Posts Tagged batman
Batman Cares
When I was chatting with Dylan Horrocks about his newly reprinted Hicksville collection, I quizzed him about his time writing Batgirl for DC Comics. The following didn’t make it into my Bookslut piece, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
“When I was writing stories set in Gotham City, I was very conscious that the whole Batman ethos presents a vision of the modern urban environment that I don’t think is true. I don’t mean that people dress up in tights and capes – people do! It’s that it presents the city as a kind of urban jungle, full of predators preying on innocent citizens. They’re poisonous, they’re corrupt, and so on.
“And the only way to protect innocents in that kind of setting is to be more violent than those predators. You have to become a predator who preys on the predators. That’s what Batman is. He uses violence – really nasty violence – and his stock and trade is torture.
“I was writing Batgirl at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal. I felt like this vision of how the world works presented by these comics went perfectly with the one the Bush administration was pushing on us. We’re engaged in a war on terror and, in the comics, Bruce Wayne is engaged in a war on crime. So it’s not just that I rejected Batman’s tactics – I rejected that whole view of the world.”
He’s not wrong. I mean, I love Batman – if pushed, I’ll admit that Batman might be my favourite character in the entirety of fiction – but he’s not wrong. One of the things about these iconic characters, though, is that they’ve been around so long that there can never be one coherent ideology throughout their thousands and thousands of stories. It’s how the Huffington Post can run a piece suggesting Batman would be pro-immigration and anti-jail for drug offenders, while conservative newspapers happily claimed The Dark Knight as a blockbuster with a Bush-friendly subtext.
So allow me to offer up proof that Batman cares, and from an unlikely source: the infamously grim Batman: The Killing Joke one-shot from 1988.
I know, I know. It’s the Batman story where poor Barbara Gordon gets crippled, right? And maybe raped? All in the Joker’s bid to convince Commissioner Gordon that the only thing between sanity and madness is “one bad day”? That’s the one. Even its writer, Alan Moore, doesn’t like it. He says it’s “a terrible book. I mean, it doesn’t say anything. It’s talking about Batman and the Joker, and says that yes, psychologically Batman and the Joker are mirror images of each other. So?”
Ignore all that – even Moore – and remember how The Killing Joke begins with Batman visiting the Joker, imprisoned in Arkham Asylum. “Hello,” Batman says. “I came to talk.” And he continues:
“I’ve been thinking lately. About you and me. About what’s going to happen to us, in the end. We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps later. I just wanted to know that I’d made a genuine attempt to talk things over and avert that outcome. Just once.”
Sure, it turns out that Batman’s not talking to the Joker at all, but just a stooge in white facepaint who’s taken his place while the Joker organizes the lovingly-drawn horror that follows. That’s not the point. I can enjoy the gritted teeth of near-fascist Batman; I can enjoy the gaudy and ludicrous BIFF! KAPOW! 1960s TV Batman; but my favourite Batman is the one who’ll do anything to avoid more violence and death…
…even sitting down with his psychopathic arch-nemesis in a heartfelt – and inevitably pointless – attempt at conversation.
My favourite Batman is the one who hates goodbyes.
Batman Hates Goodbyes
There’s a gag that’s been running through Batman comics for as long as I can remember. Batman and Commissioner Gordon are engaged in a terse discussion over Gotham’s latest batch of murders. Batman then disappears mid-conversation, leaving poor Gordon talking to himself by the light of the Bat-Signal.
Every writer seems to have provided their own variation on this same vanishing act, but only one I know of explains why Batman does it.
Before I get to that, though, a little more on my last mention of the “tangle of personal tragedies and pointless minutia” of some comic book continuity. Company-wide reboots like Crisis On Infinite Earths are one way to fix these snags, but more common is to perform on-the-fly ‘battlefield surgery’ on continuity hiccups. Writers create new justifications for odd notions from previous issues as they go – or, at worst, they find new excuses to ignore the weirder or dumber elements of their characters.
Geoff Johns’ work on Green Lantern is dedicated to this conceptual surgery. He took the fact that Green Lantern’s ring originally didn’t work against the colour yellow – a random weakness introduced to give villains a shot at winning – and transmuted it into an all-encompassing, world-building logic for his corner of the DC Universe.
He’s created a sci-fi “emotional spectrum” of warring colours that explains early Green Lantern stories while also providing endless fodder for later ones. Admittedly, I’m still waiting for him to tackle the time Green Lantern fought The Shark despite his invisible yellow forcefield. (Yes. You heard me. Invisible and yellow.)
Sometimes a retroactive justification can be much smaller in scale. Greg Rucka wrote an idiosyncratic Batman story called “Falling Back” in Legends of the Dark Knight #125. It came towards the end of a sprawling crossover called “No Man’s Land” – a surprisingly good crossover, too. Even when it was leaking logic it was full of fascinating ideas and dark character turns.
