Batman: Journey Into Knight takes Batman, the character, from being a likable, appealing character and turns him into the soulless, neo-facist jack-hole he’s been in the last ten or fifteen years worth of DC comics. It’s not bad either (the “regular” DC Batman is, in writer Andrew Helfer’s story, a result of brainwashing courtesy the Joker), in fact, it’s a bit of a tragedy. Bruce Wayne loses himself and never even realizes why he did. I imagine Helfer, who’s old school, was making some quiet commentary in Journey, which otherwise is fairly innocuous. It’s Batman Begins (in quite a few ways), only in DC Comics’s continuity.
The art, by Tan Eng Huat, isn’t quite what Journey needs. Most of Huat’s art is okay--passable, without being interesting (his action scenes, for example, are difficult to decipher). Journey needed someone who could do iconic art, tragic even. Helfer’s dialogue is mediocre, but his scenes are effective and the story itself is rock-solid. It’s serious, occasionally comedic, and still allows Batman to be a character. Interestingly, Helfer fails at some of the supporting cast’s relationships--including one important one, but I suppose a reader going through the issues month-to-month would forget--but his relationships between Batman and other characters are always good.
The last three issues of Journey upgrade the paper from newsprint to something slick and the change really hurts Haut’s art. It’s a bad place to do a changeover, because Journey’s conclusion is unexpected to say the least. Helfer manages to tie the series together well since the first six issues take place four months before the last six. It’s not just the change in Batman, which--like I said--isn’t a journey, but the result of brainwashing, it’s also the way Helfer maneuvers the story. He only lets one thing get away from him (the girl, of course), but it’s still a good job, since he held on to four or five other major plot-lines. Helfer made me feel bad for Batman, which makes Journey a reasonable success.
