Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #8 – “The Burning Nun”! In the previous installment, Mr. Whisper continues exacting his revenge on those who wronged him in the past. Later, during an altercation, Whisper and Batman find out that they KNOW EACH OTHER. Oooh, baby. Chills.

Bruce Wayne also recounts his time at boarding school as a lad. He discovers his friend’s head in the waste bin in the headmaster’s office while he gets caned to kingdom come. That’s probably the most nutso thing I’ve seen in a Batman comic so far, and I saw Joker slice his own face off.

More fun surely awaits!

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #8 [June, 1990]
Written by: Grant Morrison
“The Burning Nun”

The enormous Batcave full of enormous machinery on page one is the coolest depiction of the Batcave I’ve seen yet. Multiple levels and stalagmites and stalactites and metal floors and railings and, honestly, it looks like it’s -45°F down there. Alfred stands at a counter with what looks like a serving tray with a single bottle of cough syrup on it. “Good morning, sir,” he addresses the approaching Batman. “Pleasant night?”

Well, no, Alfred. He was out beating people up again, that’s far from pleasant. We can’t all stay in Bruce Manor playing Mario Golf all night like some people he knows. Alfred asks where Batman’s cape went. He looks like garbage without it! It rounds out the apparel well and now he just looks like one of those kids who wears a puffy Batman costume while trick-or-treating.

“Lost in a fall,” Batman says of the missing cape. “The neck brace in my cowl was a good idea, Alfred. I’d have broken my neck without it.” Well, we can’t run around fighting crime with a head all flopping around, can we? Compliments accepted, sir.

Batman speaks candidly about his evening. Seems that his headmaster, Mean Ol’ Mr. Winchester, he is the one who has been murdering all these gang bosses left and right. Golly, it’s been 20 years since he last saw him. He was in his ‘40s then. Now he’s… *counts on fingers* … 96! But he still looks 40! Awfully strange, that.

Bruce is bleeding from the head and asks Alfred to stitch him up in the infirmary, which is roughly 65 floors above the Batcave and the elevator is broken and/or nonexistent! Once that’s all taken care of, it’s time to pay a Mr. Winchester a friendly visit!

Fiddlesticks, though. Winchester ain’t at the school right now, but Bruce speaks to… some other guy behind a desk. You see, Bruce is very interested in tape recordings of Winchester reading old poems. His sultry baritone voice is just the medicine for soothing frazzled evening nerves! He would like to borrow a tape.

Well, there’s no love lost of Mr. Winchester. He fucked off amid a scandalous scandal and the school is still recovering from the damage. “There are certain old wounds, Wayne,” the… principal? … tells him while pouring a drink. “Wounds which I would be most reluctant to re-open.”

There’s a crisp $5 in it for you!

Well, why didn’t you say so? Principal Green-Shirt puts his spectacles back on and leaves the office for a tick. Bruce waits patiently in the chair playing with himself a tad, staring out at the window with a glazed-over expression. The principal guy comes back with a large reel. “Sorry to take such a long time. I hope this may prove useful.”

This isn’t pornography! Oh well, he’ll take it anyway. Wincherster’s sultry baritone and all that.

Bruce puts his Batman stuff back on, because one cannot just hang out in the Batcave without looking the part, and listens to Winchester’s recording. Voice analysis tells him that Winchester comes from Austria, and why that’s relevant whatsoever is lost on me, but Batman finds this info useful so I will go along with this dumb ride. “Who is he? What does he want in Gotham? What’s his plan?” These are all solid questions, but to get to the bottom of this he’s going to have to play a few rounds of Mario Golf with Alfred. Barring that, it’s time to continue analyzing recordings! Perhaps this reel of examples of regional dialects will help him with… whatever.

Batman stops dead on his feet when he hears the voice of his father. “I must have filed the tape wrong…” he stammers as he stumbles and flops around the tape player trying to stop it before he goes into convulsions. A nearby Alfred notices this display of undignified behavior.

