There are plenty of reasons to be critical of DC's Batman: Battle for the Cowl event. It's an overblown crossover. An event-on-top-of-an-event with unnecessary tie-ins designed more to serve the corporate bottom line than to serve story development. It reeks of editorial interference, the artist-writer revealed (and chosen?) months after the series was announced. It's a retread of past Batman stories like Knightfall. The story is rushed and crammed into too few installments. Need I go on?
But the real fault of Battle for the Cowl lies in none of these things, which could be attributed to any number of other comic storylines at any given moment. No, the ultimate failure of this series is the way in which its basic premises make faulty assumptions about the nature and significance of Batman, thus subjecting us to a gross mischaracterization of the Dark Knight postmortem.
Let's start off with the way in which Battle for the Cowl, and the Batman comics surrounding it, have portrayed the state of affairs in Gotham City since Bruce Wayne disappeared. Almost instantly, the city descends into a chaos of gang wars and crime sprees. The cops and other vigilantes are ill-equipped to combat these threats as the city (at times literally) burns. Ok, we get it. Batman is of utmost importance to Gotham. And I'll admit that these story elements are successful in conveying that fact, albeit in a blunt, knock-you-upside-the-head-with-a-batarang fashion.
The sad state of Gotham in BftC is meant to uplift Batman, but by going so overboard in one direction to do this, it ultimately reduces our hero to a buffoon. After benefiting from years of crime-fighting and justice-seeking by the caped crusader, the city simply falls to pieces the second he's gone? Batman must have really done a crappy job figuring out how to bring about any kind of lasting change. Furthermore, how ineffective were the teaching techniques he used on the Robins? Shouldn't he have passed along to them a few good pointers on how to be the dark avenger of a city?
It's more absurd to suggest that there would even need to be a battle for Batman's cowl anyway. Ever the master of preplanning and foresight, Bruce Wayne would surely have devised a plan for his succession years ago. Especially considering that Gotham City faced the exact same situation not too long ago, following the back-breaking antics of Bane. Bruce had two capable sidekicks in Dick and Tim, and he would have surely prepared one of them to step into the cape and cowl the moment he was gone. This accusation is even more damning when taking into account that the story that necesitated Battle for the Cowl, Batman RIP, had the notion of Batman's preparation for its thesis statement!
A real Battle for the Cowl would have featured Dick or Tim (and probably the former) stepping into the role of Batman immediately, already instructed by Bruce on what to do. The central conflict would eschew Black Mask or any other villian causing havok and instead focus solely on the interpersonal dynamics within the bat family. Perhaps Jason Todd or Damian would have sought to usurp or sabotage Dick's assumption of the mantle, believing themselves to be Bruce's true heir. It also would have been nice to see a departure from another good versus evil romp here and instead to focus on the disparate personalities, philosophies, and methods of the various Gotham heroes in Batman's wake.
I say all this with a glaring eye aimed at DC Comics editorial, but with no ill will wished toward series scripter Tony Daniel. From all indications, he was handed the outline of Battle for the Cowl the moment he was hired as its writer. His pencil work for the series is strong, and his images brought to life the brilliant madcap ideas of Grant Morrison in RIP. Given the likely mandate of stale story ideas by folks like Dan DiDio, it is hard to believe that any writer short of Morrison himself could have set the atomic batteries to power and turbines to speed on this clunker of a tale.