Gordon is upset that a defeated Batman disappeared, abandoning Gotham. Now that Batman’s back, Gordon wants nothing to do with him. He’s furious that Batman left the city unprotected without even a word; furious that no one in law enforcement will take him seriously because he needs a masked vigilante to help him.
They finally meet, face to face. This issue is almost entirely dedicated to their conversation: no fight scenes, no flashbacks. Artist Rick Burchett lets whole pages sit, empty of dialogue, as these two men struggle to find the right words. Downstairs, a waiting Robin nervously says it feels like his parents are deciding if “the divorce is final”.
When Batman tells Gordon that they’re still partners, Gordon responds: “Partners are equal, Batman! When have you ever treated me like your equal? Partners, for example, tell you their plans! They keep you informed! And they sure as hell don’t walk out on you in the middle of a sentence!”
Batman slowly bows his head, and says: “I’ve never been good at saying goodbye.”
Batman’s disappearances aren’t just him being needlessly spooky; it’s that he’s still so consumed with guilt and grief over his parents’ murder that he’d rather vanish than risk another goodbye.
And, just like that, a tired gag is injected with retroactive heartbreak.
The Thirsty Mayor
Halfway through watching the ballet Scuola di ballo, I was interrupted by the Thirsty Mayor.
Scuola di ballo (The School of Ballet) is the second of the three pieces that comprise the latest production by The Australian Ballet: the ambiguously-but-sleekly named Concord. Choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, it’s the story of an egotistical buffoon in charge of a dance studio and the lengths he’ll go to in order to ditch his worst dancer, Felicita, onto an unsuspecting impresario. Eventually, though, the authorities dance in to put a stop to the schoolmaster’s schemes, and…
Hold on. The authorities dance in? Sure. I mean, it’s a ballet. That’s fine. Everyone dances.
But then… I mean…
If everyone dances, all the time, then why is there a need for a dance school? Is the dancing they do in the school somehow different than the dancing they do when they dance at home, or out of bed in the morning, or through the aisle of the local grocery store? Or is everyone forced to attend a dance school in order to learn some basic steps? If they don’t, they must be shunned the rest of society. Imagine if everyone was dancing around you at all times – friends, family, strangers – and you were just putting one foot in front of the next like a nobody. Imagine the name-calling. Imagine the self-loathing.
Furthermore: are they born with these steps already encoded deep inside their nervous systems? Perhaps they attend the school to learn a complicated selection of steps that they can use during various commonplace social events! A ‘happy’ dance, a ‘sad’ dance, a ‘my schoolmaster is trying to palm off his worst student and I wonder if he’ll succeed’ dance…
You accidentally ask one question; that question clatters into the next; before you know it, the entire premise of the fictional world has ceased to make sense.
Somehow, I’ve taken to naming these moments of complete logic meltdown after the Thirsty Mayor. It’s a reference to a quick joke from The Onion: “Thirsty Mayor Drinks Town’s Entire Water Supply“. This story was used as an example in a behind-the-scenes piece by beloved radio show This American Life on the hellish pressures of The Onion’s writer’s room. They describe how most writers thought the Thirsty mayor headline was ridiculous enough to be instantly funny – but one writer needed more. Some kind of reason. Why was the Mayor so thirsty? What does the joke actually mean?
(The answer that placated him was that the Mayor had “…deeply mismanaged city resources”.)
You can find the Thirsty Mayor everywhere. He’s particularly at home in superhero comics. The interconnected universes of Marvel and DC lead to exactly the kinds of logical fissures that the Mayor finds irresistible. Every kid has asked themselves why Batman doesn’t just call his indestructible pal Superman to solve 99% of Gotham crime without breaking a sweat, right?
These disjunctions are not only between different characters. They’re often contained within just one. For example, Batman (the all-to-human street-level vigilante who beats up punks on the streets of Gotham) must coexist somehow with Batman (the teleporting, dimension-hopping, alien-fighting member of the Justice League of America). Or take his relationship with fellow Justice Leaguer Zauriel. Zauriel was an angel. An actual, literal, from-heaven-above angel. Would you expect this undeniable proof of the existence of the Almighty would make Batman wonder about, say, his beloved dead parents and their eternal afterlife? You’d be wrong.
You can see the Mayor’s footprints all over commercials, too, especially those for food or alcohol. I remember one beer ad where animated bottles walked up to a bar, and the bartender (who was also a beer bottle) popped off all their bottle caps, and then, uh, I guess they happily drank themselves. Did they metaphorically drink the beer that was already inside their own glass bodies? Or slosh their internal fluids into each others’ mouths? And does that make the bartender-bottle some kind of sadist, or murderer, or…
The Mayor is very, very thirsty. Try not to think about it.