Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Batman and the Mad Monk, Issue #6 – “Dark Moon Rising (Part 6)”! In the previous installment, Batman escapes the Rallstone Death Castle and gets extremely fucking wounded in the process. Instead of staying away from the Murder Mansion, he decides to return in order to save a girlfriend he’ll have for another three weeks from a Brotherhood of Feral Vampires.

We’re wrapping up the Mad Monk limited series. It’s been a fun ride! Next I’ll tackle Batman and the Anime Convention Orgy.

Batman and the Mad Monk, Issue #6 [March, 2007]
Written by: Matt Wagner
“Dark Moon Rising (Part 6)”

lol look at the cover. Niccolai with his spear and spiked mace. Batman with a fucking shield. This is going to be stupid and I love it.

Julie is scared and screaming like a dingus. Suddenly, she’s not so tired. Suddenly, she doesn’t feel so drugged. Suddenly, she’s awake and aware and oh god the humanity. “Let me go!!” she yells to deaf ears. “What do you want?”

Look, dear. They want your blood. Sorry if that offends you.

It’s at this point that Batman decides to crash his car through a motherfucking wall, scaring a great deal of the Brotherhood and perplexing the Mad Monk to no end. Dala thinks it’s part of the sacrifice. Like a mid-meal show or something, but Niccolai is like “you’re really dumb.”

Batman shoots some weird poison gas out of his car to help “thin out their numbers.” Then he leaps out the roof, providing a decent view of his crotch, and starts roundhouse kicking some red-robed butt. Of course, the Monk is conspicuously dressed, so Batman singles him out almost immediately. He’s the one who looks like Moltar from Space Ghost.

Mad Monk gets nervous! “This… intruder if the very downfall of which I had warned!!” he yelps. “Tear out his throat as you would any cattle! Prove yourselves worthy of my gifts!”

Yeah right. The Brotherhood is riddled with Boomers, basically, and Batman is able to punch these old losers with nothing but the most robust of gusto. Batman even comments upon their sniveling loser-dom. Bunch of perverted nerds, the whole lot.

New phone who dis?

In short, Batman takes down about 400 people without even huffing and puffing. Julie starts screaming for his attention, and I can’t believe he didn’t already notice her. The woman chained to a cross, the centerpiece of the room. He throws silver batarangs at the Monk (embedded in the wrist) and Dala (embedded in her chest), and then blames the Monk for the injuries! Ha! I like that.

Noticing that the Mad Monk isn’t affected by the silver (which is really going to piss off Alfred; Batman wasted those candlesticks for naught!), Batman rushes toward him to give him the ol’ one-two-buckle-my-shoe, but then gets kicked in the ribs. This guy is fast! Like the opposite of a snail, whatever that animal may be.

The kick was so forceful that it sends Batman flying into Julie, splintering the wood she’s chained to and setting her free. His stitches bust open, so that’s a lmao. He’s bleeding all over the place again. But no time for self-care, the Mad Monk is on the run! Julie seems ok, so he leaves her hacking and coughing on the cold floor as he follows the running vampire.

Meanwhile, the sweating, beady-eyed Norman Madison hides behind a column in a parking garage, gun at the ready. He’s going to wait until Maroni and his cronies come down the elevator so that he can murder them in public, thereby severing his ties with the mob forever and living happily ever after!

“MARONI! IT’S OVER! Say whatever prayers you can recall…”

Then Norman fires three rounds that miss Maroni and his men by about 89 nautical miles. Needless to say, Norman gets killed by the still-living goons. It’s really sad, maybe. To somebody. I don’t care much, personally. Norman Madison was a shitty character to say the least!

Maroni is like “I thought it might have been one of Falcone’s guys, but it’s just some drunk homeless guy or something” and moves on with his day.

Batman has lost the Mad Monk’s trail and is now wandering aimlessly through the maze of the castle’s underground tunnels. Again. His underwear is soaked in blood, but he presses on until he finds his culprit in a room full of medieval weaponry. Some real Legend of Zelda shit. They each grab weapons and duke it out, son.

Batman notices that the Mad Monk maintains his springy agility while Batman himself is a bumbling sack of garbage.

Further injury is sustained.

You’re such a whiner.

Batman grabs a shield and hits the Mad Monk with it, stymieing him for precious seconds before he takes off in the other direction again. Batman gives chase, gasping and panting and dying of exsanguination before our very eyes.

They both end up on the roof, and it’s pouring rain. Batman takes note of the steepness of the roof and the slippery tiles! These will prove to either be advantageous or disastrous! Mad Monk starts talking a big game about his immortality, telling Batman that people like him have been trying to thwart him for centuries! Batman calls him “Richard Rallstone”, which takes the Mad Monk aback for a blink of an eye. Then he basically says “nuh-uh.”

As Mad Monk raises his spear, intending to impale the Bat-Man once and for all, he gets struck by lightning! And he dies! There’s nothing ironic or poetic about this justice at all. Batman didn’t do a thing! Before he bleeds out completely, he runs back down to the basement to go find Julie. She is currently being threatened by Dala, who is pulling her hair and waving a knife around with reckless abandon.

Damn. Get a hobby, lady. Jesus.

Luckily for Julie, there’s a large piece of splintered wood right in front of her. Quick as a sultry fox, she whips it around behind her and clocks Dala right in the mug. Somewhere along the line the room was set afire, somehow, and Julie starts choking in the smoke. Before she dies to death, Batman takes her by the arm and plows through a fucking window. The illustration looks like he used her head to break the glass, which I find charming!

Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation time! Julie’s heart is barely beating, her breathing stopped. Bruce takes off his cowl so that she can see a familiar face and a familiar crooning, silky, baritone voice. Like Nick Cave. She wakes up slowly and notices that Bruce Wayne, the Bruce Wayne, is in a Batman uniform! She’s startled and confused and Bruce kinda feels bad about it. He apologizes for all the deception while she freaks the fuck out.

To further add fuel to her freak-out fire, she remembers that her dad was being weird to her while she was still drugged up on vamp juice. Batman promises that no harm will come to him (lol).

Epilogue already? Ha, whatever. Julie has left Gotham for good and joined the Peace Corps. She pens a letter to Bruce noting that she pinpointed the reason for her father’s weird behavior from his journal entries: he was afraid of Batman. So, good going. Anyway, she’s protecting the people of this small African settlement in the same way that Bruce protects Gotham City. “There is a part of me that will always love you, Bruce. But that part all but died along with my father.” So, again, eat shit.

Batman sinks into a depressive bout of introspection. His stupid Batman crusade keeps hurting people, but he won’t stop. He’ll try to not hurt people in the future, though. He’ll try really hard!

Oh yeah, and Jim Gordon found a warehouse full of poisoned bodies. Maybe that’s linked to the missing heroin. What a pointless secondary plot point that didn’t need to be introduced and went nowhere.

Show’s over, folks.

Final Thoughts

This story is not as good as many would lead you to believe. I, for one, thought it was a pile of Grade A Prime Boloney!

But you can do much worse than Batman. Superman, for example. Blech.

I just found out, too, that I was supposed to read this one after Batman and the Monster Men, so whoops! Don’t bother clicking that link yet, I probably haven’t gotten to it. Unless I did get to it, then by all means. Just click any link you see around here, honestly. Something good will likely happen! Not a guarantee.