Shadow War: Alpha #1 Discussion/Spoilers

[Rakzo]

Yes, yes, yet another Batman event. We all are tired because of the oversaturation of those mostly thanks to James Tynion IV's mediocre crossovers and while the fact that Joshua Williamson is not staying for the long run on Batman might make you think that this story is not worth checking out, at the very least it starts in a pretty engaging way.

The premise of Ra's Al Ghul trying to do good at last due that he's on his final days is a very interesting premise, one that creates solid character moments for all his family (which also follows the character development that Williamson has been doing in Robin). This leads to a logical conclusion where all the key players are reunited and of course, we all know that good things can't ever happen at the beginning of an event.

This is where Deathstroke's involvement is revealed and again, this is something that Williamson has also been setting-up during his Deathstroke Inc. series (although that's probably the weakest book he's working on) but things are not so simple here, the writer is playing with a mystery about how not all is what it seems and someone might be manipulating everyone here. Considering all the people involved here, you don't know who might actually be sincere and even Ra's fate might be part of a plan as well. I believe this is the right way to start a crossover, a compelling premise that could build-up to an even greater idea.

Viktor Bogdanovic's artwork is always pleasent to see, his Greg Capullo-influenced style continues to shine with beautiful and expressive characters along with precise storytelling.

Solid beginning. Better than anything that Tynion did at least.

[sifighter]

I thought it was interesting that they remembered the Totality was a group

By the way that look Damian gave Bruce, you know the one, will make for a great meme.

[Drako]

It's so weird that Bruce is completely inadequate with Damian. He can't say things to help Damain, but when he say something, he worded wrong. He can't even hug the boy the right way. It feels forced when you remember some of their previous interactions, even if you discard the pre-new 52 stuff.

Meanwhile, we have Deathstroke, a dude that literally killed his son before and it's a absolute piece of sh*t, being a better parent in this.
My hope is that Williamson will flip the script with this later in the crossover, cause it's a bad look right now.

The rest was fine, it's a solid book.

[Zorkel567]

While I was originally digging Tynion's run- and I do like a lot of his original characters- I soured on it over time. I like Ghost Stories a lot, and Their Dark Designs. Joker War was solid. But Cowardly Lot felt like another Their Dark Designs, just a big lead in to another event, while Fear State felt like a Joker War redux, the city falling to hell in a handbasket off page and Batman running around for five issues, just for a disappointing resolution in the finale.

So when this was first announced, I was rather annoyed, just coming out of Fear State for another event. But already reading both Batman and Robin, and having started Deathstroke Inc due to Wiliamson's talking it up, I've warmed up to this event over time. This one feels, more natural, I guess than the last couple Bat-events, naturally building out of the events of Batman, Robin, and Deathstroke Inc, building on seeds Williamson has been planting for a year now.

I've got to say that I really enjoyed this, and thought it was a great start to the event. Much better than Fear State Alpha. Though I wasn't sure how to feel about another event so quickly, I'm really digging it and this did a great job imo of bringing together threads from Batman, Robin, and Deathstroke Inc. and getting everything ready to blow up as the event continues.

I love the twist at the end. Here we were thinking the solicits had spoiled the big thrust of the event, just to have the truth be something different. I'm curious as to who the killer is. Does anyone have any guesses? Slade did say he recognized his movements.

I liked the meeting between Bruce and Damian, and I assume we're heading towards a resolution between them. I don't totally get where the issue lies though anymore. Admittedly, I didn't read Teen Titans, but the events of Tomasi's 'Tec run seemed to fix the Bruce/Damian issues.

Even so, I'm hoping the end of this arc can put that to bed and let the characters move on. I'm glad the next part is out next week, because I really want to see what happens next.

I've been happy with Williamson's Bat-works, and hope the rest of this event stays similarly strong.

[king81992]

It's so weird that Bruce is completely inadequate with Damian. He can't say things to help Damain, but when he say something, he worded wrong. He can't even hug the boy the right way. It feels forced when you remember some of their previous interactions, even if you discard the pre-new 52 stuff.

Meanwhile, we have Deathstroke, a dude that literally killed his son before and it's a absolute piece of sh*t, being a better parent in this.
My hope is that Williamson will flip the script with this later in the crossover, cause it's a bad look right now.

The rest was fine, it's a solid book.

Batman at his worst is a better parent than Deathstroke at his 'best'. Any 'good' parenting Slade does is probably a new manipulation tactic.

[Drako]

Batman at his worst is a better parent than Deathstroke at his 'best'. Any 'good' parenting Slade does is probably a new manipulation tactic.

I know that, and Deathstroke is probably going to do some harm to his kid but it's not what transpired in the book when you put one scene after the other. Damian is cleary in need of his father and Bruce can't do anything to help for some reason. And when he open his mouth, he said the most stupid shit ever to a kid who thinks that Alfreds death was on him.