Right. Yeah. I know it’s been a while, Bruce, but let me teach you a thing or two about fathers…

Within the recording, his father mentions, among other inconsequential items, Lake Dess, Austria. Batman considers this to be a clue and makes preparations to travel to Austria. At least I don’t feel like I’ve taken crazy pills a couple minutes ago, because Alfred thinks this is nuts. But when does Bruce ever listen to Alfred? Wise, always-correct Alfred? He never fucking does, that’s when.

Batman goes to another part of the Batcave and removes a giant Bat tarp from a Batcopter and starts Bat-flying soon enough.

Elsewhere, even Morgenstern is starting to get paranoid. Morgenstern, who has been skeptical from the very beginning, has his goons holding a man upside-down over a 700-story roof. “You told Bunny Babbitt it was me who poisoned Ottavio. What are you trying to do, huh? Taking over this city is a very delicate operation, and you’re screwing it up with your big mouth.

The man is named Henry, and he’s unleashing veritable torrents of diarrhea. Morgenstern wants to be very, very, very clear here: Back to the Future II absolutely sucks ass. ALSO, Ottavio was killed by Mr. Whisper. THAT’S what everyone needs to know, ok? Stop spreading ugly rumors or, so help him, Morgenstern will glue Henry’s eyes open and make him watch Back to the Future III, and that one is even worse. Don’t toy with him.

Of course, just like they all say when they’re hovering a mile over pavement, Henry desperately yelps that he’ll do anything Morgenstern wants. Does he like blowjobs by a man? He’ll find someone great for that! Just– WAAAAHHH!!! PLEASE!!!

“I want you to seriously start thinking about your new life as a stain on the sidewalk,” Morgenstern tells him, puffing a cigar.

“You’re next, Morgenstern!” Henry yells, getting some balls in spite of his situation. “Whisper’s out there and you’re NEXT, you bastar–”

Then Morgenstern’s goon lets him go. Henry plummets. Morgenstern moves on. This Mr. Whisper thing is out of control. What he’s really like too is for Batman to disappear for a couple of days. Hopefully somewhere remote, like Lake Dess, Austria. Ah, but a man can dream… a man can dream…

Here’s another scene with that short-haired nun they keep showing. She crouches in the doorframe of a pathway in the train station. A man wearing a flamboyant red cape and a devil-horn hairstyle approaches with a rose. “Don’t be afraid, little nun. Don’t run away. Why must the young be always in such hurry? Racing to the grave, never taking the time to stop. To stop and smell the roses. Soon the streets of this city will be filled with roses.”

Well, a guy who likes roses can’t be THAT bad!

Bruce is in Austria speaking fluent German to a monk, because why not? The monk tells him to speak to the abbot; he’ll give him directions to Lake… what was it now? Dess? Yes, the abbot will know. The abbot knows all!

The abbot speaks fluent English! That’s lucky! “I rather think you alarmed many of the brothers, Batman,” he admonishes the super hero. “Your appearance is somewhat distressing.”

Well, get used to it. The Bat goes where the Bat wants. The abbot takes him through the monastery, which makes Batman antsy and impatient. He wants directions to Lake Dess! He doesn’t want to walk through a stinky monk hovel! But, oh, there will be plenty of time for that. Abbot McJones wants to show him something… interesting…

*opens trenchcoat*

Abbot leads him to a large library. He speaks of the history of the monastery that’s not at all interesting as promised. It’s awfully dull. You see, roughly 300 years ago blah blah blah…

Yo, Baldy! I’m on a schedule, here!

The “illuminating” story is fairly long. “Untouched by the pestilence which raged through the countryside, stood the Monastery of the Capuchins, Then, as now, the Monastery was the home of Humble Men. Godly Men.” Great, unnecessary capitalization. Why does Batman have to go to some faraway location and learn about their culture again? Why can’t he just stay home and beat up a bad guy the old-fashioned way?

