"If I am going to inspire change, I can't just be a creature of myth and shadows, or an instrument of violence. I have to show people that I am real. That I am here for them. I need to show people that I am..."
— Jace Fox
Created by Academy Award-winning writer John Ridley and artist Oliver Copiel, I Am Batman is the follow-up to The Next Batman: Second Son. The series follows prodigal protagonist Timothy "Jace" Fox as he finally dons the cape and cowl to become Gotham's newest Dark Knight.
Set immediately after the events of Second Son while tying directly into Batman (James Tynion IV), Jace has learned that his father and Bruce Wayne were allied with Batman. Deciding to use his own training and the resources Batman left behind, Jace moves out of his family's home and sets up shop in the Hibernaculum to continue his hunt for Tyler Arkadine, the billionaire philanthropist turned international criminal who eluded our hero in the previous series.
This series contains examples of:
- Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: When the stressful first years of working for Wayne Enterprises resulted in him spending long hours away from his wife Tanya, a young Lucius Fox had an affair with a Japanese co-worker named Elena Aoki, who inevitably got pregnant with Jace from the entanglement.
- Affirmative-Action Legacy:
- Jace Fox is the fifth person to carry the Bat-Mantle. Where as all the previous holders were Caucasian with the exception of Dick Grayson (who has Romani heritage), Jace is African-American. Or more specifically, he's Afro-Asian.
- Hadiyah is a complex case. She wears the faceless mask of Renee Montoya after the latter had encouraged her to take up her mantle as a vigilante. But when she arrives to save Jace and Tiff from the Moral Authority, she chooses the alias "Nobody" for herself, a name primarily associated with Morgan and Maya Ducard. Where as both Morgan and Maya were Ambiguously Brown at best, Hadiyah is explicitly an Arab.
- Ambiguously Evil: Rafael Villanueva, the Mayor of New York City, presents himself as a left-leaning progressive who seems to genuinely care about his city. But the fact that Manray targets him suggests that he's hiding something sinister behind all that good will. Issue #11 reveals Rafael is actually in bed with a Super Mob Boss named Mr. Dreadful, who helped him get elected.
- Asshole Victim: Commissioner Becket ends up a victim of Manray.
- Back for the Dead: Anarky is found dead by Chubb and Whitaker at the end of issue 1, seemingly shot to death by a teenager named Morris Caulfield who was radicalized by Seer and the Moral Authority.
- Badass Biker: Instead of employing the use of a Batmobile, Jace chooses to cruise through the streets of Gotham with his motorcycle from Second Son.
- Bastard Angst: This trope immediately hits Jace like a freight train after being faced with the revelation that he was born from Lucius' affair with another woman behind Tanya's back. A revelation that Tanya, Tam, and possibly Luke were all already aware of while Jace was kept in the dark about it. This shatters the newfound respect he had for his father, leaves him questioning if this was the real reason why Luke treats him like garbage, and results in him being too demoralized to put up a proper fight against Ezekiel King and the Moral Authority, who he previously could curbstomp by himself with little effort.
- Batman Gambit: During one of his brawls with the Moral Authority's militiamen, Jace begins to realize that his foes don't seem to fear him as they should, either due to them catching on that he isn't the original Batman or thinking that he at the very least adheres to the same no-kill rule as his predecessor. So after thrashing all of his comrades, Jace decides to reveal to the last goon standing that he indeed really isn't the original Batman... and thus is not bound by Bruce's moral boundaries. Cue the panic.Goon: Who the $@%# are you?!Jace: I'm the guy who'll snap your neck and drag your carcass from one side of Gotham to the other. What's that do for you?
- Big Applesauce: To avoid being perpetually stuck in Bruce Wayne's shadow, Jace decides to leave Gotham after the events of Fear State in favor of permanently establishing himself as the Dark Knight of New York City. From a meta-perspective, this move historically marks the first time an ongoing Batman series has been set in NYC since the 1940s.
