Rikdad's Comic Thoughts

Action Comics #1

2011-09-08T07:12:00.000-07:00

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Yes, it's all there, and not by coincidence. The second Action Comics #1 visually-checks numerous elements of Superman lore without always name-checking them. And so, we get references to the Thirties in the form of the wife-beater who is thrown through a wall, the poor tenants who have their homes destroyed, and even (Neo) Nazis. We get a nod to the 1978 movie when Superman is asked if he can do something and he says he's never tried. From later eras, we see a photo of the deceased Kents, Jimmy Olsen holding a device that emits a zee zee zee, and of course, Lois Lane putting herself at risk and needing to be saved. Grant Morrison is aware of the elements he wanted to include, but unlike the Superman he portrays, he doesn't want to beat anyone over the head with them.

And conscious as he is of the little touches, he begins on page 1 by showing Superman overshoot his intended target. The seemingly countless elements of Superman lore that Morrison includes make it important to note which ones he avoids. This is not the Superman who is so used to holding back that he has forgotten what it is like to go all out. This Superman is going all out, frequently, and he's a bit of a bull in a china shop.

The china happens to be the powerful and the corrupt, who include Glen Glenmorgan, the Army of Sam Lane, and a Lex Luthor who is not a fugitive, but far from law-abiding, and whose use of electricity to stun, but not stop, Superman, channels the Ultra-Humanite from Action #13. Glenmorgan merges together in one person several powerful men whom Superman harassed in 1938's Action, including a magnate who is promoting arms in order to sell armaments and a mine owner who subjected his workers to unsafe conditions. He may also be based on Morgan Edge, as the owner of Galaxy, and the Earthly liaision of Intergang, and therefore of Darkseid. This, then plays on the Darkseid plot in JLA #1, and suggests that the matchup we saw in Final Crisis that nearly ended the last DC Universe is at the forefront as we begin this one.

Morrison excels in teasing future plots, and while the main action in Action #1 concerns Sam Lane and Luthor teaming to trap Superman (as in the recently out-of-continuity Superman Secret Origin) while the threat of Intergang looms, there is more. An object entering the solar system from afar is sure to be the focus of another plot. The diction resembles that used of the kryptonite asteroid from Jeph Loeb's Superman/Batman, but this could be just about any interplanetary friend or (more likely) foe. Clark Kent's landlady has a name that suggests the Fifth Dimension. The three friends -- two men and a beautiful blonde -- visiting Clark are almost certainly the Legion of Super Heroes. And as Clark now works for an editor named Taylor, he is probably at the Daily Star, which may go out of business if it is, as stars normally are, part of Galaxy. That would mean that by taking down Glenmorgan, Superman is taking down Clark Kent's boss. And the little man turning the tables is what Action #1 was all about. Both Action #1s.

Who Took The Super Out Of Superman?

2011-07-28T00:03:00.000-07:00

Who Took the Super?

For much of his 73 years, Superman has been the leading character of the superhero genre. The first of the successful prototypical comic book superheroes, Superman has also been – at times – the best-selling, most popular, most powerful, and in a couple of different ways, the defining symbol of righteousness. At others times, however, he has been less than that, and by and large several of these quantities have trended downwards over the last half of the character's history. The purpose here is to ask, as the title of a 1976 story put it, "Who Took The Super out of Superman?"

To the greatest extent reasonable, I have collected data to back up these points. I read one page of Superman from each year and counted the number of panels and statements that, in my view, portrayed certain traits. Ideally, one would examine every panel of every issue and have multiple readers "coding" their impressions, but I believe that the sample I performed is still enough to show some obvious facts on the scale of decades. I also used sales data to the extent that I could find it. I think there are some interesting and underappreciated truths in this data, and enough information to deflate a few myths.

History of Superman

Over seven decades, the tone and structure of Superman stories have varied considerably; to some extent, he is a barometer indicating what sort of stories one may find in each era in American culture as a whole. Summarizing Superman's history in any detailed manner would be a massive undertaking. My goal here is simply to sketch out some defining trends in the kinds of stories that have been told. Some of these trends are specific to Superman. Others reflect trends in the comic book medium or American entertainment as a whole. Some changes have led generally in one direction, whereas others have cycled like fashion.

Power

Superman's physical powers have generally increased over the years. This is probably best seen as a gradual many-step retcon; there was not an overarching account that Superman's powers were increasing over time. Certainly the physically weakest version of Superman came right at the beginning. A process of powering him up lasted about thirty years. Since then, his power levels were twice (1972, 1986) reduced for creative reasons, but there have been power-ups along the way. The cumulative trend from his creation to now is definitely upward, but the increases generally came in the first half of his history, with power levels being cyclical since then.

