drawn by Chris Samnee
colored by Mathew Lopes
One of my absolute favorite creative teams in all of comicdom is the duo of writer Mark Waid and artist Chris Samnee, whose work I first discovered in the pages of Marvel Comics' Daredevil series, on which the duo collaborated from 2011 to 2015. I've diligently followed their collaborations, from their twelve-issue Black Widow run from 2016 to 2017, to their brief run on Captain America in 2017 and even their work for other companies, like IDW's four-issue miniseries The Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom. While some of their stories have inevitably been better than others, their work was always engaging, crisp and supremely entertaining, a tragic rarity in modern comics. They appeared to go their separate ways just before the COVID-19 pandemic, with Waid doing various books and Samnee going on to co-create a comic book for Image with Robert Kirkman.
Little did I know that they had a truly memorable collaboration still to come, for arguably one of the most iconic comic book characters in existence. It was to my surprise and delight that I found out last year that they had teamed up, after YEARS apart, on a twelve-issue miniseries titled Batman and Robin: Year One,
As the title suggests, the series chronicles Bruce Wayne's and Dick Grayson's (untold) early adventures together as Batman and his newly-minted Boy Wonder, Robin. In particular, they have to team up against a formidable threat to Gotham City, the conniving and corrupt General Grimaldi who seeks to upset the tenuous balance of power between the existing crime families in Gotham by pitting them against each other. To help him do this, he has a secret weapon: a man who can change his likeness on a whim, or none other than Clayface. To make matters worse, former District Attorney and now wildcard criminal Harvey Dent, aka, Two-Face wants in on this action. Amidst all this, will Batman and Robin be able to save Gotham City from a brewing gang war, especially since Child Protective Services is watching Bruce Wayne like a hawk to see if he's fit to be a parent for his new ward, Dick Grayson?
As someone who only sporadically reads DC Comics as opposed to my regular Marvel fare, I couldn't say if this story hasn't been told before in some other form, but it seems likely that this is the first time both Batman and Robin have gotten the "Year One" treatment, and to my mind, there's no better creative team to do it. Waid, of course, is a veteran of DC Comics, having written volumes of DC Comics for decades, including seminal work like Kingdom Come, and Samnee, I would argue, is one of his very best collaborators, whose work evokes the Silver Age brilliance of the likes of Bruce Timm and the late Darwyn Cooke. It's almost like these guys were born to tell this story, and they bring every ounce of the creative energy that made their runs on Daredevil so darn memorable. They have a knack for marrying propulsive narrative, snappy dialogue and visual flair that just makes it impossible to put this book, which is a fairly hefty 264 pages, down until the very last adventure. Reading this was just pure joy from start to finish.
Now, if only Marvel could lure these guys back to do a run on Spider-Man...
10/10
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