Azrael • Batgirl • Batman • Batman and Robin • Batman Beyond • Batman Confidential • Batman Incorporated • Batman: Dark Knight • Batman: Streets of Gotham • Birds of Prey • Justice League of America • Outsiders • Red Robin • Superman/Batman Batman: The Cult is a four-issued limited series published in DC's prestige format. Each issue of the series features a raised cover.

Quarantine Book Club – Batman: The Cult | Batman News Quarantine Book Club – Batman: The Cult | Batman News

Angered at being rejected by his idol, Nashton begins ranting to which Batman realizes that Nashton still has something planned. Upon realizing Batman hasn't figured out his next course of action, a delighted Nashton gives him one last clue by singing "Ave Maria," the song sung at the Mitchell's funeral to imply that the final part of the plan is mayor-elect Bella Real's assassination. However, Batman fails to realize this and exclaims, "What have you done!?" The next issue features a note indicating that Todd Klein was incorrectly credited as the letterer of this issue. The actual letterer was John Costanza.

Did we miss something on diversity?

Casper: I mean, the stuff at the end with the enormous Batmobile is awesome! I just love how over-the-top that is. Since then, always trying to hurt Gotham City, and each time, bigger and bigger his ambitions and the scope of his plans… That being said, in general, I’m not overly thrilled with the fourth issue of this story. It’s almost as if the wheels just came off, and I have to wonder if there were changes from what was originally planned for the book’s conclusion. There’s just such a strong departure in tone, focus, plot, and pacing that it feels off. To be fair, there are some interesting aspects of The Cult. It is easy to see how it could have inspired Christopher Nolan. In some respects, The Dark Knight Rises owes as much to The Cult as it does to No Man’s Land, with Bane using an almost religious fervour to raise an army of the dispossessed to claim Gotham as their own. Even the iconography is similar – the bodies strung up on the street lamps here evoke the bodies dangling from the bridge in The Dark Knight Rises. ( The Cult also provides the inspiration for that lovely “Batman visits Gordon in hospital, vows to return” scene.) The Others: Not sure about this one. It seemed to hold together as a story while I was reading it, but on analysis the holes are… maddening. Maybe they were supposed to be.

Batman: The Cult, or just me? Does anyone else here love Batman: The Cult, or just me?

Michael : I never thought South Park would be a plausible comparison to a Batman story, but you’re completely right. If the entire book had been more camp it could’ve worked. Gotham City has many legends, and you can bet that many of those aren’t something good, and this one isn’t the exception… This is the weirdest Batman story I have ever read, and I have very mixed feelings about it (some spoilers ahead). Josh: Yeah, the lift here is quite apparent, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. This is definitely where you see a tonal shift within the story. At this point, I think the element that makes the sequences actually work are the interviews with Gotham citizens.

But we see the GCPD fail, the National Guard fail, and Batman fail, to defeat simplistic tactics by homeless people with guns and knives. It's such bad plotting because these hurdles could’ve been jumped by any one of them if they actually behaved as they would rather than how Starlin wants them to. And the Army don't get involved because a newsreader (there's an abundance of newsreaders overused throughout to serve as both narrators and the Greek chorus - they become a hindrance to the flow of the story and tedious to read long before the end) informs us the President thinks it would be too costly to send the Army into a city in mainland US soil that's under siege! Riiiight, so if a major US city were held hostage, the government would write it off and allow it its own sovereignty? I realise “Dark Knight Rises” has this as a big part of its story but at least with the film there were large stakes – a nuclear bomb – as opposed to thousands of homeless people wandering the streets. Josh: Alright, I think everyone knows the drill by now. Any initial thoughts on selecting this book? Batman gets brainwashed in this story, and we see him like never before. He mows people down with a machine gun in one instance, and acts like a coward in many other instances.