Tone

The tone of Superman stories has teetered between dark, noir themes and tales of childlike simplicity. This ran roughly parallel to similar changes in Hollywood. Current readers who think of the Fifties as "old" may not appreciate that cinema had a darker era before the mid-Thirties, much as Superman and Batman inhabited tougher worlds in their initial run which quickly mellowed as the Forties began. Both Hollywood and the comics had official "codes" to preside over family-friendly standards. Then, in the Sixties, as major cinema began to allow darker themes, the comics also ratcheted up their seriousness. Superman's facial expressions alone are unmistakable gauges of this. His foes of the Fifties seemed merely to confound and irritate him. As often as not, his menaces were nothing more than attempts by Lois Lane to discover his secret identity, or to marry him. In the Sixties as in the Thirties and early Forties, he once again grimly faced killers.

Friends

In his earliest stories, Superman had no confidante in the world, and other than his dead adopted parents, apparently never had. And yet, he never expressed any regret or remorse. From the Fifties through the Eighties, he had a large cast of friends at the Daily Planet, but he never trusted anyone with his secret identity unless that person was also a costumed crime fighter. Certain other superheroes, particularly Batman and Supergirl, became true confidantes of his. His romantic relationships became increasingly weird, as his cycles of denying and desiring Lois Lane actually hinged on the "rule" that the publishers could not change the mythos by marrying the pair, but within the comics, Superman always offered the reasoning that it would endanger her if they married – illogical given the public nature of their romance such as it was. With the Byrne reboot, Superman became significantly less odd. His closest superhero friendships were deleted but more than replaced with the return of his adoptive parents, the Kents. A "super family" of super powered friends arose, and Superman finally married Lois Lane, giving him a complete confidante.

Superman, Kal-El, and Clark

There has been a complex juggling of three or more personas within the character of Superman. Where there is one physical body, he has been, or subsumed, all of the following:

a) A human and specifically American who happens to be of alien origin.

b) A tough man with powers who pretends to be a frail weakling.

c) A tough man who is reasonably tough even as Clark Kent.

d) A Kryptonian who remembers his early childhood there and reveres the memories and traditions of his lost planet.

During the late Bronze Age, that last personality became, like his romantic relationship, increasingly strange, with Superman's life full of solitary rituals devoted to the memory of Krypton, rituals he rarely shared with his cousin. An undue number of thought balloons contained Superman thinking about his favorite topic – Superman, not infrequently thinking of himself in the third person as something that may have been himself or may have been his sense of his own public image. As Alan Moore had the man himself say in Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?, Bronze Age Superman was "too wrapped up in himself," which helped motivate the humanizing reboot that followed.

For the first thirty or so years after the Silver Age effectively merged Superman's world with that of other heroes, they called him "Superman." This has since changed, in many stories to "Kal" or "Clark" when no outsiders are around. The use of "Kal" seems to have peaked in the Eighties; Lois calls him Clark, but not infrequently, the ironically belittling "Smallville."

Rivals (in the Superman titles)

Superman's universe has became increasingly more populated with characters whose powers (or gadgets) rivaled his own. Initially, Superman was the only unreal element in his fictional world. That lasted for just one year, after which mad scientists and their creations began to challenge him. By and large, such additions to his fictional world "stick" and are less often subtracted, so his fictional world has continually become a more challenging environment as time has gone by.

In his own titles, Superman had the first of many encounters with characters who physically rival him, when he struggled to defeat the giants created by a mad scientist in Superman #8. At first, the idea of a foil that could match Superman was fresh and used rarely. In Action #47, Luthor used electricity to give himself strength almost equal to Superman's. In Superman #30, Mxyzptlk had powers that matched, but did not clearly exceed, Superman's. In the early Fifties, two stories introduced characters with Kryptonian-level powers. Within little more than a decade, they added Superman's pets, cousin, a clone of sorts, and we learned that two entire Kryptonian cities plus that society's equivalent of prison had survived the planet's destruction. Superman had a virtually intact Kryptonian society he belonged in. Meanwhile, in another line of stories, Superman had another set of peers with the Legion of Superheroes.

