Sam Quixote's Reviews > Batman: Curse of the White Knight

With Jack Napier (mostly) gone, the Joker is back to wreak havoc on Gotham City by revealing a groundbreaking truth about Batman - and he’s gonna use Jean-Paul Valley as his avenging angel of death to do it!

This was SO BAD! Sean Murphy gets worse and worse as a writer. I feel like he was forced to do this as White Knight, which this is the sequel to, was so inexplicably popular, because Curse of the White Knight doesn’t feel inspired in the least.

At its core is the most tedious, convoluted, couldn’t-care-less origin story of Gotham involving (of course) Bruce’s ancestor, and a pair that (OF COURSE) look like Joker and Jean-Paul. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense (although there is that), it’s that it’s such a tenuous motive to have the kind of repercussions Joker thinks it will centuries later in present-day Gotham. A vague message daubed on a stone wall and some bones will somehow topple Bruce’s empire?! It doesn’t even matter in the end anyway. Even the evil company blackmailing Bruce seems to conveniently disappear.

Joker/Jack physically transforms from alabaster white skin/green hair/red lips to a normal appearance whenever he switches personalities. It’s so astoopid. Fans of the Jack Napier character from the previous book will probably be disappointed with this one given that Jack is barely in it - even Joker’s not in it that much. He’s pulling the strings behind it all though, I guess. After all, he’s the genius who decided to draft Jean-Paul Valley into his labyrinthine plan.

Jean-Paul Valley - this guy doesn’t really make sense. Here he’s an old man who’s cancer-ridden - he should be feeble, not some super-effective force of nature to be reckoned with! Oh, I guess the magic sword of the Order of St Dumbass gave him the power, right? I feel like he’s just here because Murphy has nostalgia for late ‘80s/early ‘90s Batman. Besides all the stuff lifted from the 1989 Batman movie, here’s a buncha crap from early ‘90s Batman like Azrael and the time Jean-Paul was blue robot Batman, just ‘cos Knightfall!

A character dies, another’s preggo, some unmaskings happen - and none of it’s interesting. The book closes out with a depressing, reimagined Nazi origin for Mister Freeze drawn by Klaus Janson that added nothing to the story (unless you thought that trinket Batman glances at in one panel was enough to warrant an entire issue explaining how Bruce came by it!).

Batman: Curse of the White Knight is way too long, way too boring and I hated every minute reading it. It’s down there with Creature of the Night and The Golden Child as one of the worst Batman comics of 2020.