Summary: <br> Zatara comes back into Bruce’s life while the cult that birthed Azrael has an idea for sentient religious robots. What could go wrong?<br> Affiliate link included.<br> Transcript below: <br> Batman has a magical meeting with an old flame and he and his team have to face off against a fanatical robot and Spoiler tries to save the city from vigilante superheroes by being a vigilante superhero. We’ll talk about it all in a review of Batman: Detective Comics: Deus Ex Machina, straight ahead.<br> Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.<br> This is the fourth volume of the Detective Comics series in D.C. Rebirth and it collects issues 957 to 962. While Tom King’s Batman has been solely a Batman-focused book, Detective Comics has tried to be a team book. Batman forms a team because he senses something really dangerous is coming to Gotham City and he needs to be ready. And he chooses for his team a variety of characters and most of these had either had their own series or been quite popular with fans. The original team was Batwoman, Red Robin, Tim Drake, Spoiler, Stephanie Brown, the heroine Orphan Cassandra Cain, and the oddest choice for the team, the super villain Clayface who’s reformed now. In the first volume it looked like Tim Drake was killed, but it was revealed at the end of the issue that he’s actually being held somewhere, and then in the second volume Spoiler departed. In the third volume both of them were replaced on the team by Azrael and Batwing.<br><br> Batwing is Lucas Fox, the son of Lucius Fox, a long-time employee of Bruce Wayne. He’s a wealthy inventor and scientist in his own right with his own company and a kind of Tony Stark-esk ego, but not necessarily the charm.<br><br> Azrael is Jean Paul Valley and that character has a very interesting backstory. He was introduced in the 1990’s; he was a college student unaware that he was the latest in a line of assassin enforcers for the cult The Order of St. Dumas. However, he runs into Batman and he ends up giving up the path of the assassin and becoming a protege of Batman – which became important during the Nightfall event where Batman’s back was broken by Bain. And it was stated in the comics that Bruce would never walk again, and Jean Paul Valley actually took over as Batman. However, he became increasingly unstable and out of control, to the point that Valley and Bruce have to fight, with Bruce ultimately finding a way to triumph.<br> After Bruce Wayne took over as Batman, he would kind of kick around and appear here and there through the D.C. Universe, seeming to die in the late 1990s story ‘No Man’s Land’, but it all becomes kind of unclear. The D.C. Universe rebooted with the New Fifty-Two and he made an appearance in Batman and Robin Eternal, and then was introduced into Detective Comics. In this current timeline he’s alive and he’s been freed from the order St. Dumas, and prior to joining up with the Bat Team he was out helping up people in a shelter. And I liked in the last volume, it revealed even though he’s left this cult he still holds on to faith – which I think is kind of cool because a lot of comics would be tempted to turn him into an atheist or make some kind of straw man argument. And they didn’t go there – I give James Tynion credit for that. Deus Ex Machina in its A-plot is really an Azrael story. The Order of St. Dumas is trying to reassert itself over his armor and take control of his armor and him, and at the same time they’re also sending in robot versions of Azrael, trying to replace him with a robot who – unlike a human – will not be programmed to doubt and to alter or back away from the mission. <br> This story was kind of hard to get into. I don’t think the order of a St.