- Bittersweet Ending: Issue #18 concludes the series on a mostly positive note. With both Tiffany and Hadiyah/Nobody on his side, Jace gets his Heroic Second Wind and successfully defeats the Moral Authority while saving Elena Aoki's life from a homicidal Ezekiel King. An emotional Jace then reveals his secret identity to Elena, who instantly recognizes him as her son and tries to explain her reasons for leaving him with the Fox Family while holding out on the hope that he'll allow her back into his life, which Jace seems to reciprocate. But on that same note, Jace decides to leave the Fox Family for good, which drives both Lucius and Tanya to break down into a crying mess, but he remains on good terms with Tiff who has officially become his sidekick in New York. Detective Chubb also seems to have fully shed her initial prejudices against superheroes and has embraced her role as The Commissioner Gordon by working to get both Tiff and Nobody deputized by Mayor Villanueva.
- By-the-Book Cop: Continuing her characterization from Second Son, Detective Chubb operates firmly in line with the anti-vigilantism policies put in place by the Nakano Administration. However, her own biases against Gotham's vigilante community is practically teetering on being outright malicious as Chubb not only jumps at the chance to shoot at Jace while he's apprehending the hired thugs trying to kill them, she outright requests the Magistrate forces who show up to assist the GCPD to hurt Jace if they find him.
- Childhood Friends: Hadiyah, the daughter of a CEO working with Foxtech on bringing broadband to rural and underserved communities, used to be close friends with both Jace and Vol when they all attended the same Military School as teenagers. Like Jace, she was shipped off by her family after being involved in a killing. But whereas Jace was a perpetrator who bears the guilt of his actions, it's heavily implied that Hadiyah bloodied her hands in an act of retribution.
- Continuity Snarl: Issue #1 has Jace state that there hasn't been a true public sighting of the Batman in six years, with the implications being that Bruce's vigilante persona is still largely regarded as Shrouded in Myth and out of the public eye. But this contradicts the fact that Bruce actually has been seen out in the open as Batman in several titles set before and coinciding with this series. The biggest example being the Justice League, where it's a publicized fact that Bats is a founding member. Even if one is to consider it an offshoot of Seer declaring Batman dead in the opening segments of The Joker War, which this series carries on from, that is at most a month or two, not even one year. In effect, it seems that this issue comes with transplanting Jace wholesale from the Future State line, without taking into account how things are different.
- Crazy-Prepared: In order to prevent reinforcements from interfering with his assassination attempt on Mayor Villanueva, Manray planted bombs on the cars parked outside of City Hall to create a flaming barricade to keep police vehicles at bay.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Jace ends up on the receiving end of one during his first confrontation with Manray, who brutalized Jace so thoroughly that the hero is forced to launch himself out of a window in order to make a Tactical Withdrawal.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: During the Dark Crisis tie-in issues, Jace Fox proved himself capable of channeling enough Heroic Willpower to beat the shit out of Sinestro after hijacking control of his own yellow ring. Just for comparison, the last human character to pull off a similar feat against Thaal was Guy Gardner.
- Didn't Think This Through: When Villanueva learns that Becket is dead, he attempts to recruit Renee Motonya to replace him. She doesn't bite as, despite her having rebuilt the GCPD from the ground up, she rightfully points out that hiring a homosexual Latina so soon after losing a bigoted cop would just be seen as virtue signaling.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Invoked in-universe. When Commissioner Becket proposes that they should assemble a tactical unit to take out the new Batman, Mayor Villanueva immediately shuts that idea down, pointing out just how piss-poor the optics such an initiative would have.Mayor Villanueva: So, to be clear, Commissioner Becket, in the world we currently find ourselves living in, you'd order a posse of police officers to hunt down and kill an unarmed black man who's exercising his constitutional right to intervene in felonies as they're being committed?Carmichael: When you say it that way, yes it sounds—Mayor Villanueva: Stupid. Nakano tried that in Gotham with the Magistrate. After that #$%*-show, next election he'll be running for his political life.
- Dramatic Irony:
- Lucius believes that the reason Jace is spending so many late nights working at his company is that he's trying to make amends for his past juvenile behavior. In reality, Jace is secretly trying to undermine Lucius' contract with Simon Saint's Magistrate by using their own technology against them.
- Jace theorizes that the Batman might actually be a Corporate Samurai that Lucius and Bruce bankrolled in exchange for him protecting their business interests in Gotham. Needless to say, any reader with so much as a cursory knowledge of the Bat-Mythos knows that his take is way off the mark.