Brother Manfred was the pious and most devout, wrapped up like a deuce, another runner in the night. Blinded by the light. He was perfect in every way, just a pristine, shining example of monkiness. Except he was proud, ohhhhh, was he ever proud. Satan fell from heaven because of pride! Pride is bunk! Can’t have it! Manfred was proud of his learning, proud of his rejection of earthly desire. He patted himself on the back too much. It was sickening.

Manfred took a liking to a younger protégé named Conrad, who reminded Manfred of himself. One day, Conrad told Manfred that he had a sin to confess that only he, Manfred, could help him with! There’s the pride again! ONLY him?! Spit it out, son, this is fantastic!

Apparently, Conrad was led to believe that sinning was the road to salvation, so he sinned his fucking ass off. Every vice you can think of: smoking, drinking, lusty indulgences, gambling in Four Winds casinos, smacking prostitutes, chewing tobacco, coffee, shopping for shoes, laziness, laxatives, video games, strangling animals, and enjoying some family-friendly masturbatory activities. So, Manfred took it upon himself to lead other monks into some… cleansing. Cleansing to appease God of Conrad’s sinning. You see what I’m getting at here? Cleansing.

There is another story about a group of nuns who arrived at the Monastery to seek sanctuary. Well, Manfred led his team to torturing them. One got burned at the stake. No reason, just for fun. Appeasement of gods and the like. Manfred’s new god liked it when women got hurt. Really got his rocks off.

One would think this would be enough for Manfred, but there was “one final act of submission” remaining. Manfred discovered plague bumps on his body shortly after the stake-burning. “Fear of the most monstrous of deaths drove Manfred to that final desperate act.” He sold his soul for some of that plague eliminator and, why not, an extra three hundred years of life on Earth.

Sounds pretty good to me. You can get a lot of reading done in three hundred years.

While the outside world continued to decay and die, Manfred’s little kingdom was a thriving, insular land of sin and debauchery! And stuff on fire, don’t forget that. Well, all this bullshit was starting to really piss God off, so he broke the dams of the Dess River and flooded the Monastery. Boom, everyone dead. Fuck y’all.

Once in a while, Manfred’s spiderly soul creeps around the land… I dunno, looking for his glasses. The end.

Abbot closes the dusty book and tells Batman that these are all fairy tales, of course, and sorry for wasting a ton of his time. “I don’t believe in devils,” the Abbot says, “the real truth is far more horrible. The Kingdom of Hell is within us.”

Yeah, ok. Where is Lake Dess, please.

OK, well, you see that river right outside? Follow it and you’ll get to the lake. I don’t remember how far away it is, somewhere between 500 feet and 17,000 miles. Pack a snack.

“Like all stories, this one has not yet come to an end…” Abbot warns as Batman stomps off in what I can only assume is quite a huff. There’s more too, like an air of death and deceit and sin hovers over Lake Dess. “I myself am far from being a superstitious man – but some of the brothers here claim to have heard things. Seen things.”

Yeah yeah yeah, we all see and hear things all say, sir. Let’s get on with it. Goddamn.

How mean can a Ghost Nun really be? “Oogity Boogity I’ll hit you with a ruler!”

“In her hand, she bears a lantern,” Abbot speaks of Ghost Nun, “ceaselessly searching for her tormentor. Her body, they say, is all aflame with unearthly fires.” Ah, so she’s hot! Say no more.

Again, only stories.

*wink*

Batman makes his way under the lake and into the decrepit old Monastery. He fumbles in the flooded corridors and rooms with a flashlight and sees a bright figure off in the distance! Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit… he gets closer and closer and… oh shit oh shit…

It’s only a mirror! Whew! For sure Batman thought it was a burning nun here to eat his bones! He finds a very ornate door with floral patterns carved into the wood. “Unlock the rose…” he thinks and he fumbles around the flower and pulls open the door. It’s a giant cathedral.

“Oh my God,” Batman gasps as he looks inside.

Final Thoughts

AHHHH!! Another cliffhanger? These Batman comics are eating up my insides with antsy suspense!

Oh wait, that’s just the plague. My bad.

