Sequart.com Columns > The DC Canon, Part 1: Batman (Sequential Culture #14)

SEQUENTIAL CULTURE #14

19 Sept 03

The DC Canon, Part 1: Batman

Sequart.com Columns

JULIAN DARIUS

THE DC CANON

You are reading Part 1: Batman.

Read Part 2: Superman.

Read Part 3: Kingdom Come.

Read Part 4: The Justice League.

Read Part 5: Superman: Red Son.

Read Part 6: Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.

Read Part 7: Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

Read Part 8: Vertigo, Part 1.

Read Part 9: Vertigo, Part 2.

Read Part 10: Vertigo, Part 3.

DC Comics’ super-heroes star in a plethora of ongoing series, mini-series, specials, original graphic novels of various sizes, and collections every month. Characters like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are more iconic than any other super-heroes around. Yet for all of their sales, some have not explored the best that these icons have to offer.

This, then, acts as a guide for those new to DC’s characters, for those who may be missing a classic of one of them, and for those who simply wish to argue what merits such concern. Lists of such a nature are always a matter of some debate and always involve some subjectivity. They are, nonetheless, not without their purposes of stirring thought, guiding future reading, and solidifying the canon. Take this one as you will.

Batman

The DC character who has produced the most works that rise to the level of classics is, without a doubt, Batman.

The DC character who has produced the most works that rise to the level of classics is, without a doubt, Batman. Batman is the ultimate non-powered vigilante, but his lack of powers seems to have been an asset more than a liability. His stories have featured dark conspiracies and villains defined not by their power but their insanity. He is equally suited to detective stories (as should be obvious by his first appearance in Detective Comics #27) and to crime stories. The stories that follow demonstrate the range of genre, or subgenre, of which this most versatile character is capable.

The best Batman story is commonly -- and probably rightly -- thought to be Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Written and penciled by Frank Miller, inked by Klaus Janson, this classic was originally published in 1986 as a four-issue prestige format mini-series -- a rarity at the time. It takes place ten years after Batman’s retirement as an aged Bruce Wayne puts on the cowl once again in response to his lack of purpose and a Gotham City dominated by punk gangs and casual street violence. Batman returns with a vengeance, returning to his violent ways. Considered an urban legend by most of the young, and with Gordon retiring, the bureaucratic city deals with him as the illegal vigilante that he is. Catwoman is an old woman and no longer a villain. Robins Dick Grayson and Jason Todd are gone, the first in a dispute with Wayne, the second dead. Two-Face returns, and his battle with Batman ends atop a massive tower in a beautiful sequence full of reflections. The Joker, freed by pop psychiatrists who think his problem is not being loved, kills TV talk show host David Endochrine (based on David Letterman, then hosting NBC’s later-night follow-up to The Tonight Show) and his entire audience before confronting Batman in his favorite setting -- an amusement park. The cross-dressing element of the Joker is heightened in this depiction. In a move that would forever change their relationship in the comics, Batman contemplates killing the Joker and rightly feels responsible for the uncountable people the Joker, allowed to live, has killed over the years. A new, female Robin is introduced, as well as a Batmobile that is actually a massive tank. In the finale, Batman (with assistance from a one-armed Green Arrow) confronts Superman, who is a stooge for the U.S. government headed by Ronald Reagan (President at the time of publication). Batman’s heart gives out and he dies, his identity revealed to the world -- but returns to life, as part of the chemical trick planned to fake his death, and in turn creates a new life underground and coming to terms with himself. Oh, yes: the final issue also sees the destruction of the Batcave, the death of Alfred, and a nuclear exchange complete with a society-disrupting electromagnetic pulse.

Fifteen years later, Frank Miller wrote and drew an even longer sequel entitled Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again in a more celebratory if not orgiastic vein -- a work memorable for its somewhat different depiction of Batman but also for its depiction of so many DC super-heroes.

A masterful work, Batman: Year One possesses a level of realism greater than perhaps any Batman tale and, with a breakneck pace, does the hard work of describing the humble beginnings of Batman’s career, performing in the process a remarkable process of infusing Bruce Wayne, James Gordon, and Selina Kyle with true character, personality, and history.