- Driving Question: "Who really killed Anarky and why?"
- Dropped a Bridge on Him: Simon Saint, one of the major power players in Tynion's run on Batman as the mastermind behind the Magistrate program that would go onto terrorize Gotham in Fear State, is released from prison and assassinated by his government partner Victor Noonan in part of a plot to bait the new Batman into falling for an ambush set by Noonan's T.A.L.O.S. Troopers.
- Elaborate Underground Base: The Hibernaculum is a massive underground weapons foundry hidden underneath Wayne Enterprises that was utilized by Lucius Fox and Bruce Wayne to create the latter's wonderful toys. However, the facility has been largely trashed with many of its original contents either missing or locked off. Thankfully for Jace, Vol has the technological expertise to at least get some of the systems up and running for him to utilize.
- After the move to New York, Jace and Vol purchase The Helix to serve as their new base of operations. It was originally a massive transportation hub constructed back in The '70s to connect Harlem to all of the city's railways and airports until the fiscal crisis forced the ambitious project to shut down. While the subterranean levels give Jace direct access to New York's vast subway system, the street level of the building can double as a front for their crime-fighting endeavors via a satellite office for the Fox Family's Impact Fund.
- Friend on the Force: Enforced in issue 6. The mayor of New York City refuses to allow the insanity of vigilantes run rampant in his city and creates a task force of recruiting and deputizing Jace and makes sure he does things by the book.
- Good Old Ways: Despite having the vast resources of the Hibernaculum at his disposal, Jace makes the pragmatic decision to design his Batsuit to be considerably low-tech and utilitarian so he won't be tracked by the Magistrate's surveillance network. He also decides to forgo the usage of Batarangs and the other exotic gadgets and weaponry Bruce employed in favor of sticking with the more practical armaments he's already familiar with.
- Heroic Bastard: Jace himself is revealed to have been this all along in issue #16, where Lucius and Tanya are forced to come clean about his parentage after the Moral Authority publicly outs Lucius' affair with a mistress they've kidnapped.
- He's Back!: Renee Montoya dons The Question persona once again in issue #11 to seek Jace's help in figuring out who really murdered Anarky.
- He Knows Too Much: Issue #14 reveals that Anarky was murdered by Tony in order to keep him from learning the truth behind the death of Danny Chan.
- Hold the Line: When the Moral Authority attacks the juvenile detention center Caulfield is being held in, Chubb and Whitaker are forced to hunker the place down with what little firepower both they and the present correctional officers can scrounge up until the GCPD can provide reinforcements. Fortunately for the detectives, Jace arrives just as the heavily armed militia is about to breach their defenses.
- Icon of Rebellion: With Seer's disinformation campaign fracturing the city's trust in its heroes and law enforcement alike, Jace's ultimate goal as Batman is to become a visible and tangible champion for the people of Gotham to rally behind in opposition of the Magistrate since sticking to the shadows like his predecessor is no longer an advantage.
- The Informant: Danny Chan, a high-profile political activist who was helping organize protests against the Magistrate and Police Brutality in Gotham City, is revealed to have been a police informant who was feeding information about the protesters to Detective Keenan. A more radical activist name Tony murdered Danny after finding out he was snitching to the police then shot Anarky In the Back in order to keep the vigilante from exposing him.
- Interface Spoiler: Detective Whitaker scathing accusation of Jace being a coward and Jace's Disproportionate Retribution in response becomes highly suspect due to the fact that both men were surrounded by an aura of yellow energy during the time of their heated argument. This is Foreshadowing the appearance of Thaal Sinestro, who is confirmed to appear in a Dark Crisis tie-in issue specifically to target Jace.
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Being a former intelligence operative, Jace has no qualms about employing torture to extract information from his enemies. This is best showcased in issue #2 where Jace stabs a criminal with his own knife then drives the blade even deeper into the man's flesh whenever he refuses to answer his questions.
- Jerkass Has a Point: While Sinestro is a petty and murderous tyrant, he did have a point that Jace's refusal to involve himself in the Dark Crisis incident while the entire superhero community was risking their lives fighting against it is an act of cowardice. Jace himself admits that he was wrong to turn Jon Kent's offer down and arrives for the Final Battle against Pariah after defeating Thaal.
