Batman Annual #2 Review

Writer: Tom King / Artists: Lee Weeks & Michael Lark / DC Comics Annual issues are often where writers get to truly shine their brightest. It’s the rare opportunity to tell a story with no restraints and take characters places no one else had thought to take them before. Or even one to add backstory to a character’s catalogue and reveal details you never realized you needed to know. Last year’s Batman Annual brought us a collection of stories from several different writers. Including King’s Eisner Award-winning “Good Boy,” which tells the story of Alfred painstakingly rehabilitating an aggressive dog manipulated by the Joker until it became the loyal canine partner we now know as Ace. Batman Annual #2 shifts from last year’s strategy of calling in multiple storytellers by letting King take full ownership of 38 pages of real estate for one story with art from Lee Weeks and Michael Lark.

King’s more than deserved this opportunity and used it to add to the major decision he’s going to be credited with introducing into the Batman mythos—among many. While fans are still reeling from the fact that Bruce Wayne proposed to Selina Kyle, which she accepted, King explores that relationship even more. In an alternate timeline, we see a relationship between the two blossom over time as Catwoman repeatedly appears in Bruce’s life as a nuisance in the same way you’d expect a love-struck kid on a playground to. She steals the batmobile and crashes it into Porky’s, she steals a pen he wa…