Ironically, the stronger Superman became, the more often he ran into rivals and foes that were stronger than him. What was once meant to be a fresh and original twist – a foe stronger than Superman! – soon became a cliché. Initially, every Superman and Action cover showed Superman doing something dominant and amazing. Over the next several years this pattern was interrupted by covers showing Mxyzptlk, the Prankster, or Toyman making a dupe of Superman. Much later, in 1952, a cover promised "The shock of the year" – showing a character punching Superman backwards through a wall. That was perhaps a shock in 1952 (one which ended up not being real; Superman had staged a phony defeat), but by the late Sixties, nearly a quarter of all covers showed someone physically overpowering Superman, and many of the rest showed him in some other way humiliated or bested by the like of Atlas, Samson, Hercules, and Zha-Vam, a Captain Marvel surrogate. The original premise of Superman as an unbeatable winner had given way to the point of monotony as a super powered punching bag that was nearly always faced with some form of domination. Of course, this is how the cover pitched the comic, while the story inside would end with his eventual victory. But in the process, Superman went from a character that was dominant 100% of the time, to one who often spent almost every page of a story losing and only winning in the last page or two. When 1978 rolled around, Superman was punched, zapped, or blasted off his feet in no fewer than 11 of the year's dozen Superman issues.

And while the Byrne reboot cleared the slate of all of those rivals it quickly replaced them, and established that in the new Superman continuity, many characters and even rather conventional machines, were not only a match for Superman but also in many cases far stronger. He soon faced Apokoliptan villains and four Kryptonians of the Pocket Universe whose power far exceeded his. Doomsday was introduced as a brutish foe that could physically beat Superman to death. When Infinite Crisis reintroduced Superboy Prime, he was shown to be clearly stronger than our Superman, as though the "power down" that Superman underwent in the Eighties did not affect him.

Rivals (DC Universe)

While the pages of All Star Comics had several times in the Forties featured Superman in several cameos and just one actual illustrated adventure, the reality of those stories seemed absent from the heroes' solo features. Superman's universe effectively merged with that of Batman in 1952. The single biggest change came in the early Sixties when the Silver Age merged the fictional worlds of all of DC's major superheroes. But the advent of the Justice League, like the Justice Society before it, was not immediately mentioned in the characters' solo titles. Crossovers began in 1962 to establish the unified nature of the heroes' universes even in their own titles. This happened for Superman at a slow pace: A party for Superman in early 1964 had no Justice Leaguers besides Batman present. The other Justice Leaguers were first mentioned in a Superman title in July of that year. And the third and fourth appearances of characters from another "sandbox", besides Batman and Robin, on a cover of Superman came only in 1973, with the offbeat choices of Star Sapphire and Batgirl.

The Seventies, though, solidly asserted the relevance of the Justice League in Superman's world, and in so doing, gave major creative decisions a back door into Superman's titles that they had not previously had. Initially, Superman's physical supremacy over his allies was frequently implied and then vigorously asserted by Justice League #63, which opened the "versus" topic by stating that Superman could physically whip the entire Justice League (including Flash, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman; Martian Manhunter was not present) at once. It went on to state neither Wonder Woman's lasso nor Green Lantern's ring alone could restrain Superman, but that in combination, they could. Soon, however, Green Lantern rings were getting the best of Superman, with guest Tomar-Re zapping Superman in JLA #80. Through the late Sixties and early Seventies, many new and existing DCU/JLA foes are shown outpunching Superman, and this now meant that Superman's rank among the strongest beings in his own universe was continuously lowered. Currently, DC comics have indicated that Superman is roughly on par (perhaps a bit stronger, perhaps a bit weaker) than a vast number of other leading characters. Whereas Superman began as easily the strongest being in his own universe, he is now matched or bested or tied by whole races, and may not be even the millionth-strongest being in his own universe.

Weaknesses

One of the hallmarks of Superman is that he has certain stock weaknesses. This superhero trait began with the original Green Lantern's weakness to "non-metals", which he encountered unfortunately frequently. Over the years, Superman has acquired specific weaknesses to the effects of kryptonite (1943 on the radio; 1949 in comics), red sun (Action #262, 1960), and magic (Action #86, 1945). These weaknesses, like powerful rivals, play a precise role in the narrative, giving Superman an obstacle to overcome, which inherently introduces variety into the range of storylines. When this was not enough, red kryptonite was introduced, allowing an implausibly vast range of quirky plots. The importance of varying story templates is the focus of the next section.

Story Structure

The classic story formula – not just for Superman, but also for Western literature as a whole – is Situation, Complication, and Resolution. In Superman stories, this is most often realized as follows: The peace of Metropolis (or the Earth as a whole) is attacked by an enemy. Superman comes forth to end their evil ways. A common alternative is that the enemy is aware of Superman and begins by attacking him directly.

