I’m not a crook.
I’ve never committed a crime worthy of a story.
But I am from New Jersey.
And when you’re born and raised in New Jersey, you come to learn a couple of things about how a great crime story should go.
As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews of this title, Tom King set out to model his twelve-issue Penguin series on great crime epics, namely “The Sopranos”.
Now that the final issue is on store shelves, I can confidently declare that King has done his New Jersey homework.
We open with Batman rescuing Penguin from Black Spider and trying desperately to rush him back to the cave. It’s an opening that really drives home the moral ambiguity that the title has always trafficked in, since Penguin is standing over the dead body of his son Aiden. In typical Tom King fashion, the reader jumps back and forth between the twin action sequences of the initial rescue and the subsequent race home. The two sequences add up to maybe the most effectively pulse-pounding montage of the whole title so far. Having sustained an inordinate amount of damage in the rescue combat, however, Batman cannot control the Batmobile (again drawn fabulously by Rafael De LaTorre) and crashes into the water, leaving him and the Penguin to drown ignominiously and finally catching the reader back up to speed with the flash-forward cliff hanger of that very first issue from months ago.
We then get an almost-Deus-ex-machine (more on that later) second order rescue from The Help, who fishes our heroes out of the water with all the calm and indifference of a man cleaning his pool. This is followed by a quick montage of loose ends being tied up, the most brutal of which reveals just how much Oswald is willling to “give up” for the sake of control, and how coldly he is able to do so.
Of all the illustrators working for DC these days, there are few who have taken to the Dark Deco revolution of the 90s more successfully than Rafael De LaTorre. He has total command of shadow, and his figures, whether they’re on the ground or high atop the roof, look as if they’re ready to be swallowed up by Gotham’s architecture, lending the drama an undercurrent of the tragic inevitability of crime in Gotham. And I simply just can’t get enough of his mean, lean, less-is-more Batmobile. Long may it last.
The tying up of loose ends lands the reader softly back down onto the terra firms of a new, seemingly peaceful status quo in Gotham. The dust is settled, the Bat and the Penguin reach the moral impasse they know they’re destined to stay at, and Gotham’s most brutal crime lord is left to feed the birds.
And this is what I mean by Tom King doing his New Jersey homework.
As any self-respecting son of the Garden State can tell you, the six seasons of “The Sopranos” are not timeless strokes of genius because of all of the cursing and the killing; those things are just what keep us sickos watching. What separates “The Sopranos” from other products is what happens after: the quiet, mundane, picayune suburban moments that the criminals are left with in the end. Sopranos seasons end quietly. The end with no worlds saved or conquered; they instead with quiet, almost pathetic returns to a familiar status quo, and the viewer is left to contemplate the fact that ennui can sting just as much as a broken kneecap. Here, King executes his own brand of ennui excellently: a fat, seemingly pathetic old man alone on a park bench with his birds. It’s the fact that the reader has been made to witness what that man is secretly capable of that makes this a thrillingly effective crime story. Tony Soprano, after all, could just be the heavyset guy sitting behind you at the diner eating onion rings. At least as far as you’re concerned.
This is not a narratively flawless conclusion. There is at least one loose end that get tied up that I’d be willing to bet a good half of even the loyal Penguin readers forgot about. It’s of course better to have it clunkily addressed than dropped entirely, but that basic accountability does unfortunately end up pointing to evidence that the story is not completely airtight. The rescuing of Batman and The Penguin by The Help similarly feels a little bit convenient, and is only salvaged from the realm of total Deus Ex Machina by the fact that Tom King seems committed to establishing his presence as a nearly omnipotent force when it comes to Gotham City’s underground. These are minor quibbles, however, and do little to disrupt the satisfaction of this conclusion.
In case I haven’t made myself clear, I would let Tom King have total control of all things going on in the Gotham City corner of DC’s output. I also know that I’m not going to get a lot of folks agreeing with me on that front. Until the day that I am able to do so, I feel confident in letting his Penguin title stand as a testament to his craft.
Recommend if…
- You enjoyed Tom King’s Gotham City: Year One
- You get a kick out of the “We’re not so different, you and I” trope
- Your ideal Batmobile is all muscle, no gadgets
Overall: This is a satisfying conclusion to a mostly great Gotham crime epic. It’s the best issue that we’ve had from this title in months. If you’ve been hoping that sticking out the middling issues will all be worth it, consider yourself rewarded.
Score: 8.5/10
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