I was less thrilled when he justifies letting a woman get torn apart by rabid homeless people for the greater good. Batman gets kidnapped and brainwashed by a murderous cult, which then goes on to take over Gotham City. They use the sewers as their base of operations and everyone knows this but nobody goes down there to take them out, they just allow them to skulk around and pop up. Blackfire tortures and drugs the Dark Knight and eventually succeeds in getting him to join his cult. Blackfire preaches justice, speaks the same message as the Batman, but says that brutality is the only way.

Since Jason Todd had never really caught on with readers, and since DC was looking for a high-profile event, the company decided to kill off Robin in A Death in the Family. While the results of this story don't glaringly point to a single instance in the Bat's canon, junkies of these stories (such as myself) can see the foundation that is laid with these words.One thing leads to another and Batman finds himself captured and tortured by the Underground Empire, a cult made up by the city’s homeless. Michael : I never thought South Park would be a plausible comparison to a Batman story, but you’re completely right. That said, this was all deliberate, and executed quite well—which is why I agree that turning the story into a bombastic battle, instead of diving into Blackfire’s manipulations and the truth behind them, felt like a weak way to conclude the story. You know that you’re about to get a thrill, when Jim Starlin is writing and even more if it’s something for DC, and even more and more if it’s about Batman.

He mows people down with a machine gun in one instance, and acts like a coward in many other instances.Aspects of The Cult can be seen in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, a story about an urban uprising from the sewers and Batman’s attempts to rebuild himself to save Gotham. But those are just the hardcore unable to accept the truth -- Batman murdered a man while under the influence of a cult, incapable of controlling his actions or trusting his own senses. Unlike those stories which took place over a couple of years and ran through multiple titles, Starlin and Wrightson explored these ideas in four issues and it works. Most of what’s done in this story is done better in other stories, save maybe the compelling and legitimately unsettling brainwashing of Batman.

Michael : Unfortunately I don’t think it’s totally out of the realm of believability that some citizens wouldn’t leave Gotham once Blackfire takes it over. He has a tank, he has a gun that shoots tranquilizer darts, he leaves people behind for dead, and by the end it felt less and less like a Batman book I want to read. Josh: Matina mentioned Robin earlier, so I want to make sure we give him the credit he’s due, especially since this is Jason Todd.The Cult caused a stir on its initial release as it was, and even today still is, spectacularly gory. This is interesting because it deals with ideas and concepts that would be dealt with in later Batman stories but those tales would be much longer. The best media gag comes as a city council man tries to spin the mysterious disappearance of Gotham’s homeless population in his favour. The story follows the machinations of Deacon Blackfire and his band of homeless followers who have kidnapped Batman before the events of this story.