Superman stories tend to run several pages (once as few as twelve; now, over a hundred, in the form of multi-issue story arcs, is not uncommon). Superman essentially always wins, and he is defined, traditionally, as being capable of beating almost any enemy. Accordingly, some counter-complication has to happen to prevent Superman from winning on the first page.

Over the years, this has tended to consist of largely repetitive formulas which paradoxically have evolved over the years. A formula is used for years on end, then is discarded, and a new formula is used.

For the first year or two, Superman faced almost no setbacks of any kind. The stories, which were usually quite short, consisted of him asserting his will onto a situation. Sometimes, he set out to change a social situation, and (as in the first two stories in Superman #1) his extra-legal solution consisted of forcing someone to undergo an experience that would make the person become more moral.

That template of story was mixed in with, and gradually replaced by, low-level mysteries. Superman would fight his way through some henchmen in one or two encounters before finally cornering his enemy. The key condition that enabled this was that Superman, though virtually invincible, was not omniscient. It was never asserted, as it later would be, that he could use his various sensory powers plus speed (plus little concern about invading the privacy of many innocents in order to catch the guilty) to scan large areas to find anyone he was looking for.

In the Fifties, there was a rise in stories where Superman was troubled by some sort of personal difficulty, often involving his secret identity or Lois's quest to marry him. From the Sixties to the present, the most common complication is that a foe has a way of besting Superman, despite his great powers. Many of the ways that this can happen have already been listed, but there are others: Superman is vulnerable to mind-reading, hypnosis, teleportation, threats to his friends and innocent bystanders, and countless science fiction constructs that infect, overpower, shrink, enlarge, zap, trap, or otherwise transform him. By and large, the default Superman plot has transformed into one that begins by emphasizing the limits of his power, and then the interest in the story shifts to how he overcomes that limit. Sometimes, this takes the format of a "Flash facts" story – Superman exploits one science law to beat his foe, and the issue thus becomes a mini-science text. Sometimes, Superman comes up with a clever tactic, or gets help from an ally. Sometimes, he seems simply to try harder in his third encounter with the villain than he did in the first two, summoning up just barely enough will power to win.

All told, the various degradations in Superman's relative powers and the increasingly challenging situations that he has faced can be seen as a way of renewing the creativity of the serial, allowing stories other than the repetitive stories of his initial year. However, these plot devices have themselves often become repetitive. A year's worth of stories in which Superman always solves a problem on the second-to-last page is no more or less formulaic than a year's worth of stories in which he always wins on every page.

Character-Driven Stories

Superman began as a supremely self-confident individual, bold, egotistical, and prone to boast, even gloat. He, like DC's next three heroes, was also a vigilante, working as a fugitive and at times almost as an anarchist. He resembled Frank Miller's Batman more than he resembled most later versions of Superman. When the comic genre as a whole lightened in tone, Superman naturally lightened with it, but his good nature remained even when the world around him became more complex in the Sixties and onward. Superman became the "Big Blue Boy Scout", at home in one-page promotional spots where he lectured kids on good values. His level of confidence and ego has generally wavered between the Sixties and the present. While, in the Fifties, Superman had not much personality at all, he now has essentially no personality at all. While he of course remains a heroic figure, the details of his values vary sharply from writer to writer.

As the tone of Superman stories changed over the years, embedding a long "nice" period between his rougher first year and the darker Sixties, Superman's personality developed accordingly. In the Fifties, all DC superheroes had much the same personality: They were happy and optimistic when things went well, temporarily glum but still optimistic when things weren't going well; they were upset by setbacks, but never angry.

As the publisher aimed for older readers, and mindful of the competition from Marvel Comics, DC had their superheroes begin to grow up in the Sixties and Seventies. In this new era, one could say that the Flash, Superman, Batman, and Green Arrow definitely had different personalities from one another. One can say that the industry grew up, replacing one-dimensional characters with more realistic, more "literary" characters, the basis of richer stories, more deserving of mature readers' attention.

To an extent this is true, but the character development has gone only so far, and is probably no more than one finds in "young adult" literature, aimed at teens. While stories are sometimes quite complex, they tend to be complex in a science fiction way, not like classics of literature. And, fair enough – they are churned out and mass-produced. In most media, serials and classics are distinct. Moreover, the "hero" genre excludes some of the range of personality from the creative palette: if a set of characters have to be heroic, then there is quite a bit that they cannot be.

