InsaneJournal

Batman not scaring innocents
Gotham Knights 39 Black & White - "Sunrise"
writer Alex Garland, artist Sean Phillips

The Black&White stories are 8 pages long, so I'm posting less than 3 pages here. I love the B&W stories because they often focus on quirky glimpses of Gotham life, or, as the case may be, of Batman. This one is rather charming, I think.

Anyway, the story begins with a little old lady in her armchair, looking at a photo album full of old photographs. She looks up from the album to her window, where she can see the sun rising. It's a beautiful sunrise, and she decides at once to photograph it. She takes her camera and hurries up the stairs of her apartment building, without answering the calls and good-natured jokes of her neighbours on the way.

Once she's on the roof, she's ready to take the perfect photograph, but she stops, remembering that it's been years since she took her last photograph, thinking that photographs are made for people with a future, and she's too old to have a relation with the future. She can barely catch her breath after climbing the stairs, after all.

And that seems to be it, but then she hears someone else puffing, so she turns her head slightly to the side, and.


She crosses her arms and looks at him sternly and he relents and explains that he was breaking up a robbery (industrial espionage) and was sent out of the window. Fell some thirteen stories and wrenched his should when he managed to caught a ledge, but of course:



On the last page, not included because B&W are 8 pages long, the lady is back in her armchair, smiling, with a framed photograph of Batman and her on her coffee table.