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #7 – “The Death Ship”! In the previous installment, a bunch of people die at the hands of a villain named Mr. Whisper. The reemergence of this dude shakes a guy named Ottavio to his very core, and he tries to convince a guy named Morgenstern to take it seriously. These two guys are important for reasons I don’t know.

At the end of the issue, Ottavio clicks on the Bat-Signal. If this is canon, it may very well be the first time it’s been used! So many canons, so little time!

Oh yeah, and Bruce Wayne is having a lot of Dead Dad dreams, causing him to sob nakedly in his four poster bed while Alfred soothes him with a giant frown on his face. That’s funny as hell.

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #7 [May, 1990]
Written by: Grant Morrison
“The Death Ship”

Gotta love the barely-post-Crisis covers. “LOOKIT DA BAT. DURRRRR!!”

That Bat-Signal glows brightly in the sky like a big, eye-ruining searchlight. “What did I tell you, Ottavio?” says Morgenstern, puffing his ugly cigar. “This is the dumbest thing I ever saw.”

Shut the HELL up, Morgenstern. We’re summoning bats. Zip the lip.

The last person Morgenstern wants to show up is Batman. I don’t know why, but he’d rather the gruff guy in tights stay away from this one.

Too late! He showed up. Ottavio and Morgenstern are like “GAH!!”. I’m like “BUH!!”. Batman is like “BRRT!!”. Elsewhere, Joker is like “AWOOOGAH!!”.

“You called me? How dare you call me?” Batman growls menacingly, which is weird and out of character for this particular superhero. “It’s not good to see me. For scum like you, it’s never good to see me. How dare you bring me here?”

Dude, you didn’t have to come. You could’ve just continued hanging out in the sewers like you love so very, very much to do. “That!” he snaps, pointing up at the signal in the sky. “What is THAT?”

Ottavio says it’s a genius invention! It’s a Bat-Signal! I mean, it’s not like Jim Gordon didn’t already create it himself, but hey. Let’s bend the canon constantly as everyone sees fit!

I HATE bright lights! They make me think of my dead dad! He LOVED bright lights!

“Look, it was the only way. We need help,” Ottavio pleads. “We want to make a deal with you. A bargain. This thing that’s happening, we can’t handle it on our own…”

Aw hell nah. No way. No deals, no bargains. That’s worse than the giant lightbulb! He – wait a minute… a deal? Well, why didn’t you say so!

Ottavio starts explaining the grim accounts of the one Mr. Whisper. He was killed twenty years ago. He, Morgenstern, the Kane brothers (dead), Graziano (dead), they all slaughtered his butt. “We had to kill him before he did it again.”

Mr. Whisper killed eight kids. I wonder if he gave them exploding chocolates? Well, this Mr. Whisper is supposed to be dead and he seems very much not really at all such as dead. AND, one by one, Whispery is exacting his terrible, justified revenge on the lot of them. “The Man with No Shadow”.

“And you want to make a bargain?” Batman snarls, his face less than four inches from Ottavio’s. He can smell Ottavio’s breath. Just cigarettes and ham sandwiches and a gallon of mouthwash. And yes, Ottavio has a bargain. No more shady dealings; a suspension of all their nefarious street crimes and drug trafficking. For now. Just until Whisper’s dead. Then they’ll start it all back up again! lol. So what do you say?

It’s not even the fun kind of Hell where the little imps poke our butts all day.

“Clean? You’ll never be clean,” Batman snarls and sneers and growls and gruffs. “Drugs. Prostitution. Protection. Corruption. Assassination. This city is sick. Its people are sick with fear. Now you know what it feels like.”

Yes, a fair point, sir. But, uh –

Batman walks away at this point and tells them both to rot in the Hell they created in the city. Morgenstern puffs his cigar sumgly. “I told you, didn’t I?”

Elsewhere, in a large Gotham cathedral, the short-haired woman who disembarked the train gets hassled by a security guard. “Get the hell out of here! Come on! The cathedral’s closed to the public until next week.”

The woman responds creepily: “God’s not at home. And he’ll never come back here. The cathedral is God’s rotting refuse. People dig and burrow like maggots.”