The second-best Batman tale is probably Batman: Year One. Written by Frank Miller and hauntingly illustrated by David Mazzucchelli, Year One was serialized in Batman #404-407. It tells of the first calendar year in which Batman emerged in Gotham City, beginning with Bruce Wayne returning to Gotham after studying martial arts abroad. Wayne becomes a vigilante, at first without the Batman outfit, at first fumbling a bit. The sequence in which he conceives of the outfit takes the old cliché from Batman history of a bat crashing through the window and transforms it into a moving moment; Year One gives similar treatment to flashbacks showing the murder of Wayne’s parents. In a city dominated by gangsters before the ascent of insane costumed criminals, Batman encounters Catwoman, here depicted as a whore who takes to the street with frustrations about gender, her sadomasochistic elements heightened. James Gordon becomes a fully-realized character for the first time, adjusting from his move from Chicago to Gotham, where the police force is dominated by corruption. He investigates Batman, suspects Wayne, has an affair, and ultimately has his child kidnapped and rescued by the vigilante he sought to bring down. In a tough city, he goes from crusader against Batman to the first stages of his relationship with Batman. A masterful work, Batman: Year One possesses a level of realism greater than perhaps any Batman tale and, with a breakneck pace, does the hard work of describing the humble beginnings of Batman’s career, performing in the process a remarkable process of infusing Bruce Wayne, James Gordon, and Selina Kyle with true character, personality, and history.

The story was followed by two sequels, the Catwoman mini-series that took place concurrently and slightly following Year One, and Year Two, which itself received two sequels, Year Three and the one-shot Batman: Fear the Reaper (featuring the return of the foe from Year Two). Batman’s early years would become the subject of the ongoing series Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight as well as several mini-series. None had any involvement by either Frank Miller or David Mazzucchelli.

The iconic characters step outside of their roles as adversaries, recognizing that they are locked in a decaying pattern.

Tacking in at #3 is Batman: The Killing Joke, written in the mid-1980s by the deservedly famous Alan Moore and illustrated over two years by the master draftsman Brian Bolland. A single 48-page prestige format special, this graphic novella tells in flashbacks the Joker’s origin while the Joker, in the present, tries to prove a point: that he is not special, that a single bad day -- like the one he experienced in which his wife died, in which he fell into a vat of chemicals, and in which he went insane, becoming the Joker -- is all that separates anyone from madness. His target: Commissioner Gordon. The Joker begins by shooting Batgirl -- the original one -- and paralyzing her -- in the regular continuity. (She would go on to become Oracle and later watch another Batgirl emerge.) Kidnapping Gordon while his daughter lies on his floor, the Joker strips him, has him bound and hauled like a naked animal through an amusement park, and put on a ride that displays pictures of his shot daughter. Batman saves the day and Gordon doesn’t go mad, but the story ends on a considerably more unsettling note: waiting for the cops to arrive, Batman takes the opportunity to cut the shit and talk with the Joker. He tells the Joker that their feud will end in death and that it doesn’t have to be that way, that he will help the Joker find sanity, should the Joker wish. It is a scene in which the iconic characters step outside of their roles as adversaries, recognizing that they are locked in a decaying pattern. As if thinking about the offer but realizing that they are in fact locked in that pattern, the Joker responds to Batman’s offer with a joke -- a joke about two lunatics escaping from an insane asylum. Batman, breaking his cool demeanor to laugh with someone who is strangely both friend and foe, laughs -- and pats the Joker on the shoulder. The two are mutually-dependent opposites, as the theory of deconstructionist Jacques Derrida might put it, unable to change. The brilliance of the book is enhanced by its status as art object, with the inside front and back covers being a close-up on rain falling on water, the same image that opens and closes the narrative proper.

Truly an epic, no chapter more powerful than the ending, The Long Halloween shows nothing less than personal tragedies (none more subtle than that of Dent’s wife) and the transition from one era into another.

Ranked at #4 is Batman: The Long Halloween, a 13-issue mini-series written by Jeph Loeb and illustrated by Tim Sale -- the team responsible for much above-above-average or slightly-less-than-classic works for both Marvel and DC. The Long Halloween is by far the best of their famous collaborations, however. It begins on Halloween during Batman: Year One, even featuring the same otherwise disposable gangsters. Gotham at the time is a city of corrupt cops and powerful gangsters. By the end of the series, on Halloween a year later, Gotham has become a city of zany and crazy villians along the lines of Dick Tracy. The narrative is strung together by a series of murders attributed to Holiday, with each chapter occurring on a holiday and featuring another murder or attempted murder. Along the way, Batman encounters a series of villains and District Attorney Harvey Dent becomes the villain Two-Face. The tension with Catwoman from Batman: Year One is here too, but the story is simultaneously a gangster tale heavily influenced by The Godfather. The final issue seems to reveal the identity of Holiday, only to quickly undermine that by revealing that multiple people committed the crimes, copying each other -- including, we find out in a moving and mind-boggling scene, Harvey Dent’s loving and sympathetic wife. The beginning and the ending are tied by the phrase “I believe in,” which succinctly expresses characters and their motivations, turned in the final chapter towards devastating implications. Beginning and ending are also tied by a secret meeting atop Gotham’s police headquarters -- at the first a sacred pledge to clean up the gangster-run town, at the last a recognition that this quest has been won at the cost of Harvey Dent, poignantly absent, and not without new threats in the form of costumed villains. The paradigm has changed for Gotham. Truly an epic, no chapter more powerful than the ending, The Long Halloween shows nothing less than personal tragedies (none more subtle than that of Dent’s wife) and the transition from one era into another.