He can't even say "Because you're my son" when Damian is questioning him why Bruce didnt let him die? It looks forced to create drama.

[millernumber1]

I definitely wouldn't say this is better than anything Tynion did, as I was a big fan of most of what he was doing. But this is definitely the best issue Williamson's written for Batman so far (even though it's not technically Batman). The focus on the Batman, Robin, and Deathstroke Inc casts seems to have done a good job focusing up the character work.

[Frontier]

I know that, and Deathstroke is probably going to do some harm to his kid but it's not what transpired in the book when you put one scene after the other. Damian is cleary in need of his father and Bruce can't do anything to help for some reason. And when he open his mouth, he said the most stupid shit ever to a kid who thinks that Alfreds death was on him.

He can't even say "Because you're my son" when Damian is questioning him why Bruce didnt let him die? It looks forced to create drama.

Which is weird because Bruce seemed way more emotionally honest and genuine when Tomasi wrote them together again in the last few issues of his run or, heck, that issue of TT where Damian quit being Robin.

Like I know popular fanon is that Bruce is a crime-fighting robot who has difficulty expressing himself or understanding other people emotionally but this was too much in my opinion. Like, he's an intelligent, functioning, adult he should know how to properly phrase things.

I'm tired of Bruce being written bad for the sake of family drama.

[K. Jones]

I started flicking through this as a breeze read, just keeping up with Batman's zeitgeist. I've found the Bat-Family of titles to be on an uptick lately but not monumentally good or anything, but that baseline level of "goodish" has been nice because nothing is glaringly bad - and that's a trend that continues here although I was pleasantly surprised that I had to stop trying to read and do other things at once because there was at least enough clear direction (and misdirection), canonical valuation and "neatness" - both in the sense of a well-told or "tidy" story but also in the "oh neat!" pings a long-time fan might get here. That's not a premature estimate that the whole crossover will be good, but just this first issue, which had the benefit of that clean Bogdanovic art.

I really have a lot of fondness for Williamson because of his Flash run, which took a really holistic, really all-encompassing approach. He was the one, with his Rebirth run, after all, who had neatly bundled story arcs which fit together with nicely seeded longer story threads and did a clean job of mixing the old (A Rogues arc here) with the new (some big new thematic villain) while making it look effortless to incorporate the expanded elements of Flashness from the TV show into the long canonical history in a way that felt like it's just always been like that. By and large, these were the Rebirth runs that I thought the most highly of - Steve Orlando's Supergirl and Ben Percy's Green Arrow also did this very well for me, and they're hardly the first either.

So I think his Batman run (and eventual DC kung-fu & mysticism takeover) has a lot of potential, but I do think it's going to be a slow build (and even this "shocking!" crossover event is probably just laying ground-work). But at least in that slow, or long-game approach, he's paying a lot of love to ... or I should say, it's clear he's read the last 15, 20 years of Batman comics and has his favorite runs and like just a handful of other DC writers (Your Orlandos, your Seeleys), there's a lot of Morrison in there. Oh, not with Morrison's trademark panache or ability to cut right to the red meat. Morrison's plating of a dish is clean, vivid and the presentation is always a three course meal by a chef that knows what they want you to experience. These "long and holistic runs" feel more like they come from a more modern school but do at least seem like they have an eye for balance between "a pop that gets excitement in this season of 2022, contrasted with a plan for how to have an actual five year run of comics stories with some cohesion and thematic structure."

This doesn't mean the dialogue is all tight and pitch-perfect or that using a character that's had other odd history thrown into their recent status quo doesn't feel weird or underserved or all the other things that can be problems, pacing, structure, the art selling the stakes, the vibe, the tone. Bogdanovic's art is gleeful and really slick for instance, but is far more in that Greg Capullo school of dynamism with the hints of the cartoon or anime elements that, looks really good ... but also might not 100% be the kind of urban warfare or shadowed alley ninja vibe that would best suit a proper "assassin war" tone. But he still draws the crap out of every page, I still prefer a clean, almost more T.A.S. look to somebody being a grim & gritty try-hard laying down paltry pencils then expecting their inker to "shadow it all up" without somehow drowning the whole page in a lack of clarity, composition or narrative flow.

I also like the somewhat animated style and then how he depicted "we're gonna kill Ra's al Ghul but you know, he dies and comes back all the time, so we're going to go to comedic lengths to show that somebody really thought this through diagetically and is "really really really gonna kill Ra's al Ghul"." And I think it's a fine shot to fire to tell a Batman and Damian come back together story because it's a relatively simple and novel concept about a real life thing that often happens where you haven't spoken to a family member and don't until someone dies and then you can add all the Bat-Family, Demon-Family and Wilson-Family melodrama on top of it to complex it out.

