Noteworthy Issues: Task Force Z #10 (July, 2022)

Well, apparently, Bane in this series had a secret, namely that he wasn’t Bane.  That makes a certain amount of sense.

Issue:  Task Force Z #10, July 2022

Writer:  Matthew Rosenberg

Artists:  Eddy Barrows and Eber Ferreira

The Plot:  Yeah, turns out that wasn’t really Bane this whole time…

Commentary:  With this series (coming to a planned conclusion with issue #12) coming to an end, it is time to show a bit more about what happened, how Amanda Waller was and was not involved in this particular Task Force, and more importantly, who the undead Bane is.

It isn’t Bane.  It someone arguably much, much worse.

But that’s a last page reveal, and it does explain why Bane was doing something he shouldn’t have been able to do at the end of issue #9.  The situation is Bloom made a deal through both Amanda Waller and Powers Incorporated to produce these undead agents, but he also had some memory changes made to a rather large fellow to produce Bane.  The real Bane apparently appeared in a Joker series alive and well.  And again, this true identity was revealed on the last page, so I won’t be saying anything just yet here.  It was someone I recognized once he’d been named, and someone who will make Jason’s life much worse than Bane ever could have.  It’s someone who, thanks to Bloom, thought he was Bane.

And that makes sense from a company perspective.  While the idea of undead bad guys running around as rotting corpses that can be cured if they get enough of the Lazarus Resin is a good one, looking over most of the bad guys involved doesn’t show a lot of super-recognizable Batman foes.  Mr Bloom is new and not a zombie.  Sundowner?  Never seen her before.  KGBeast is outdated.  Man-Bat is more familiar but not on Bane’s level.  Copperhead?  I think of him as more of a Hawkman foe these days.  Solomon Grundy was already undead.  Arkham Knight?  Never heard of her before.  But then there’s Bane.  He’s one of Batman’s bigger bad guys these days, and not just in physical size.  The only other bad guy of Bane’s level of recognition to appear in this series as a zombie was Mr. Freeze, and he took enough of the resin to restore himself to life.

Basically, it means Bane isn’t expendable like the others.  If Arkham Knight doesn’t come back, and it looks like she won’t, will anyone really notice?  Probably not.  But Bane is a different story, and it does mean the other zombies might be a bit more expendable as a result.

Oh, as for the rest of the issue:  Bloom has a really creepy power over the other resin users, but he needs something from Jason’s team.  About the only one Jason can really count on seems to be Grundy since he’s not like the others.  But even I don’t know if Grundy can stand up to “Bane”.

Grade:  B+