The Long Halloween was preceded by three worthy but less poignant prestige format Halloween specials (for the series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns) by the same team. The Long Halloween was in turn followed by Batman: Dark Victory, by the same team in the same format, which attempted to resolve the ambiguity around the Holiday murders but which was less artistically successful.

The Joker contends that Batman is just like the violent lunatics he captures. Ultimately, the Joker’s contention is proved correct.

Coming in at #5 is Batman: Arkham Asylum, informally subtitled A Serious House on Serious Earth. Written by manic Grant Morrison and painted by the brilliant Dave McKean, this original graphic novel sold a quarter of a million copies just in hardcover upon its release in time for the 1989 Tim Burton movie Batman. The story focuses on the lunatics taking over the asylum, running amok and transforming it into a distorted, crazy landscape -- enhanced by McKean’s stylized art. Into this asylum enters Batman, invited inside by the formerly incarcerated Joker -- here with his cross-dressing elements and the homoerotic elements of his relationship with Batman played up. The Joker contends that Batman belongs there, that he is just like the violent lunatics he captures. But the Joker is not the only villain successfully re-envisioned by this classic graphic novel. Two-Face, for example, has been rehabilitated through weaning him off his dichotomous coin and onto a tarot deck, paralyzing him with the options of a morally and logically ambiguous world. Ultimately, the Joker’s contention is proved correct, as the pages after the narrative illustrate in half-pages the psychological state of each of the villains, dramatically concluding with Batman, crazy enough to think -- in his mad desire to compensate for childhood trauma -- that he will “become a bat.” While not to everyone’s taste, Arkham Asylum is an intellectual tour de force.

An astounding number of Batman tales are also of note.

An astounding number of Batman tales are also of note. Batman’s earliest years are as primitive as most comics from the era, but some rise to a higher standard, most prominently the Bob Kane two-parter featuring vampires and collected in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told. While the 1950s and the 1960s were dominated by forgettable (if occasionally charming) camp, the 1970s saw a revival of Batman spurring off Neal Adams’s work in the 1960s. Classic Batman stories from this era are collected in Batman: Tales of the Demon, containing classic stories of Ra’s al Ghul, and Batman: Strange Apparitions, featuring the celebrated and memorable work of Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers that saw another girlfriend for Batman and the ghost of Hugo Strange.

The 1980s saw, in addition to many of the works above, Batman: The Cult, written by Jim Starlin with art by the classic horror illustrator Bernie Wrightson. This four-issue prestige format mini-series was considerably dark and reads like a classic, though it doesn’t stay in the memory in the same way. Several Elseworlds are worthy of note, including the vampire trilogy of original graphic novels (Batman / Dracula: Red Rain, Batman: Bloodstorm, and Batman: Crimson Mist), written by Doug Moench with pencils by Kelly Jones. The Elsewords prestige format one-shot Batman / Houdini is beautifully illustrated, as was the recent original graphic novel Batman: Nine Lives (illustrated by Michael Lark). 1999 saw the year-long No Man’s Land storyline run through the various Bat-titles, a storyline of inconsistent quality but never better than in the four-part storyline that comprised its first month, written by screenwriter Bob Gale and illustrated by the masterful Alex Maleev. The issue focusing on the Ventriloquist weaves a masterful tale about language and linguistic theory around a villain ranked a second-stringer -- at best. 2002-2003 saw the 12-part Batman: Hush, serialized in Batman #608-619. Written by Jeph Loeb (of The Long Halloween) and illustrated by Jim Lee, the storyline catapulted Batman to the top of the sale charts for the first time in a decade.

Ultimately, such a list of additional, near-classic Batman works is difficult to compile, as there are simply so many such works that would be rightly thought classics of the character if that character’s history were more impoverished. At some point, even storylines memorable most for changing the character -- such as the death of Robin Jason Todd or the Knightfall storyline of the early 1990s -- are worth noting as important and fun, if not really classics. Ultimately, the list of real Batman classics as given above remains fixed for the literati, any such list of Batman’s near-classic works risks spiraling off into absurd length.

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Julian Darius can be reached at julian@sequart.com.

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