Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Batman and the Monster Men, Issue #4 – “Batman and the Monster Men (Part 4)”! In the previous installment, Bruce continues to be a flake in his “relationship” with Julie. As Batman, he discovers that a Maroni poker game massacre may lead to Professor Hugo Strange as a person of interest and pays a visit to his super-secret warehouse lab. He gets thrown into a cell with three giant genetically-engineering monster men! How’s he going to get out of this doozy of a pickle, you ask? Do the words “foxishly cunning” mean anything to you?

Batman and the Monster Men, Issue #4 [April, 2006]
Written by: Matt Wagner
“Batman and the Monster Men (Part 4)”

Batman is bleeding profusely in the face, but he fears not. For you see, the three giant monster men? Small potatoes! He can beat these guys up even after cutting off all of his limbs with a rusty chainsaw! Take that! Who’s the victim now?

“The creatures are surprisingly swift for their size,” Batman thinks as he throws many batarangs. One goes right in a fucker’s eye, jesus. Ouch to the max, sir. “But like any giant, their joints most likely suffer from excess stress.”

Batman kicks knees and wraps rope around legs and, generally, is a huge nuisance. “Remarkable,” says Strange, watching the footage from the comfort of his… bar. “His every action… as sleek and swift as an Olympic athlete.”

Strange keeps blowjobbin’ Batman while the monster men try to make short work of the poor sap. They fail. Strange gets more and more worked up and aroused. “He is… magnificent!”

One monster man lifts Batman by the cape, nearly choking him to death. To death! TO DEATH!! But then the cape tears off in the beast’s hands. Another rips off his utility belt. The third one pantses him and nibbles his penis delicately. “Distracted by each other and their handfuls of trinkets… the creatures relax their grip just enough. Lucky my hip wasn’t dislocated. Lucky my kneecap didn’t shatter.” Uh huh, this is all very exciting, isn’t it? Batman’s gonna die and none of us care! Let’s get back to our Super Smash Bros. Melee game. It’s been on pause for six hours now!

Looks like the cover of Big Black’s Songs About Fucking to me.

While Batman is getting his ass handed to him, Norman Madison takes a swig of very strong scotch. He’s so damn drunk that he slurs his words to his lovely daughter. Like “isssshhh that yeerrr BOOOOBS? YERRR GOIANG OUT DRESHED LIEK THAHT!?!” Julie is having a girl’s night out since Bruce is a dick and won’t even return her calls. “Don’t wait up for me, okay?” she says, kissing her lush of a dad on the cheek. Julie wonders why her dad seems preoccupied. All the men in her life seem preoccupied. It sucks.

Norman, once again, wonders out loud of this Bruce fella is good enough for his daughter. And Julie is like “tee hee, he’s rich and handsome” and leaves it at that. Julie walks out, leaving Norman to stare wistfully out his penthouse suite window, looking like someone’s going to snipe his face at any second JFK-style.

So Batman is still beating up big, drooling, hairy giants, right? They smell like feces and things are sort of not going well all of a sudden. His ribs keep cracking one by one, which is going to concern Alfred later while Bruce decides to go jogging at 4am without medical attention.

Batman chains one by the neck and ties the other end to a sewer grate. Eventually, the giant pulls the grate out of the floor with a SKRONK, leaving a convenient escape for Batman right there for the taking!

The giants are perplexed.

WHERE’D DA BAT GO?? GRUNT RRGNNH WHERE DA BAT? HRRRNN FAAART

Strange watched the whole thing from the comfort of his… dad’s bed. “He escaped! He escaped using only a pair of handcuffs!” He’s positively salivating at this. It’s quite pathetic. “Just imagine what one could do with the DNA of such a man!”

Batman lands in the stinky sewer water, and it smells like home. Strange has created some ungodly beasties; what would possess a man to do such a thing? Power? Greed? Bravery? Cunning? Hunger? Sexual desire? “And what wicked lengths will he go before he is stopped?”

Strange enters the room and inspects Batman’s trinkets and baubles littered around the floor. He picks up the utility belt and discovers no firearms. Just silent weapons, detection equipment, emergency aids, and boner pills. He picks up the cape and smiles fiendishly. An idea he has, that’s for darn sure!

Later, Bruce has another stupid dream about his dead parents before Julie wakes him up. What she’s doing there is this: surprise! Just checking up on you. I got to your room through the secret trap door from the Batcave that I discovered while digging giant holes on your property! Isn’t that funny?? Haa haa hoo hoo ha.

Anyway, Bruce is completely floored that this woman was able to find her way in the manor, let alone his bedroom, without Alfred’s assistance. Julie tells him to shush and it doesn’t matter, so stop nagging. She draws the curtains and discovers that Bruce is covered in about a hundred bandaids and large squares of gauze. “It, uh… it looks a lot worse than it feels!” he says unconvincingly. She demands to know what happened and he won’t tell her. “I, um… took a spill playing polo. My pony dragged me around for a bit.”

A shrewd one, this girl. Too bad I’m going to have to kill her now.

Julie is very concerned, but Bruce tells her to lay the fuck off. He’s a big boy and he can take care of himself, is all. He grits his teeth and looks mean as hell. “Julie, I’m… sorry. It’s… been so long since I’ve had someone actually worry about me… I guess I’m just out of practice.”

“Have I let her get too close to my dark and violent world?” Bruce thinks as he waves goodbye to his concerned barely-girlfriend. “The war has suddenly grown so bizarre. Yet still remains heedless of what victims it claims.”

Very poetic, dingus. Write it in your diary next time, I don’t want to read that hooey.

Professor Strange, meanwhile, plays with his beakers and his Bunsen burners. He found a single drop of blood on Batman’s cape and now he’s playing with his various strange liquids. Outside, Strange’s assistant Sanjay has a gun to his face. You see, Strange has been delinquent on paying back his loans without dirty money, so a couple of Maroni’s goons are here to settle the score. One guy shoots one of Strange’s stasis tubes containing some poor floating sucker. “So just consider this a warning… there better be no more ‘unusual events’ around the time of your next payment.”

After, for some reason, letting Strange know that Maroni is nowhere to be found at the moment, they walk away leaving Strange seething and no longer horny. “Follow them again, Sanjay. See if you can discover what rat-hole Maroni has crawled into. I believe our association with Sal Maroni has reached the end of its benefits.”

And guess who turned the tables? In the Batcave, it is now Bruce who is spying on Strange. And he just saw this whole thing! Time to take action!

Final Thoughts

Batman needs to stick this guy’s head in the toilet. He’s been asking for it since day one and a swirlie is just what the doctor ordered. And that doctor’s name was Dr. Scholl’s. His feet stink too, is what I’m saying.