AUTHOR: SEAN MURPHY | ARTIST: SEAN MURPHY | PUBLISHER: DC BLACK LABEL | FORMAT: SINGLE ISSUE | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

DC continues their darker trend of storytelling with this, the latest of the DC Black label collection. Batman: Curse of the White Knight picks up where the earlier Batman: White Knight left us last year with some simultaneously tantalising and frustrating plot threads dangling like an abandoned batrope. But before the casual reader picks up Curse of the White Knight, you absolutely NEED to have read White Knight, otherwise it will make no sense at all!

In the earlier book, the Joker was cured of his insanity, assumed the identity of Jack Napier and sought to heal the city he once terrorised for decades. Becoming a city councilman, he sets about a campaign to discredit Batman for all the property damage he causes, becoming something of a populist saviour in the process. It was a feasible scenario featuring fantastic characters, all the more relevant in the current climate.

Events in the story change Batman and his crime-fighting entourage forever, and these jarring changes are naturally carried over to this continuation, where Joker has reverted to full psycho and has a secret that might well be the biggest joke of all on Gotham City. As this is only the first instalment, writer/artist Sean Murphy’s deliberate and meticulous storytelling style merely sets the scene and teases the reader with hints of the further changes and trauma to be inflicted on our hero. Adding to the tension is the fact that as this is DC’s Black Label series, literally anything can happen, everyone is fair game, nobody is safe, and the gloves are off. If White Knight is anything to go by, then things are definitely going to get messy.

As much as that story examined civic corruption, political activism and manipulation with an unflinching story of mental illness and the sad inevitability of regression, this story is already beginning to shape up to be an equally dark and uncompromising descent into darkness.