Rating: *** 1/2*

Grant Morrison continues his run on Batman and Robin with issue three of the Circus of Strange storyline.  In our last issue, Damian had quit being Robin and went off alone to stop the Circus of Strange.  His arrogance resulted only in him getting captured by the Circus’ leader, a man by the name of Pyg. 

When DC Comics decided to go in this direction of having a new Batman and Robin with Dick Grayson as Batman and Damian Wayne as Robin, they wanted to have a role reversal.  Batman was always the dark character and Robin the lighter character.  With Dick and Damian as the Dynamic Duo, the roles are reversed: Dick is the “light” and Damian is the “dark”.  I was interested in seeing if they could make this a success, but my feeling was that if Dick’s Batman is portrayed as this happy go lucky crime fighter, the image of Batman would not work and readers would reject the idea of Dick as Batman and demand the return of Bruce Wayne to the role.

One of things that I like in what Grant Morrison is doing here is that he portrays Dick Grayson as Batman to still be this menacing figure to the outside world as we see in the opening scene of this issue.  Dick is dragging Phosphorous Rex, a member of the Circus, through the streets of Gotham while he’s riding his motorcycle.  This is exactly something “Batman” would do to scare criminals into giving him what he wants.  I don’t see that over in Judd Winick’s Batman.  The reason Two-Face has discovered that someone else is wearing the Bat costume is because Judd is having artist Mark Bagley draw him with a big freakin’ grin on his face as he fights crime.  DC has a winner with Grant Morrison’s Batman and Robin, but they need to have a uniform interpretation of not only the portrayal of Batman in their comics, but also the portrayal of Damian.  Peter Tomasi who is writing the Blackest Night: Batman mini-series portrays Damian in a much more sympathetic and meek way than we see him here in Batman and Robin.  In this book he is jerk, but is completely badass.

Damain shows he’s a badass when he regains consciousness and looks at the situation he’s in and immediately says, “Whose neck do I break first?”  Compare this to the Damian who we saw in Blackest Night: Batman who was afraid to pick up the skeletons of his grandparents.

Morrison continues to show how sick of a person this character Professor Pyg is.  Pyg wants to turn people into living dolls.  This is his idea of perfection.  He puts on these weird faceless masks that graft onto the person’s face.  He plans to do the same thing to Robin, but before he does this he decides to put on some disco music and perform a dance that reminded me of Jennifer Beal in Flashdance.  Very sick and very funny.

Before the mask can be placed on his face, Robin frees himself and proceeds to not just beat up the members of the Circus, he mutilates them as he takes the electric saw that one of them had and hacks the faces off of three of the doll people.  Badass!  Batman shows up to help and we also see the daughter of the man, Niko, from the first issue.  She too has a doll mask on her face and she goes after Pyg.  He escapes, but he’s soon captured by Batman and Robin.

We don’t end there as “Robin and Batman” as Damian feels the team should now be called, intercept a transmission from Le Bossu of the Black Glove who were the villains in Batman: RIP.  They crash his hideout and apprehend him.  Finally we see Niko’s daughter at the hospital and she’s killing her father.  Whether she’s crazy or she’s performing a mercy killing on her father because he has the doll mask on as well, we don’t know.  Some guards try to stop her, but they’re shot by someone - the Red Hood!

Now Jason Todd has been the Red Hood for some time now, but I’m wondering if Grant may throw us a curve and make this a new person behind the mask.  From what we’ve seen in various previews, Red Hood and the girl whose name is Scarlet according to previews, will become a rogue Batman and Robin duo who believe in a more extreme way of fighting crime.  I thought this would be the direction they would go with and I’m still thinking that Damian may become Red Hood’s new sidekick down the road. 

This was a very good issue, but a bit difficult to follow at some points for me with the stuff Pyg was doing, and the scene with Le Bossu came out of no where.  I still think this is the best of the Batman: Reborn books that I’ve read.  (I haven’t read Streets of Gotham or Gotham Sirens.)  I just wish DC would have a uniform depiction of the new Batman and Robin.  I understand artistic licensing, but this is a little too much I think.  I highly recommend this book and I say recommend it to people who haven’t read Batman in a while.  They won’t be let down!