Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Detective Comics (Vol. 1), Issue #937 – “The Great Escape”! In the previous installment, Batwoman gets her chance to rally the troops after Batman becomes all fucked up from fighting a Robot-Batman army. The problem now is that Batwoman’s dad is directly against helping, and Batwoman and her own merry band of troops will now need to go against Col. Kane, Army Man Extraordinaire!

If that doesn’t sound interesting to you, can I turn your attention to Paper Girls, which is a comic book series that is infinitely more interesting?

Detective Comics (Vol. 1), Issue #937 [September, 2016]
Written by: James Tynion IV
“The Great Escape”

“Item 37… miniature laser cutter… Item 38… rebreather… Item 39… appears to be a series of lockpicks… Item 40… small antitoxins? We’ll need to run these through toxicology… Item 41… this can’t be…”

Ahh, Item 41. We could have stopped at Item 40, but noooooo. We had to keep going to Item 41, which looks like a chunk of kryptonite!

A masked army bad guy is sorting through the contents of Batman’s utility belt. “This is going to completely revolutionize our suit munitions,” he says as a chained Batman starts stirring awake. “We’ll need to up the dosage,” he continues. He and another masked army bad guy deliberate upon removing Batman’s mask, but they are unable to at this moment since removing Batman’s mask will mean short-circuiting Batman’s suit’s central computer and erase everything. How’s the for COMIC BOOK LOGIC??

The army bad guys congratulate themselves on detaining Batman and taking away all his tools and means of escape, but through the x-ray scanner they see Batman tonguing something in his mouth. “Oh Lord. His tooth. He has something in his tooth!”

Batman spits out the bloody tooth, which immediately begins emitting smoke. The army guys blindly flail around with their guns trying to find Batman, but he has somehow escaped his chains and now he’s starting to crack some fucking skulls, yeah baby.

Meanwhile, Batman’s own army is travelling down what looks like an abandoned subway tunnel. They appear to be trapped. Hopefully they aren’t being followed, but if they are being followed, then hopefully they aren’t being followed competently. Orphan confirms that they aren’t being followed competently with a thumbs-up.

Red Robin regales us with some Gotham history: “When Gotham first broke ground on their subway system in 1898, they spent a year building tunnels that turned out to be three feet too small on all sides. There were no subway cars in the country that could safely fit, so they started over a few hundred feet up.”

It’s like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop idea without all the fascism.

The kid smiles as his companions look in awe at these pods attached to rails that can travel 20x the speed of the Batmobile throughout all these abandoned tunnels.

Good work, you fucking nerd. Batwoman commends you. Now take the others and hide for a while, because this is Batwoman’s battle and she should never have gotten anyone else involved in all this hoo-hah. “I need to find my father. I need to take care of this,” she insists while the others protest. Red Robin folds his arms like a Grumpy Gus and tells her, with all due respect, that she’s playing right into her father’s trap. And, also, in addition, actually, Red Robin knows where they took Batman! And he’s not telling, so take him and everyone else with you. Checkmate, sister.

Meanwhile, Batman checks a computer that is tracking Batman-related activity. Batman has been sighted in Afghanistan and Nairobi! Gaza strip! “Hh.” Batman huffs a sound effect that I can’t replicate, but I imagine it sounds like when you finish up an orgasm and then feel stupid for a split second.

The army slacker in charge of the computer has just returned with snacks. Batman throws him against the wall and demands answers about the Colony. The slacker is wearing a Batman shirt under his fatigues. “Yeah! Of course!” he says, starstruck.

Smile and say “incel”!

The kid is Ulysses Hadrian Armstrong, and he has been reverse-engineering every piece of found Batman tech “since he was still getting pimples”. “My scanners started cataloguing your tech when you walked in the room. The longer you stay, the more I know.” Armstrong smiles, picks himself up, and dusts himself off. “I was fourteen years old when the Colony recruited me. I sent my term paper to every office in the Pentagon after breaking through their network defenses.”

Batman shoves the kid back down again and asks him, very bluntly, why this place exists and what the Colony actually is. He raises his fist as if to mean to punch the kid’s teeth out, and trust me, they ain’t gonna be smoke bombs.

The kid snickers and mocks him for not knowing the answers already. After going through some information that is obviously culled from previous storylines that I’ll never, ever read, he coughs up the info that they’re raising an army of Robot Batmen. Armstrong shows Batman footage from two years ago of what looks like of a group of them busting up a bomb plot. “If you want more grisly missions, I’ve got video,” Armstrong says. Batman declines.

Armstrong now shows Batman what he calls the “Bat-Eyes”; drones that are keeping tabs on him. This is how Armstrong is watching his every move. His mapped movements train their “men”. “I designed an algorithm that tells them exactly what move to use when. They follow every command that runs through their helmets.”

“Look, we’re all big fans here,” Armstrong continues as he pulls out a gun from inside his uniform. “We love what you’ve done, but we’re going to take it all to the next level.”

Fat chance, punk-ass! Batman grabs his gunnin’ arm and breaks it. “You’re coming with me,” Batman says as the kid writhes painfully and amusingly on the floor. It’s at this time that a team of Bat-Bots advance on our caped crusader, trapping him on the edge of a balcony overlooking a deep canyon-like canyon-y canyon. Col. Kane emerges.

We tried filling their heads with ABBA, but they became more murderous!

Batman is surprised to see his good ol’ Uncle Jake. Kane asks why he took Kate from him. Batman says he noticed he had more drones tracking her than anyone else combined. This is the part where Kane does his “look, son, there’s a sinister threat in this city that you know nothing about, so why don’t you just go run off and play with your games and balls and puzzles. You can’t do this alone. You need strength in numbers! You need the whole dang-ass military behind you!”

But, of course, Batman does his “I work alone” shtick, which is exactly why Kane made the decision for him. “The League of Shadows is in Gotham City, Batman.”

Well, THIS is a fucking wake-up call! The League of Shadows! Say it ain’t so! But Batman stays stoic. “The League of Shadows is a myth created to frighten the disciples of Ra’s Al Ghul. The League of Assassins is the threat.”

Oh, Bruce. You naive idiot. “They are hiding under every stairway in every dark corner. You cannot imagine the scale of this battle. You were never capable of fighting it on your own. And you brought my daughter in to die by your side?” *spits*

Col. Kane is going to bring her back to his side. He’ll bring everyone back to his side! Then he takes out a big gun and pushes the business end right against Batman’s head, pulls the trigger, kills him dead, coughs, puts away the gun, and… oh, I’m getting ahead of myself, sorry. He doesn’t actually shoot him because he gets interrupted.

“You want me to pick a side?” Batwoman says after her team has somehow entered the Colony HQ undetected. “How’s this for an answer?”

Everyone poses for the camera in that way that superheroes do. It seems ineffective, but what do I know?? I don’t write comic books!

Final Thoughts

Colonel Kane doesn’t know what he’s getting into, does he? Neither does this Minor League Justice League of Fledgling Dorks. I’m prepared to spend the next issue narrating a boring fight scene, it shall surely be a snoozefest. See you then.