caring about their sister. But Tim (who’s now going by ‘Jace’) does care. And he is trying to mend whatever he can with his family, to repair that damaged human connection. It’s as important to Tim as fighting crime. In fact, they may be one and the same.
On one of his patrols as Batman, Tim helps two teenage, would-be members of a new Bane-based gang of Gotham. The boys are brothers, desperate and vulnerable, preyed upon by the gang’s leadership for recruitment. They’re given Bane masks and told to “blood in.” After stopping them from executing a drive-by on a rival, Batman saves the kids from the police, who are acting on their “shoot a mask on sight” policy enacted by The Magistrate and mayor. Batman doesn’t know they’re brothers, but the comic makes this clear. The leader of the Bane gang even tells the kids no one cares about them, especially their supposed family. “Except us,” the leader says, “we care, we family. So the question is: do you want to be family?” This version of Batman is very much focused on family, but from a distinctly different perspective than what readers are used to with Bruce Wayne.
Future State: The Next Batman #2 drops January 19th.
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