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What Do You Get When You Cross Watchmen's Button With Psycho Pirate's Mask? Batman #22 Tells You…

Published Tue, 18 Apr 2017 16:30:36 -0500

In Watchmen, the smiley face button was a symbol worn by The Comedian. Thrown through a window to his death, the button was picked up by Rorschach as a potential clue as to the identity of the murdered man. The image and position of the bloodspot on the badge is echoed through the comic, the crater on Mars, the hands on the Doomsday clock and more, as it became a symbol of the whole story, something shiny and happy, now tarnished by death and mortality, what Watchmen does to the superhero story. And it fills the book, watching the Watchmen with its cold, dead eyes. The actual button has its blood cleaned off it, but it symbolically lives on throughout the story, and spreading beyond, infecting the acid house movement and launching legal cases in its wake.

So, naturally, DC Comics couldn't leave well alone, and in DC Rebirth, they had Batman find it, still splattered with blood, in the Batcave, behind the letter that had been given him by The Flash from the Flashpoint reality, where Thomas Wayne was the Batman and his son, Bruce, died….

In tomorrow's Batman #22, the button starts acting up. With Psycho Pirate's mask, taken from the man Batman rescued from Bane's keep.

And bringing back Thomas Wayne…

…briefly. Note we have a countdown, just as the smiley button mirrored the Doomsday clock.

As the Flashpoint story, also written by this comic's plotter Geoff Johns, rears its ugly head. And how long does it take you to read a letter?Destroying literature? A little like what some folk believe is being done with Watchmen…