The guard is not entertaining this complete wacko bullshit. He grabs her and shoves her out of the building while she rants about marrying God and how she can’t be thrown out of God’s house and that she’ll be back. SHE’LL BE BACK!

A man asks the guard what was the matter. He says that this crazy lady was claiming to be a nun and that he threw her ass to the curb. “A little nun?” the man says, looking like Mr. Whisper. “There’s a certain symmetry here. My life’s path becomes a circle. And a circle is forever.”

Yeah yeah yeah, weirdos are everywhere in this comic book. Bruce Wayne is having another dead dad dream. Here’s the rundown: They’re on the beach and a large, unfamiliar ship with a black sail heads toward shore. Dad still has his mouth sewed shut and is writing “UNLOCK THE ROSE” in the sand in huge letters. Bruce, a child dressed up in his huge Batman clothes, does not understand.

A circle of suited-up zombies sit at classroom desks and sing Ring Around the Rosie while Batman stumbles around the room. “Set us free,” one says. “Unlock the rose,” another says. “The worms build tunnels and galleries in our corrupted cryptic flesh,” another says a little too dramatically.

“Wayne? You’re nothing but a dirty little sneak, Wayne,” a man who looks like Mr. Whisper stands behind him. “I have ways of dealing with dirty little sneaks.”

Whatever. Aaaahhhh. Wake up.

I do not wish to hear about you pulling girls’ pigtails and throwing rocks through the principal’s window, sir.

Later, out on the giant, uh, for lack of a better word, “patio”, Bruce sits pensively at a table and regales Alfred with more dream talk. There’s nothing much worse than someone talking to you about your dreams. Alfred, as always, maintains professionalism against all odds. “Always the same; my father, the old school, a warning I can’t quite understand. I’ve tried to write it down, but it all slips away like smoke.”

Hmmm. Have you tried taking Ambien and driving a forklift at 3:30am? No dreams guaranteed! Barring that, maybe your dreams are telling you something about Mr. Whisper! Ha, wouldn’t that be awfully convenient? Convenient like a venereal disease.

Looks like we get to hear all about Bruce’s pantswetting days of yore. No one wants to hear about this. Least of all Alfred. Least of all me. “I was sent to a private school. Upstate. I hated it.” Oh, whine whine whine whine whine. Alfred was sent to Butler Boarding School where they paddled you if your bowtie was askew.

“I can’t imagine what possessed my parents to send me there. I used to think they wanted me out of the way.” Well, Brucey, I think you answered your own question. He reflects upon the dreadful Mr. Winchester, who whipped his ass ruddy with a barbed cane! Or, since that would’ve been criminal, he was just involved in a scandal. The school was rife with scandal. Debauchery, gossip, viewing parties of episodes of the show Scandal. “In my school, you didn’t say ‘scandal’. You said ‘tradition’. It was ‘traditional’ to live in fear of bullying prefects.”

Skinny teenagers in short shorts are chasing little kids down the hall with batons, holding them upside-down in toilets, chewing on their tender little penises. “It was traditional to be beaten and humiliated and to fight off the advances of degenerate old teachers with doctorate degrees.”

Bruce had a little wiener friend who hated the place too, plus his mother was dead and he had asthma and he peed himself a lot! lmao. Robert had told Bruce that Mr. Winchester was the devil. He has no shadow. He hangs the toilet paper the wrong way. He smokes the weed. And so on and so forth. Well, soon enough, Robert wasn’t showing up to class anymore. Nobody was surprised – the incontinent little whelp was sickly and he probably died and no one cared.

Yes, sir, Mr. Devil, sir. May I please have another, sir?

Mr. Winchester caught wind of these rumors emanating from the mouths of insolent babes, and inclined to beat this kid’s ass bloody. But, ah, Alfred my boy, getting caned like we were in Singapore wasn’t the worst part of it all, oh no no no, far from it. IT WAS THE ANTICIPATION OF GETTING CANED. No, the worst part was what he didn’t see while he was bent over (oh god I hope it wasn’t an erect PENIS). No, it was the anticipation. That was worse.