- Just a Kid: Discussed. Just like how they were split on Mayor Nakano's anti-vigilantism laws, Chubb and Whitaker have starkly opposing views on Morris Caufield. Whereas Whitaker has sympathy for Caulfield, seeing him more as an impressionable kid who was manipulated into committing murder by Seer's propaganda, Chubb refuses to shed any tears for Caulfield and lambasts her partner for ever feeling sorry for an unrepentant killer who already admitted that he would've killed a cop just like he killed Anarky if given the chance. Then there's Commissioner Montoya, who doesn't fully side with either detective's views and is far more concerned with ensuring Caulfield is properly processed and provided legal representation under the law.
- Knight of Cerebus: In the beginning, Jace Fox typically faced off against white-collar criminals, mercenaries, and corrupt law enforcement operatives like the Gotham City Magistrate. While the latter two were numerous and typically heavily armed, the threat they posed wasn't anything Jace couldn't just pulverize in a couple of pages. That all changed when his move to New York City brought him face-to-face with his first actual supervillain: Manray. A brutal Mad Artist Serial Killer who beat the living shit out of Jace while making him question his entire life's purpose as a Vigilante Man. Manray's debut signifies a significant shift away from the relatively mundane antagonists the aspiring Dark Knight challenged before, while also putting the pressure on Jace to significantly step up his game if he wants to live up to the mantle he's carrying.
- Logical Weakness: While Manray's Epic Flail is devastating in close quarters combat, he needs a second to recall it every time he whips it at a target. The brief opening that creates in Manray's defense is enough for Jace to exploit during their rematch, resulting in the Dark Knight beating Manray into submission with his own weapon by seizing control of the flail's metal chain after the villain missed him by a hairline.
- Mad Artist: Shortly following Jace's arrival in New York City, Manray, a masked Serial Killer who horrifically mutilates their victims into ghastly works of art, makes their big debut by killing and desecrating one of the city's most prominent philanthropists. Detective Chubb theorizes that this new killer is the first of what is going to be many more villainous psychopaths slipping into the city, attracted to the Batman's presence like moths to a flame.Manray: Let's make something beautiful.
- Malicious Slander: After having hijacked control of Gotham's telecommunications under the guise of Oracle, Seer has enacted a massive disinformation campaign designed to sow as much discord in the already panicked residents of the city as possible.
- Mind Rape: Sinestro spends the entirety of Issue #15 psychically torturing Jace Fox with the express purpose of trying to coax the hero into killing himself. While Thaal expresses to Pariah that he could've simply murdered Jace with a snap of his fingers and be done with it, he'd rather just sit back and enjoy watching this Batman fall to despair as payment for being put on a hitjob he considers to be greatly beneath him.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Upon recognizing that the new Batman that's been fighting crime in Gotham is actually his son Jace, Lucius Fox quickly activates a hidden failsafe to remotely shut down the Powered Armor of the T.A.L.O.S. Troopers who were deployed to assassinate him, giving Jace the exact edge he needed to defeat them and escape. Afterward, Lucius finally comes to terms with how everything he's suffered through since the Joker War has nearly sent him over the edge and decides to seek professional psychiatric help.
- Mysterious Past: Hadiyah is revealed to be on a First-Name Basis with Renee Montoya and heavily implied to have trained alongside her in Nanda Parbat. Renee also seems to hold Hadiyah in high enough regard that she decides to pass her mask down to her after deciding to recommit to being Gotham's Police Commissioner.
- No Badass to His Valet: Vol might be Jace's loyal handler and resident Techno Wizard, but he'll never stop seeing the aspiring Dark Knight as the self-loathing dork he grew up with when they were classmates.Jace: I need to bleed this thing for all of its tech and use it for my own purpose.Vol: And that purpose is?Vol: Yeaaaah. Your whole master plan sounds like you're still trying to work out your daddy issues.Jace: I do not have... Look, the privileged... They need to know that the things they think protect them can be turned against them.Vol: Right! But no daddy issues.
