Home Columns Classic Comic Compendium Classic Comic Compendium: BATMAN – THE CULT is a harrowing Batman comic

Classic Comic Compendium: BATMAN – THE CULT is a harrowing Batman comic

A harrowing look at how cults can suck you in, break you, and control you.

01/12/2026 11:00 am

During the ’80s, DC Comics did quite a number of four-issues prestige format mini-series either reinventing existing characters or pushing them in different directions. Experimenting with the characters. The most famous probably being The Dark Knight Returns, but there were countless others. Some on the fringes of continuity, others deeply entrenched in it. Batman got another in 1988 from one of its regular series writers and one of horror’s greatest artists.

It featured a populist dictator. A cult following him blindly. Extrajudicial murders of criminals. A city overrun by those empowered by that leader. You’d be forgiven if you thought I was somehow writing about current events, but these are elements from a story from nearly 40 years ago now. Certainly not exactly the same, though I think it’s interesting how stories from the past can inform things in the present. And at times can weirdly coincide with them.

“All the ugly little pieces weren’t in place yet, but I was beginning to see the picture.”

Batman – The Cult from Jim Starlin, Bernie Wrightson, Bill Wray, and John Costanza was meant to be a mature take on Batman as a character and dealing with some serious subject matter. It was about Batman being broken down, brainwashed, and repurposed by a charismatic cult leader, who had also taken in Gotham City’s undesirables and homeless, and turned them into an army to take over the city.

Deacon Blackfire ultimately isn’t that nuanced a character, but it’s fascinating to see those around him fall into his cult of personality. And the stories, whether true or not, of his attempts to sway people over various methods—politics, mafia, etc.—before finally settling on a kind of religion. Or at least mysticism. And then using that force of will to have otherwise innocent people kill, to push an even more extreme form of vigilantism, and how many of the ordinary citizens of Gotham just fall in line when it bubbles over.

The art from Bernie Wrightson and Bill Wray is incredible. At this stage in his career, Wrightson was already a master, so it’s amazing to just see him go. The level of detail is superlative. There’s a realism to his horror here that makes the story feel believable. And the synergy of the creators’ storytelling is wonderful. The types of panels shift when it goes into flashbacks, Bill Wray’s colours change too washing out at times, choosing specific limited colour schemes during sequences, to fit with the various movements. Little things that add a lot to the overall readability and flow of the story.

And some heavy lifting from John Costanza working in all of the narration that’s typical of a Starlin script. Fascinating here too as it comes from Batman’s perspective, giving more insight into the character, yet the narration boxes here haven’t adopted the journal-like script from the previous year’s Batman: Year One. I think it more establishes that this was still a then-contemporary Batman tale.

“The dark knight will yet rise from the ashes of defeat.”

Although it does get weird and trippy at times, and it sets a precedent for the federal government to abandon Gotham City that would be picked up again in No Man’s Land, Batman – The Cult by Starlin, Wrightson, Wray, and Costanza is a harrowing look at how cults can suck you in, break you, and control you through the perspective of the unlikeliest candidate in Batman. And what damage the overall force of that cult can enact on a given city, gone to extremes.