Hush

Written by Jeph Loeb and art by Jim lee, hush is one of my favorite Stories about Batman.

One of the big reasons why I liked it so much is that, it was a mystery. Setup was issue one, and each month you got a little piece of the story. It takes the villain of the month concept and connects them into a tale along the way. Reading it As a collection is a bit different, it is still good, you just aren’t going to take a whole year to read it. Well hopefully not anyway.

The one gripe I have with Hush is, if you read DC comics, or even just Batman, you know all the characters in the book. Catwoman, Two-Face, even Superman all make appearances. Bruce and Nightwing talk like a father and his adult son would. The exception being Bruce Wayne’s childhood friend that comes back to Gotham, Thomas Elliot. Which, when one supposed lifetime friend of a major character, you’ve never heard of before in comics shows up, its like wearing a red shirt in Star Trek, you have a strong sense about where this is going. It’s like that, except Hush’s mystery is a bit deeper than that.

This I’m pretty sure, marks the almost return of Jason Todd, the Robin who was dead for twenty-ish years come back from the grave. Well, heavily hinted at coming back. Weird part is, for as realistic as Batman can be, there is a very set way of bringing people back from the dead, Ra’s Al Gul’s Lazarus Pits. Which are used sparsely enough throughout Batman stories as a whole. Caveat being whoever uses them tends to come back a little more mentally unhinged each time, so it was surprising when Batman said he had thought of using one to bring Jason back as soon as he died, but ultimately never did.

I think the action bits are just as good as the detective parts. Thanks a lot to Jim Lee’s art, character designs are amazing, and there are some pretty awesome splashes as well. Batman fights Superman at one point. There is an iconic image of The Dark Knight, while wearing a kryptonite ring, punching Big Blue in the face You might think that’s something that happens every other Thursday, but doesn’t happen that way at all in comics.

In the end, I think the story holds up, maybe not as well as the art, the finale gets weird when you have time to sit and think about such things, but it’s alright. Read it and you’ll see a bunch of memorable scenes almost non-stop. Batman almost kills The Joker at one point. They’re fighting and Batman just puts Joker on the ropes and seriously considers ending Joker’s reign of laughs forever, but Commissioner Gordon steps in and says if The Dark Knight pulls that trigger he has to arrest him for murder, and Batman is not about to become the criminal he tries to keep off the streets of Gotham.

Hush is a great Batman tale that is both action and mystery, the best kind