Gotham Nights The script calls for rain and it rains: pencil rods lacerate the page, dark against dark ink, and the Dark Knight broods, the pathetic fallacy of a million readers keeping him young after fifty years of comicbook hell: too many murders, too many Jokers doing so well what Jokers do best. Batman falls, taut on a rope that floats him to a roof where this month's cast is assembled, where ink raws the hair of the Joker from the page as he toadstools a banker, laughs; then he's turning to the giant bat that has to haunt his trail: too many murders, too many choking suitors in the world's script. Cue batarang. He falls. So buy this month's edition, its plastic bag hermetic for the corpse in spilled ink. Rejoice in thirty days of 2-D, where endings, though unhappy, are designed. Thank God for the Batman. Thank God for the chill rain of Gotham that lacerates our saviour, our statue that guards all bodies that fall.

Philip Wilson

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