Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #14 – “Prey (Part 4): The Nightmare”! In the previous installment, Catwoman and Max Cort as a Bat-like Man fight on the roof of a fancy gala event. He wins, but then when the real Batman swoops in, he loses! Not good!

Still under Dr. Strange’s spell, he feels like a danged loser. But, oh ho ho, it’s time to put on a real Batman suit and give it all he’s got! And that means kidnapping the Mayor’s daughter, probably because she was being mean to Strange! This is all about insecurities and bedwetting, it is.

I’m gonna see where this goes. Join me.

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #14 [January, 1991]
Written by: Doug Moench
“Prey (Part 4): The Nightmare”

The Mayor is UP IN ARMS! His daughter is gone, Captain Gordon, you bastard. Your eyeglasses frames match your hair color and you’re a bastard. “I’m the Mayor. I run this town. And I want her back… you hear me?”

Loud and clear, Mr. President! Er… guv’nor. Because if Gordon doesn’t fix this shit in five days time, he’s off the force. He’ll never police anyone else again in his life! Eek and erp! Gordon walks away discombobulated. He knows Batman is innocent on this, he just has to figure out how to prove it! Perhaps he can set up an elaborate series of traps, each one more elaborate than the previous, in order to–

No. Oh well. If nothing else, it’s time to let Max Cort know the current situation. “We have order to bring in the Batman,” Gordon tells him grimly. “Using whatever means necessary.”

Cort gets out his nutcracker. Time to crack some nuts!… and after he does that, it’s time to look for the Batman and give him a stern talking-to! “And here I figgered that was the purpose of the task force in the first place.” Well, he’s really got Gordon there, doesn’t he? Stay away from that nutcracker.

Cort finds his men scarfing down donuts in the local diner. “Unofficial, you understand, but straight from the top… shoot to kill.” I mean, Cort isn’t wrong here. The whole “using whatever means necessary” thing was a mistake on Gordon’s part, the dumb bastard. He should have just told him to get Batman via an elaborate series of traps that–

Next, we are treated to a gritty noir sequence of Bruce’s parents biting the big one. “I’ve lived their deaths a thousand times, and the dream is always the same… a nightmare giving birth to the other dream, equally dark – the dream of the Bat.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Strange is being a real gentleman.

I hate it when real-life mannequins start talking back to me!

Strange then slaps Catherine Klass and ties her mouth up. “WOMEN! You are all alike! No man’s ever good enough for you – unless he’s the high and mighty Batman! Well, I’ve got news – the Batman’s about to fall!” Geez, I hope he doesn’t hurt himself. You know. After the fall.

Later, a bunch of cops are shooting at Batman. “Does Gordon know about this?” he thinks as he dodges bullets like a ballet dancer, all prim and pretty. “If he does, something big has happened. But what?” He probably took a big, stinky dump. That’s the something big that happened.

Batman thinks this madness and nonsense is as bad as the nightmare. How is he supposed to stop ol’ whatsits…Night Scourge… if the police are shooting at his young, supple buttocks? “Every turn blocked by guns. How can they justify this? What has changed?”

Then a cop calls Batman a “kidnapper” and things click like a nerf ball hitting a pile of feathers. By that I mean it doesn’t click. Not yet.

Batman is seen jumping in a car, and one of these dickheads he’s gonna be the one to get him. To “ace the Bat”, as it were. It doesn’t work at all, of course. The Bat jumps out of the trunk and CHUPs the guy upside the head. Or perhaps CHUPside the head! Ha!

I heard he can melt brains with his brain-melting eyeballs and turn your genitals into a pile of ugly applesauce.

Enough of this. Batman opens a manhole and hides in the sewer until the coast is clear, even though he loves hanging out in the sewers anyway. The cops think he’s some sort of Bat-Demon, disappearing into thin air with his trickery and witchery! Then one realizes they need to go into the sewer, but that ain’t fuckin’ happening! Time to get more donuts, bye bye.

Batman heads down three blocks and gets back up to the street. Coast is clear, but news of a Batman vigilante wanted for kidnapping the Mayor’s daughter is heard as a couple of guys walk by with a boombox. It clicks like a nerf ball hitting a lightswitch, which DOES make a clicking sound! With this new information, Batman prepares… something. Lunch?

Yeah, a knuckle sandwich! Special delivery for Dr. Strange’s mouth and teeth! Batman breaks into Strange’s apartment, sending the guy into a mild panic. But he regains composure, asking why Batman felt compelled to “enter the lion’s den”. Pffft.

“To tell you I had nothing to do with the kidnapping – and I think you know it.” Well, no fucking shit, sir. The guy you’re talking to orchestrated the whole thing. It’s clicking like a nerf ball hitting a pile of other nerf balls. Plus, maybe Strange has something to do with this Night Scourge fellow! All the pieces are falling into place like four jigsaw puzzles thrown into a woodchipper!

“Denial and displacement of guilt,” Dr. Strange responds, eyeballing a nearby baseball bat. “How banal.”

Who’s the Bat Man now?! Ha ha haaaa!! Strange waves the thing around while commenting on Batman’s smelly sewer odor, then he knocks the head off of his mannequin girlfriend. She laughed at him again! Even his inanimate objects think he’s worthy of constant ridicule!

But here’s the real good stuff: the mannequin head is full of noxious gas! It’s leaking out of her forehead in ribbons of yellow vapor. A hallucinogen. Batman’s going to start thinking he’s a glass of orange juice, and if he leans over too much he’ll spill!

Now Batman is incapacitated like a wuss, and Strange thumps him on the head with the bat. Then he knocks him off the side of the building. SWUMP WUMPT WOKT. Batman screams for mommy and daddy as he plummets to the street. Strange finds this revelation quite delicious.

