Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Detective Comics (Vol. 1), Issue #938 – “Enemy at the Gates”! In the previous installment, Batman confronts a tech whiz-kid named Ulysses Hadrian Armstrong who has spent half his life collecting information on Batman in order to help design a Robot-Batman army. Col. Kane confronts Batman personally and is affronted that he recruited his daughter to help stop his mission to use the Batmen to rid the city of the League of Shadows (which Batman claims is merely a children’s fairy tale).

Before Col. Kane can shoot Batman in the brain with a *checks notes* gun, Batwoman and the rest of her team shows up to fight! FIGHT! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!

So fighting will most likely happen for the duration of the entire issue. Hopefully not, but I’ve been proven right before.

Detective Comics (Vol. 1), Issue #938 [October, 2016]
Written by: James Tynion IV
“Enemy at the Gates”

Many years ago, let’s say… four… Col. Kane’s clearance level has been raised to about 400 and now he has more access to classified information than the president. “You will not be promoted in rank. None of your work from here on out will be recognized in any public capacity for the duration of your service. You will do nothing to jeopardize the confidential nature of this branch of our military.

“Understood.”

A horn-rimmed glasses man pushes a file across the table. Things beyond Col. Kane’s wildest imagination (and he has a pretty wild imagination – he once mixed lemonade with iced tea!) lurk in Gotham’s shadows, and it’s time to put a stop to it. They chose Col. Kane because he has what it takes to make the HARD DECISIONS.

Col. Kane gets paged and he has to leave. When asked what could possibly be more important than this, he says “My daughter. They found my daughter.” And he walks out.

It appears that Kate Kane walked all the way to Arlington Cemetary from home, which would be a two hour drive, to see her mother’s grave. She’s probably, what, 12 or 13? It’s been six months since her mother and sister died in what I can only surmise is a horrible La-Z-Boy accident. She asks how her dad can make it through the day every day. He tells her that’s one hell of a question.

They have a touching moment, the kind I’ve come to expect from DC Comics once in a while. Basically, there’s a daughter that needs him and that’s what keeps him going. It takes four panels to get to that, though. Let’s try cutting that down next time.

“So, what life do you want, Kate? Tell me, and I’ll make sure I can get it for you.”

“I want to be a solider. I want to fight with you.”

How very nice! What a beautiful—oh wait, it’s present day now and they’re fighting each other. How times have changed. How the tables have turned. How the goose has been cooked.

It is attempted by a Robot-Batman that may or may not actually be a robot – I haven’t decided yet – to drag Col. Kane away from the incoming threat, but he doesn’t want to budge. He needs to think of the larger mission at hand, but he doesn’t wanna. Then he is finally goaded against his will.

But, sir! Sir! We have good intel that your legs were blown off in the war, sir!

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way, Kate,” Col. Kane says sullenly. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

Batwoman’s team fights Col. Kane’s team. “You shouldn’t have brought them here,” growls Batman. “With all due respect, sir… shut up,” responds Batwoman.

The plan is to escape, not to fight to win. Carve a path to the upper levels, everyone is currently 10 miles below ground 30 miles west of Gotham. That’s a lot of running! Hop to it!

Robo-Batmen (who may or may not actually be robots) flank the elevator on the upper levels, waiting for ne’er-do-wells to escape. When the elevator door opens, it’s just Orphan. They laugh and laugh! What’s this skinny little girl going to do to seven burly, beefy men? We don’t see it happening, but it’s going to be “a lot”.

Red Robin helms the computer and attempts to rewire the intel interactive motherboard mainframe DOS encoder module chip. Red Robin compliments the computer to nobody, then Ulysses What’s-His-Nuts Armstrong shows up to both thank him and attempt to kick his tender little delicious ass. Well, Red Robin throws the rope around him and constricts him nice and good. They exchange nerd power plays on each other for a while. “I’d love to run some of my programs by you, pick your brain a bit…” Armstrong tells Red Robin, then smiles devilishly. “…once our colony agents beat the crap out of you and throw you in a cell, obviously.”

After Armstrong tells Red Robin that there are a lot of bad guys that the government is after, and that Batwoman’s band of misfits just made the list, the floor below him drops and he escapes. OR, he falls 40 feet to his messy death. Either way, Armstrong is out of the picture for now and we can all now read our comic books in peace.

Red Robin is so naive. That’s all the U.S. military does is attack on their own soil. 9/11 was an inside job! And so forth.

As a team of Batmen advance on Red Robin, the grenades in their belts start beeping, then they explode all kablooie-like. Seems as though Stephanie “Spoiler” Brown rigged them to go off remotely! SPOILER ALERT (lol). Red Robin chides her for almost setting off every weapon in the whole place. Spoiler tells him to relax, guy.

Clayface is about 60 times bigger than the Batmen, so he’s holding his own all right. No notes.

The group catches up with Batman, who leads them to the upper levels. “The Colony has bought into a myth – the League of Shadows. One of Ra’s Al Ghul’s oldest lies,” he tells them. Ra’s even told Batman that it was bullshit and that anybody stupid enough to believe something so dumb deserves getting tricked! But now they’re all suffering for it, so that’s a D-.

“The Colony thinks they need to eliminate a series of sleeper cells in Gotham City, but the League doesn’t exist. Those people are innocent,” Batman says. Red Robin briefs him that the Colony is going rogue and intends to run missiles domestically without their superiors knowing. “Good,” replies Batman, who obviously wasn’t listening.

The group meets up with Orphan upstairs, who took out a team of Batmen without getting scraped up too badly. As expected. Batwoman is smug for about two seconds before her mask gets shot right off her face. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” Col. Kane says with about 60 Batmen behind him (and that Armstrong nerd, if we’re keeping track of Armstrong nerds). “It shouldn’t be like this. You need to listen.”

No listening here, sir! La la la la la la la! You lied to Kate her whole life! Just to make her compliant! La la la la la la la la la la!

Col. Kane gives Kate one more chance. Kate tells him to fuck his own butt. Col. Kane sighs and sadly asks his men to subdue Kate’s group. But then Red Robin smiles like he doesn’t know how to smile correctly. “I don’t think so,” he says. Someone cranked the volume up on the Batmen helmets, emitting piercing soundbites of Ed Sheeran singing. “They’re going deaf unless you shut their weapon systems down now.”

And indeed, the Batmen are trying to cover their ears. Armstrong, for once, looks angry. “No! How?! When did you do this?!” And, it’s like, when you were jerking it in the bathroom, dorkus.

Your cockamamie monkeyshines end here, Kane! No more malarkey!

The crew leaves Col. Kane and Armstrong with the knowledge that they’ll be shut down. When the council finds out, they will be dismantled. These Batmen suits, it’ll take hours to shut down the override for the loud noise. “Dammit,” Col. Kane says as he picks up his daughter’s mask. “All these years, and it just falls apart in my hands.”

Armstrong tells Kane that they can still achieve their objective using the rejected bat-eyes that Armstrong developed. You see, they make you blind as a bat! How is that useful? Well, uh…

No, he’s talking about the drones. Armstrong built them even after they were all rejected, and now they can use them! HA HA HAAA!

Whoops, I peed my pants!

Final Thoughts

So Col. Kane and his Colony is chasing a threat that Batman thinks doesn’t even exist, huh? Well, since Batman is always right I already know how this all ends: with a giant stack of pancakes in front of me. See you next time, losers.

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.