Batman & Robin (The New 52) # 5

By Mark Rodriguez

A face from Batman's past, Morgan, has started a one-man crusade to kill off Batman's 'franchise' as the super villain Nobody. Damian struggles to become a nonlethal Robin, and Nobody invites him to fight crime his. Which side will Robin choose?

  Issue 4 begins with ‘Mutineer’ as Bruce Wayne wanders outside Wayne Manor and found a paper saying ‘I had to leave. The lie is over.’ As Bruce runs back to his house, Alfred shows him disturbing drawings Damian has been drawing since he moved in. Bruce says he was a fool for not noticing his son’s problems sooner and runs off to get him, saying he won’t let him down again.

Meanwhile, Damian is hanging with Nobody. Morgan asks Robin if he’s ready to leave behind the ethics he learned and embrace the killer he is meant to be and take down bad guys with lethal force if necessary. Robin says yes but he has yet to see Morgan prove himself. Morgan tells him to follow him.

 At the Batcave, Bruce is suiting up as he has the Cave wired into every security camera in the city in search for Damian. Alfred reminds him that Damian was also trained to know where the cameras are and avoid them. Batman hops in the Batmobile and hits the streets.

Batman makes a recording for Damian as he searches the streets of Gotham, beating up bad guys and looking for leads. He starts with the story of Henri Ducard, an expert huntsman, the best there was at finding anybody, who eventually married a woman named Felicity Strode. They had a son, which was Morgan. However, Felicity was an assassin hired to kill Henri, but she instead fell for him. Eventually the guys that hired her to kill him found her and told her she had to kill Ducard or she’d be dead instead.

One day Morgan overheard his mother plotting to kill his father, and killed her himself. Henri attacked his son until Morgan convinced him of his wife’s betrayal. Henri took his son under his wing and they trained together as expert huntsmen. At this time, Bruce Wayne was traveling the world, training in several forms of martial arts to become Batman. He heard of Henri Ducard and went to look for him to train under him. Bruce found Morgan and after an epic fight, Henri showed up pointing a gun to him. Wayne asks to be his apprentice, and so their story together began.

  Back to the present, Nobody and Robin stake out an Embassy where the Ambassador is guilty of human trafficking. Robin asks about the guards and that he won’t hurt innocents. Nobody doesn’t care how he takes them down as long as they’re precise. He also tells Damian to lose the cape, and says he’s free from being a decoy for Wayne. Inside Nobody and Robin take down all the guards as they make their way to the Ambassador. When they find him, Nobody gives Robin a gun and tells him to prove himself by killing him.

My Opinions 

So in this issue we see Robin taken under Morgan's wing, but also see some flashbacks of how Bruce met and trained under Ducard. Now Ducard was a character in the comics, and unlike the Nolan movies, he had nothing to do with Rah's Al Ghul. They sort of fused both characters into one for that movie. We'll be seeing a few more flashbacks, and from what I understand they're mostly similar things we've seen before in previous stories that bring in Ducard training Bruce, but now Morgan's been added into the mix.

Damian goes to the dark side and without the filter of Batman and Nightwing to keep him in check. I like how Nobody flat out calls Robin's bright yellow cape as making him a decoy. It's a joke people have been saying for years, the dark Batman that hides in the shadows sends out his brightly colored Robin to draw all the gunfire. It's quite a change to see these two work together, as Morgan also wants to fight crime, but through lethal means. This issue ends with putting Damian to the test. Tune in next time to see if Robin will pull the trigger. Same Bat Time, same Bat Channel.