No, actually, it appears that Robert’s decapitated head was in Winchester’s waste bin. That’s 100 kinds of fucked up.

Alfred is sympathetic, but I’m sure in his head he’s telling Master Bruce to cork his pie hole. He does compliment Bruce on growing up “radiantly normal”, which is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard someone say about the guy who hangs out in the sewers for a living. “Prepare my uniform, please, Alfred,” Bruce concludes. No, not the sexy nurse outfit this time, Alfred. The one with the bat stuff, please.

Elsewhere, Ottavio is pacing up and down his suite all paranoid and terrified. “I can’t live like this, Tully,” he addresses his underling. “I don’t trust that wine. I shouldn’t have drunk the stuff.”

Tully assures Ottavio that Morgenstern gave him the wine personally. Tully drank it too! Don’t be flustered. Here, have a Werther’s!

Ottavio cannot be calm. He had received a poem; Mr. Whisper’s calling card for the people he’s going to murder shortly. It’s a death certificate is what it is, no matter how flowery the cadences and the stanzas are! There once was a man from Nantucket! Music to the ears.

Ottavio spots his assailant outside the balcony window and acts accordingly.

The only way to stop a bad guy without a gun is another bad guy with a gun who shoots all over the room and misses his target.

It doesn’t work. “You’ve ruined my coat,” Whisper smiles congenially. “Is that any way to treat an old friend, Ottavio?”

Before Whisper has a chance to do the killing thing that’s going to do, Batman enters with force into the suite. He broke more glass than the gun. “Stand away from that man,” he growls, standing tall, dark, and handsome. Brain filled with scary thoughts about Mr. Winchester, but Ottavio and Whisper needn’t know that. Not until they’re ready to hear about it!

Whipser runs away going “I’LL GET YOU NEXT TIME, GADGET. NEXT TIME…”

Batman tells Ottavio to stay put as he chases Mr. Not-Whispering-Much. Ottavio thanks the dear Lord God Our Savior and Benevolent Chessmaster for being alive, but Tully stands there like a statue. Like a dead statue with a stupid frightened look on his face. “Oh no,” Ottavio mumbles, clutching his throat, staring at the wine. The wine that turns you into a statue.

“There’s nowhere to hide,” Batman mutters on the rooftop. “Do you hear me? There’s just you and me and a five hundred foot drop to the sidewalk.”

Then Whisper hits him with a stick. They punch a bit. Batman is evenly matched, probably because he has no actual superpowers and his utility belt is filled with jelly beans. Then the masked guy gets punched right off the roof like a dumbass.

Luckily for him, as he plummets to his death, his cape gets snagged on the 40-foot long spear of a cherub statue halfway down the skyscraper. It tears up his cape something horrible, but he’s alive. Alive and kicking. Too bad, because maybe if Batman died we’d have gotten those Alfred comics I want so badly.

Batman is able to grapple and swing his way back up to the roof. Winchester is fucking floored that this cocksucker is still alive. Then, in a perplexing three panels, Winchester looks Batman square in the eye, says “I know you…” , and steps backwards from the ledge. He falls toward the street. Batman’s like “NOOOO!!” and, as you can imagine, yelling “NOOOO!!” doesn’t stop gravity. Try as he might.

Still alive, miraculously, Whisper groans on the street. Batman scrambles and asks Ottavio for the quickest way down (jump off yourself), but Ottavio is too busy grasping his neck and choking like a real cuck. “Damn,” Batman says, staring passively at the dying man in front of him.

Say, what are a couple of handsome young men such as yourselves doing in a place like this? ;-]

Batman picks up the piece of paper on the ground and reads the pretty poetry.

“I know you,” he smiles devilishly.

Final Thoughts

Befuddling! The last few pages are crazy, man! Why do Mr. Whisper and Batman know each other. IS MR. WHISPER ACTUALLY MR. WINCHESTER??

I’m calling that buffoonery now. You heard it here first. Like it’ll be a fucking surprise.