- Non-Idle Rich:
- With the Fox family now being one of the richest on the planet, this easily applies to Jace. However, he expresses disgust at the idea that Batman is an agent for Bruce Wayne and his father, and expresses disdain for the rich who get by on their privilege. He himself has been trying to do good in the world for years; he just now has a Batsuit to do it with.
- After her falling out with Luke, Tiffany Fox has been doubling down on her combat training in hopes of becoming a vigilante just like her brothers. When one of the at-risk girls she befriends at the job training center is being harassed by her old street gang, Tiff suits up and beats the gangbangers senseless in the girl's defense.
- Private Military Contractor: Simon Saint's Magistrate, the privatized law enforcement initiative heavily featured in DC Future State, are officially in power thanks to Mayor Nakano and has already deployed remotely piloted combat droids to patrol the city.
- Powered Armor: Jace and Vol utilize the Bat-Armor they found back in Second Son to prevent a peaceful protest from becoming a massacre as Arkadine had embedded armed thugs to shoot at the already agitated riot police from inside the crowd. While Jace succeeds in dispatching the thugs before they could hurt anybody, he is quickly overpowered by the Magistrate's combat drones and is forced to abandon the now severely damaged armor to escape with his life.
- The Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit a.k.a. T.A.L.O.S. is a series of military-grade power armor created by the U.S. Government to radically improve upon the designs of the Magistrate's Peacekeepers. To field-test the T.A.L.O.S. prototypes, a squad of soldiers is deployed in Gotham wearing the armor with the mission to assassinate Batman.
- Reasonable Authority Figure:
- When Commissioner Renee Montoya finds out that one of her officers had kickstarted a riot by ordering his men to crackdown on a group of peaceful protesters who had both a permit and the right to assembly, she verbally rakes the cop over the coals before immediately demanding his letter of resignation. She also acknowledges that many of the citizens wearing masks during the protests are doing it as less of a political statement against the current Nakano Administration and more as a safety precaution as the poison gas attack on Arkham Asylum has left many understandably concerned that the air they're breathing is not safe.
Commissioner Montoya: I got a department to rebuild, and you and the Magistrate aren't helping.Officer: Those people had no right to disrespect us.Commissioner Montoya: The job's not a popularity contest. People may hate cops, but cops don't hate people. Think about that when you're typing up your resignation letter.- Upon realizing that the new Batman operating in New York is here to stay, Mayor Villanueva immediately orders his people to deputize the Dark Knight as an agent of the NYPD and create a specialized task force specifically to work alongside him. This is because he's already seen how Gotham utterly failed with it's hardline "anti-vigilante" stance under Mayor Nakano's crumbling administration and isn't about to repeat their mistakes in his city.
- Rabid Cop: After the murder of Pete Becket, Detective Mike Keenan goes to extreme lengths to try and personally execute Manray in revenge. This includes breaking into Chubb's office to steal case files, having like-minded officers shadow the members of Strike Force Bat to keep tabs on their investigation, and straight up attempting to blow Manray's brains out at point blank range even though Batman had already succeeded in apprehending him. Keenan and his clique in the NYPD also intentionally ignore Chubb and Whitaker's emergency call for help when the two find themselves under fire by multiple heavily armed assailants, just to spite Chubb for stopping him. Issue 12 would also reveal that Keenan led a police squad that cracked down on civilian protesters and may have been involved in the murder of an activist named Danny Chan.
- Retractable Weapon: Jace's weapons of choice are twin extendable batons housed inside his Batsuit's armored gauntlets, something his Future State counterpart notably lacked.
- Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The Moral Authority is a growing collective of right-wing extremist groups who have all bought into Seer's conspiracy theories and banded together to "defend" Gotham from its heroes, the Magistrate, and the GCPD under the fallacious belief that they're all actually pawns serving a shadow government that's secretly been controlling everybody's lives. When Morris Caulfield, a radicalized teenager responsible for the murder of Anarky gets arrested by the GCPD, the Moral Authority mobilizes under Seer's orders to attack the GCPD in an attempt to break Morris out of custody.
- Shipper on Deck: Vol is very much in support of Jace getting together with Hadiyah and rags on the former for blowing his chances with her.
- Spotting the Thread: This is how Jace realizes that Sinestro really doesn't have Hadiyah hostage and is just another ring-constructed illusion. Even though the situation is dire, Hadiyah would never beg for mercy.
