Batman: Son of the Demon
Written by Mike W. Barr
Art by Jerry Bingham
The modern Batman required a new nemesis, and so, Ra's al Ghul, was born.
The original run of Batman villains were ersatz Dick Tracy baddies: hideously deformed gangsters whose outer deformity reflected their inner corruption like monsters from Greek myth. They were replaced, after Seduction of the Innocent insisted that Batman comics chill the fuck out, with strongly themed "gimmick" villains which was the impulse editorial was working under all the way up until the 1966 television show rendered that approach temporarily impossible.
As the Bronze Age began, Batman would tangle with monsters and sadists and robbers but it was clear that a new rotation of the recurring super criminals had to be created. Man-Bat and The Spook were clearly designed to capitalize on the 1970's comic horror craze, but it was writer Denny O'Neil and editor Julie Schwartz's love of 1930's pulp adventure that gave birth to the most endearing innovation in Batman comics of the decade. It was the Master, Neal Adams', pencil that gave weight and form to those ideas.
Ra's al Ghul was here.
Ra's did not threaten or snarl, as Two-Face did. He didn't boast or taunt as The Riddler had. He was courtly in his manner to The Batman to whom he applied the designation: The Detective. This choice, almost on its own, tells you everything you need to know about Ra's, who does not see The Batman as his greatest foe but as an archetype he has done battle with throughout history. The Batman is merely the latest in a long line of detectives who have challenged Ra's and implicitly failed, given that he's still here and they're not.
This expansion of scale on temporal grounds is married to a raising of the physical stakes: the Joker may want to poison the Gotham Reservoir, but Ra's wants the whole world. He necessitates a globe-trotting Batman with resources everywhere, and who has mastered so many fighting disciplines and investigative techniques that he is almost superhuman. The very existence of Ra's elevates Batman who, by contending with him, must be more than a simple vigilante. He must be something close to the peak human being.
This plays into the third and final great innovation: Ra's does not seek to destroy Batman, but to co-opt him into his organization. The death of Batman would be a cold comfort to Ra's who would lose the not only his greatest opponent but the only man whom he sees as an equal and the only hope his family has to continue. Ra's from his first appearance is dying-- extended by the Lazarus Pits beyond any measure of sanity he needs Batman to take over his crusade for him. And as temptation, his daughter is the one woman that Batman cannot resist. Batman is not tempted by power or control, but love-- love will make the great detective pause against the one foe most capable of exploiting that pause to bring about catastrophe.
Batman: Son of the Demon is a 1987 graphic novel by Mike W. Barr and painter Jerry Bingham that represents the only attempt before Grant Morrison's seminal run to move the stalemate between Batman and Ra's forward and explore new dynamics in their relationship. It made DC deeply uncomfortable from the moment of its publication and lost its "canonical" status, but what it has self-evidently had since first publication is a weight, power, and craft that marks it as one of the greatest Batman stories of all time.
When one of his allies from the original Ra's saga is found dead, Batman begins hunting down "The Demon's Head" until he realizes Ra's is contending with a man even worse than himself: a former protege obsessed with death called Qayin (pronounced "Cain"). Qayin's plot involving weapons of mass destruction in a Middle Eastern nation is so potentially catastrophic that Batman and Ra's forswear their enmity and become allies-- with Batman finally taking both the top lieutenant position in Ra's organization and Talia's hand in marriage.
And so the book uses the seductive power and charisma of Ra's as a villain and greatly increases now that he's sympathetic while expertly balancing this with the knowledge that any alliance between a Batman who will not kill and a man who runs the League of Assassins is doomed to failure no matter how much mutual respect is at play. Even as Talia tells Batman that she is with child we can see the inevitable tragedy barreling towards us, as inevitable as a trainwreck.
Other than the immortal Batman Year One I don't know that there's any Batman project you can definitively say has better art than Son of the Demon. Jerry Bingham's beautiful watercolors are so far beyond what a 1987 floppy comic was capable of delivering that they signal, along with the plot, that this is a Batman story take to a new level with new dimension.
This is globe-trotting Batman at his best and its only an accident of fate that this story arrived after Crisis and did not get to stand shoulder to shoulder with the other Bronze Age epics that informed its creation.