Dark Knights Rising: The Wild Hunt #1 Annotations

Cover - The Dark Knights - a bunch of bad Batmen gone wrong from the ruined backside of the Multiverse - are, from left to right, The Murder Machine (Batman + Cyborg), The Drowned (Batman + Aquaman), beneath her is The Dawnbreaker (Batman + Green Lantern), The Batman Who Laughs (Batman + The Joker), The Devastator (Batman + Doomsday), The Merciless (Batman + Wonder Woman) and The Red Death (Batman + The Flash). Down front, playing what I'm sure are some sick licks on a frankly pretty unconvincing double headed 'axe', are the Batman Who Laughs' hench-sidekicks, the Dark Robins. All of the Dark Knights were introduced here in the Metal crossover and were created by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo.

Page 1 - Bobo, the 'Detective Chimp', first appeared way back in 1952 in a back-up strip in The Adventures of Rex The Wonder Dog #4 by John Broome and Carmine Infantino. The strip ran for seven years on and off, until Rex's magazine was cancelled with November 1959's issue #46. Other than a 'Whatever Happened to...' tale chronicling the Chimp and Rex's discovery of the Fountain of Youth in 1981's DC Comics Presents #35, he was mostly relegated to one panel joke cameo appearances until Bill Willingham revived the character for his Infinite Crisis-tie-in Day of Vengeance mini-series in 2005, and the subsequent Shadowpact book that span out of it.

As T. O. Morrow informs us later in this issue, "The unexamined life is not worth living" was indeed uttered by Classical philosopher Socrates, at his trial for corrupting the youth of Athens through engaging them in vigorous political debate, and for failing to properly acknowledge the gods of his peers. After a guilty verdict was delivered against him, Socrates chose death rather than exile as his punishment, presumably as a big 'fuck you' to The Man, desperately trying to stifle a bit of healthy societal introspection.

So, whose is the life we're examining here? Much as I'm never mad keen when the old 'comics about comics' thing rears it's head, it's hard not to imagine that Morrison is talking about the ol' DC Entertainment corporate behemoth here once again. "You'll be poorer for forgetting about Detective Chimp" could easily be the fancy Latin motto for Morrison's personal DC coat of arms ('Pauper Enim Tu Simia Immemores De Inquisitor'), a deeply personal philosophy that stretches all the way back to his run on Animal Man, the very first work he did for the company (not coincidentally, one of those one-panel joke Detective Chimp cameos comes in Morrison and Troug's Animal Man #23, when all of the characters obliterated from continuity by the Crisis on Infinite Earths make a ghostly return). After spending so many years - especially during his second DC run from 2005 to 2015 - extolling the virtues of the DC Universe's insanely immense library-without-peer of backstory, it's no surprise really that his return in this issue functions as a reminder to DC and it's writers to never forget about the oddball 8 pagers, the dimly-remembered backup strips of the 1950's, the Funny Animals and the super-robots. Without them, you lose the magic, plunge into the Dark Multiverse, become just one more grim 'n' gritty playground for adolescent power fantasies. It's extremely telling that as far as Snyder has reached beyond his comfort zone with this Metal series so far, it's not until Morrison climbs aboard that Rex the Wonder Dog appears...

I'm not sure if the Detective Chimp: Year One rewrite that follows over the next few pages is an attempt to show how the 'grounded' super-heroics of Snyder's ouvre and the batshit anything-goes tilt-a-whirl of the DCU of Morrison's imagination/memories really can live together as cosy bedfellows (much as Morrison explained away the dayglo alien invasion Batman comics of the 1950's as Batman being high as a fucking kite from being constantly gassed by his foes), or if it's just because the Chimp's origin has been out of print for the best part of 70 years. Either way, it veers significantly in the detail of previous tellings despite keeping much of the thrust of the tale the same.

Back in the olden days, Detective Chimp lived on an 'animal farm' (I assume this is some sort of 1950's rural zoo?) rather than in a circus. After the murder of his owner Fred Thorpe - killed by an employee who feared Thorpe would go to the police after he confessed that he'd killed someone previously - Bobo went to live with the Sheriff Chase of Oscaloosa County, Florida. The two would spend the next seven years of 8 page back-ups solving various small-time crimes together, though Bobo never learned to talk, rarely wore a hat and, to be brutally honest, wasn't that hot a detective tbh. And that way he stayed, throughout all of his original run.

Bill Willingham rewrote Bobo's origin in Days of Vengeance #4 so that Thorpe was a hunter and huckster who captured Bobo in the jungle in order to take him back Stateside to perform in his traveling sideshow.

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