Batman and Robin and Howard: Summer Breakdown | Review

Batman and Robin and Howard: Summer Breakdown
Writer: Jeffrey Brown
Artists: Jeffrey Brown and Silvana Brys
DC Comics; $12.99

Damian Wayne has survived his first year at a new school, his classmate and one-time rival Howard becoming his best friend…and learning of Damian’s double life as one half of the Dynamic Duo. Now it’s summertime, and the boys are confronted with new challenges that will threaten the world and/or their friendship in Batman and Robin and Howard: Summer Breakdown, the surprise sequel to prolific cartoonist Jeffrey Brown and color artist Silvana Brys’ winning 2021 graphic novel Batman and Robin and Howard.

Between working on an environmental impact internship for WayneCorp and pick-up games of soccer with their school friends at the local park, the boys are keeping pretty busy, but their plates are about to get a whole lot fuller.

A trio of socially conscious do-gooder kids calling themselves “The Hero Club” warn Damian and Howard that the park is in danger of being closed down and redeveloped into some kind of weird recycling plant by a shady company whose ownership is obscured by a nesting doll of shell companies.

Oh, and the city is suddenly crawling with ninjas, a sure sign that Damian’s mother, former supervillain and the mistress of the League of Assassins, Talia al Ghul is in town for a visit.

Could these facts be related? Perhaps. It’s certainly a mystery of the sort that Damian’s dad Batman is well suited to unravel, but the Dark Knight Detective seems oddly checked-out, apparently discombobulated by the presence of his one-time lover and current co-parent.

Damian grows increasingly paranoid, worried his mother might be making underhanded moves to control his new friends and try to convince him to submit to initiation into the League of Assassins. This in turn strains his relationship with Howard, who has grown to become not just Damian’s friend, but Robin’s “Guy in the Chair.”

To save the park from what turns out to be a long-term, circuitous plot from a notorious DC Comics super-villain, the heroes will need the help of not just Batman, but the most famous Daily Planet reporter. No, not that one; the other one.

As in the original book, Brown excels at depicting the inner lives of children, and, in particular, their relationships with their parents, which, in Damian’s case, can naturally be somewhat fraught (lots of kids have to deal with divorced parents pulling them in different directions, but the list of kids whose parents are a literal superhero and an actual supervillain is considerably shorter).

Brown writes a great Batman, one who is, whatever else he might be, totally and thoroughly a dad. (This, perhaps, should come as little surprise, given that Brown, a father himself, has created several works about fatherhood and the peculiar weirdness of kids, perhaps none more popular than his Vader and Son series of Star Wars gag books, in which Brown has managed to find the essential dad-ness within the black cape and robot body parts of one of pop culture’s most infamous villains).

Stylistically, Summer Breakdown has the same intimate, hand-doodled look and feel of the original book in the series…and of all of Brown’s work, regardless of subject or audience, from the letters that look exactly like his own handwriting to the shifting realism of the Gotham City skyline, which can sometimes look detailed and referenced and other times is simply a series of cartoony vertical rectangles in the background. Here, however, the work appears, as it did in their previous collaboration, in the soft, colored pencil-like colors of Brys.

After reading Batman and Robin and Howard, which was such a complete and satisfying work, I really didn’t expect to get another story set in Brown’s version of Gotham and starring his own idiosyncratic take on Robin and his dad. Now, after reading its sequel, I find myself anticipating a third book.

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