Batman launches his Bat Bungee and he’s able to stop his fall to just slow enough to WUMP on the ground and not die! Meanwhile, Strange calls Cort to tell him the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle had been recovered from this metaphorical woodchipper I made up a few paragraphs ago! “Get me the police files on all the double murders – husband and wife – going back twenty years,” he smiles with smug-ass satisfaction. Like he isn’t a creepy little twit.

Batman is having another nightmare, and it’s worse than last time. Once his parents are shot, it takes them forever to fall to the ground. They also have about 50 liters of blood each. “Thicker than quicksand”. And he’s stuck in it as he screams and cries.

A fantastic position for all kinds of sucking.

And then he gets up, and the man with the gun chases him down. “Now it’s your turn, kid…” he says as an older Batmanned Bruce runs into traffic. In reality, a cop is pointing his gun and asking Batman to stop moving or he’s dead.

“Mom and dad. A good movie. A shortcut. And the head. The head with the drug. The shortcut drug with the men. The movie men with the vibrating guns.” And he just rambles incoherently like this as the hallucinogen fucks up all his sense and the brain parts that allow him to avoid word salads with nonsense dressing!

He jumps into a body of water, presumably a river, and starts sinking…

Elsewhere, two men are robbing a jewelry store, but after a YAARRGH and a SHRUKT, they are both stabbed and/or sliced. Definitely very dead. “Better,” Night Scourge says as he takes off his mask and becomes Max Cort the Strange Puppet. “I’m better. Better than him. Strange is right… and the moon is beautiful… relaxing…

The next day, Gordon catches Cort asleep at the wheel! Asleep at the ol’ desk wheel, that is! And it’s curious, because Cort hasn’t been working nights. “…at least not officially.” Gordon grabs the paperwork that Cort is slumped over like a drunk bump on a log. Reports that are supposed to kept out of Dr. Strange’s hands. Data on Batman sightings. Files on husband/wife murders. Egads! Sgt. Cort is helping Stinky Dr. Strange! Dr. Strange was supposed to be working through the Mayor’s office, not through the police department! A crime of etiquette of the highest degree!

Gordon frowns in front of his phone. He always frowns. Often, it’s in front of his phone. It’s a perfect storm of torrential sewage. Cort helping Strange while the cops are trying to kill Batman, and the Mayor’s daughter kidnapped which is keeping the momentum going. And now Cort knows that Gordon has been withholding sex! I mean… information! And Gordon’s been helping Batman! Hot water for sure on this one. “…and if Batman goes down… I drown too.”

Should’ve thought of that before becoming a high-ranking police officer. Perhaps you should have been an accountant instead. They get shot at only half as much.

It’s like those Lennon/Ono recordings except, honestly, marginally less disgusting.

Dr. Strange tells Cort that he and Catherine “spent half the night making tape recordings”, to which Cort responds that Strange is babbling and making very little sense. Strange throws the phone against the wall.

Batman finds himself washed up on the docks. He’s not covered in quicksand blood after all. It appears to be gross Gotham water! What a relief, but Batman is still unsure if there are still residuals of the hallucinogen making everything all weird and swimmy… until a ship crew spots him, calls him “Bat-Scum”, and proceeds to run at him their pointy harpoons! “You lookin’ for some poor punk to rip to pieces – or maybe someone else to kidnap?!”

Ugh. It’s a living!

Meanwhile, Selina “Cat” Kyle “Woman” works out in her early ‘90s jazzercise outfit, commenting on the news reports of Batman kidnapping the Mayor’s daughter. “He didn’t do it. He’s dark – but not that dark.”

Batman slumps back to his castle-shaped mansion feeling sullen and neutered. Nobody respects him anymore! He’s just a man who people think deserves a nice harpooning. No fear. No power. It sucks.

No, Alfred! Those pills in the medicine cabinet were not for you! They were not for you!!

It’s nice being back in the big, cold, dingy, empty house, but where is the faithful butler who has that ankle bracelet that will inject poison into his veins if he even thinks about leaving the premises? Alfie! Ooohhhh, Alfie! I brought home some McDona– NOOO!!!!

Alfred is supine on the floor, knocked out by an ornate, still-intact vase. Who is in Bruce’s house, infiltrated his private business and snacking on the Wheat Thins that fill his several walk-in pantries?!

“In the kitchen, son,” says a voice that makes Bruce’s heart skip a beat. “It’s all your fault, Bruce… if you hadn’t wanted to go to the movies that night, we’d still be alive. We died so you could live. You should be ashamed, son.”

Bruce starts flipping out, just really losing his marbles while his parents tell him how much dying hurt. “Because of you, Bruce, the worms are getting fat on us.” lol

The reveal here is that, once Bruce starts punching the fuck out of it, it’s Dr. Strange’s Sex Mannequin. It has a giant tape recorder inside its head taunting the bejesus out of him. Alfred, the non-hallucinated Alfred, comes out to try to hold Bruce back. He gets uppercutted! “NOOOO!! Leave me alone!!” Bruce screams like a feral baboon. He stumbles around like a bear with a tranquilizer dart sticking out his neck, howling about going to the Cave! The Cave! Got to return to the Batcave! “The only place I can be safe! The only place I can be sane! The only place they can’t get me!”

And then he fucking falls down the steps of the cave. lmao. The end.

Final Thoughts

This poor bastard done flipped his wig, son. I hope Alfred’s ok. I don’t care what happens to Bruce. Our only hope is that Bruce falls down a well and someone drops a big rock on his head.