Anyway, the bit I really wanted to focus on but ends up just being me saying "nice job Williamson" is that I did feel like we were looking at a post-Inc., and post a bunch of other drama Batman (he's clearly post-Tom King, too, vis a vis Alfred), interacting with a Robin who has definitely leveled up from the Tomasi days and had those Rebirth Titans experiences, and a Deathstroke who has definitely been in Priest's run recently. Add in other family members pulled from their Spring 2022 status quos as spice to flavor the stew. I saw the direct evidence of those pulls and that reckoning of 20 years of ... semi ... contiguous storytelling from the "peanut gallery" of outsiders commenting on the news as it unfolded this issue. The Outsiders - in and including what Geo-Force is up to lately, Luthor representing the Legion of Doom, Bat-Oracle-Girl, Vandal Savage with Hawkgirl and Mister T. in that very odd illuminati ... er ... Totality situation so we know that Death Metal ---- Dark Crisis is still a through-line. This is Batman's "International Life" writ large, a three-houses style conflict where there's connected kids who could be problems or opportunities or melodramatic side-choosing (with side-houses, too - I see Sportsmaster and Merlyn, a Raptor cameo and Damian's cousin, you show me a Mad Dog Cain, Tigress and Cheshire and the smaller houses could get crazy).

Anyway, with those outsiders chiming in peanut gallery style, I shouldn't have been surprised to see Talia pull in that Outsiders lady, the Seven Men of Death, the Demon's Fist kid assassins (Damian's cousin and crew, scions of the White Ghost), or even some of the completely rando assassins from Lobdell's Red Hood early days. There's notably some folks missing whose inclusion (because they're up to their own things) actually would have to be story driven. Shiva, Bronze Tiger, Cheshire, and many others, if they're going to enter this tale, it's an actual plot point - and whose side they choose between Talia and Slade would also be a plot point. I think Shiva is probably the most glaringly obvious of those. So anyway, it's quite nice that he (with exceptions for those who it would cause head-scratching to just have show up for the wide-shot and can better use as pieces in the narrative), he didn't really forget too many folks. Like, he really didn't forget too many folks. Talia straight up references Melisande the Fortune-Teller and Nyssa al Ghul on page six or whatever.

With all those boxes ticked, it really feels like a sort of continuity where "Demon's Quest" morphs into "Son of the Demon", "New Teen Titans" alongside, folding into the Nineties stuff into "Death and the Maidens" into Dini & Morrison's "Resurrection", Tomasi's "Outsiders", and "Incorporated/Leviathan" and into "Rebirth Teen Titans" and "Recent Outsiders" and "Priest Deathstroke" and to the recent "Robin" stuff and it more or less makes sense. Even one panel of Vandal Savage hints at a 20 year history of stories and the Morrison run, while Luthor watching plays to both Johns & Snyder's Justice Leagues, and so on and so forth. These are characters with relationships, even if not every frame hits the "wow, this panel is the sum total of a 80 year history" magic mark every single time. Sometimes the episode just needs some padding to get from point A to B, sometimes the season needs some filler episodes. I'm sure it'll all be here.

I speculate that Jericho or Adeline might be targeted right out of the gate, which should make an interesting sequence. I think we're overtly meant to figure that "Deathstroke Classic" is part of a Ra's al Ghul scheme even if the "how" or "why" aren't clear in issue # 1. It's all set up. But anyway.

[Felipe Silveira]

The final pages is the classic Williamsom, open the Comicvine lists and place the characters on the page.
Do you remember when Raptor was introduced as Nightwing's villain? With all your motivation being Dick? crazy right, another "ninja" enemy of Nightwing that turns into a geric "ninja" character in other comics.

[golgi]

Do we get to see the new league of assassins/shadows that are hunting Deathstroke?

[sifighter]

Do we get to see the new league of assassins/shadows that are hunting Deathstroke?

Oh yeah we get to see a big group shot of the people coming for Deathstroke led by Talia. Some are actually recognizable, like Damian’s cousin Maria from the Rebirth Teen Titans series. Others include Raptor, Sportsmaster, and what looks like the Green Arrow villain Merlyn.

[Rac7d*]

Oh yeah we get to see a big group shot of the people coming for Deathstroke led by Talia. Some are actually recognizable, like Damian’s cousin Maria from the Rebirth Teen Titans series. Others include Raptor, Sportsmaster, and what looks like the Green Arrow villain Merlyn.

Raptor works for for the league, so he took Talia deal?

[Drako]

He went from wanting to be with Dick's mama to Damian's, it looks like.

[golgi]

Oh yeah we get to see a big group shot of the people coming for Deathstroke led by Talia. Some are actually recognizable, like Damian’s cousin Maria from the Rebirth Teen Titans series. Others include Raptor, Sportsmaster, and what looks like the Green Arrow villain Merlyn.

No new characters?