- Stealth Hi/Bye: Surprisingly Averted for a Bat-Title. Jace doesn't bother disappearing on a pair of GCPD officers after he saves them from an armed ambush. Instead, he chooses to have a brief dialogue with them reaffirming his purpose before making his exit. Something that one cop notes is very out-of-character for the Dark Knight, even with present circumstances.Officer: Batman! You're alive? What are you doing here?Jace: Not beefin' with you.Officer: But... what are you doing here?Jace: Trying to help out?Officer: Yeah but... what are you still doing here? Usually, you'd throw a couple of punches, then do that thing where you'd disappear.
- Superhero Paradox: Discussed. New York is established to have been a relatively mundane city when compared to the likes of Gotham or Metropolis, which are both (in)famous for being rife with superheroes and supervillains alike with all of the associated dangers they bring. So when Jace arrives in New York as Batman and shows no signs of stopping his crusade against crime over there, one of the major concerns NYC officials have is whether or not he will inevitably inspire more "Masks" to operate in their city. Those concerns eventually start gaining traction thanks to the appearance of Manray and shortly afterwards The Question.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- Lucius Fox quickly realizes his son Jace is the new Batman after his faceplate gets knocked off by the T.A.L.O.S. assassins gunning for his head, revealing his distinct goatee. After dealing with the assassins, Jace shaves off his facial hair in order to stay unidentifiable.
- A similar situation happens again in issue #14, where Jace immediately recognizes that the new masked vigilante who knocked out Detective Chubb is his sister Tiffany after seeing surveillance footage of her fleeing the scene in poorly pieced together Beta Outfit while wielding the weapons she wanted to use to train with him.
- In issue #14, Detective Whitaker (or more specifically Sinestro impersonating him) accuses Jace of being a coward that is tarnishing Batman's reputation by running when things go hot, using his move from Gotham to New York and his refusal to get involved in the Dark Crisis incident as proof. Considering how Jace's move comes so soon after the Fear State incident, how he angrily rebuffed Jon Kent's request to join his Justice League and the fact that he's the only member of the Bat-Family not putting his life on the line to stop Deathstroke's rampage, it's easy to see why he would think that.
- Jace's victory over Sinestro greatly takes advantage of the fact that the villain was focused on making him suffer for his own amusement rather than killing him outright. In a straight up brawl, Thaal demonstrates how easily he could've murdered Jace just by using his ring's telekinesis alone to thrash the vigilante around like a ragdoll.
- Take That!: In-universe, the New York City mayor makes it a point that the anti-vigilante stance Nakano took by recruiting the Magistrate was stupid and that he's going to be in for the fight of his political life.
- Taught by Experience: Renee Montoya is quick to realize that, with Batman active in New York, other "masks" will start arriving to join in as well, something she would know on account of living in Gotham during the rise of the original Batman. In fact, she does just this as The Question.
- Training from Hell: Issue 3 opens with a brief flashback of a younger Jace back when he was held captive in Markovia, where he was mentored by a fellow captive named Vesey in how to Feel No Pain so he could survive his brutal interrogations.
- Underestimating Badassery: As far as Sinestro is concerned, Jace Fox is both an Inadequate Inheritor and a Dirty Coward who will inevitably break from the Mind Rape of his Darkness-infused yellow ring. But in typical Sinestro fashion, his arrogance and Pride comes back to bite him in the ass. Hard.
- Ungrateful Townsfolk: As far as both the Alleytown protesters and the GCPD are concerned, Batman showed up out of nowhere to randomly attack civilians. Completely ignoring the fact there were armed gunmen in the crowd who shot first and that Bats showed up to dispatch the shooters.
- Notably averted in New York, Where Jace's presence as Batman is perceived rather positively by both civilians and the under-resourced beat cops of the NYPD who are just glad that somebody is out there looking out for their neighborhoods. In fact, Jace's only major critics seen so far are New York's Police Commissioner Becket and Detective Chubb, who both have pre-existing biases against superheroes.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Jace and Vol are firm examples of this. Their exchanges on the comms, unless it is absolutely dangerous at the moment, are usually filled with snark. Usually, with Vol snarking on Jace.