Superman's characterization in particular left him penned into some strange pigeonholes. His Bronze Age love life was a soap opera with Lois and Lana at the corners of a love triangle. After the Byrne reboot, Superman planted an unreciprocated kiss on Wonder Woman then creepily told her he'd had erotic dreams about her. It was as though the mightiest hero in the world had the emotional and romantic stature of a fifteen-year-old boy.

The most problematic nature of Superman's characterization is how it has ended up so malleable as to have no solid core. Superman is the property of no single writing team, and in any given decade dozens of writers get their shot at him.

While certain values – of course, his goodness, heroism, and resolve – are relatively fixed, Superman has not become a well-developed character because different writers manipulate his finer points to make their stories work, leaving Superman with no real core.

For example, 2002's eight-issue crossover story Ending Battle climaxed with Superman refusing to kill Manchester Black even when he believed that Black had brutally murdered Lois Lane. Less than two years later, that value was affirmed when Superman said of the prospect of willingly killing a foe, "Never for me. Superman doesn't kill. He has too much control. He'd never make that kind of mistake."

But a year later, the Sacrifice crossover contradicted this by showing a Superman who was willing to kill Brainiac and other powerful foes when confronted with the same illusion that Manchester Black had shown him. The second story, a lead-in to Infinite Crisis, changed this value of Superman's for the sake of making the plot go where it needed to go. Even in this regard, the handiwork was careless: In order to make Superman a dangerous menace in the hands of Max Lord, it was only necessary to make him perform ruthless aggression while believing that he was responding appropriately. Sacrifice could have achieved the same thing by having Superman fight (nonlethally) opponents like Darkseid and Doomsday. In fact, he could unwillingly dole out lethal force while thinking that he was dismantling a bridge, or moving a pile of gravel. The writers and editors of 2005's story could have kept Superman consistent with his 2002 characterization simply by telling the story in that way. What were sacrificed was not the life of a fictional character or the reputation of Wonder Woman, but the creative values of consistent characterization.

The irony is that second-tier characters like Green Arrow and Damian Wayne have been characterized considerably better while Superman's characterization has, in the words of Gertrude Stein, "no there there."

Who Took The Dollars Out of Superman?

A simple display, and at first glance a shocking one. Here are the monthly sales of the Superman title from 1946 until the present. There are some factors that make this display somewhat misleading, but before we discuss these, take in the gestalt of this graph. It is a bleak state of affairs. Issue-for-issue sales have dropped as much as 98% over the past 65 years. This is a complete collapse.

Now, before looking for decades' worth of scapegoats, we should note the factors that led to the greatest part of that decline. First and foremost, the comic medium has faced increasing competition from other forms of entertainment. In 1946, printed reading material faced no competition from television or video games. As time passed, more entertainment options (besides playing outside) have emerged, and the decline seen overall in Superman sales can be seen in virtually any single entertainment channel when viewed over a run of decades.

In addition, the number of Superman titles per year has fluctuated. The frequency of publication for Action and Superman has varied, the number of other solo titles and titles containing Superman features has varied, and his team-up titles have also varied.

That said, the tale is still profoundly negative when we allow for the uncontrollable factors. If we compare Superman sales to a baseline comprised of four other DC titles (JLA, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and Flash), we see a pronounced drop in stature as the years have gone by. In the Sixties, Superman's two titles, in terms of monthly per-titles sales, had 267% the sales of that baseline group. In the period from 2000-2008, Superman's fell to 102% of that baseline. Things have gotten far worse in the past three years, with Superman often absent from his own titles. From 2009 to 2011 Superman is down to 66% of the baseline.

Lest one believes that this collapse was somehow inevitable, or attributes this relative decline to the resurgence of JLA and Green Lantern, we can use Batman as a comparison. While Batman sales, relative to those four baseline titles, plunged from the Sixties to 1980 (in large part due to the loss of the bump that Batman comics experiences when the television show aired from 1966-1968), they subsequently rose, and have remained well above the baseline.

In a nutshell, one or many adverse factors have impacted Superman's popularity between 1980 and the mid-Nineties; in the same time frame, Batman's popularity surged, and then leveled off.

Given all of the ways in which Superman has trended over the years, largely by creative choice downward, which ones track the relative decline in sales?

Sheer physical power? No. Though I do not have data to track this, by all accounts Superman's sales did well for a decade after the Byrne reboot depowered him. Moreover, Superman's powers have been boosted over most of the last fifteen years, but his sales have dropped while his raw physical power has increased. Likewise, the de-emphasis of "Kal-El" and even the Superman persona relative to that of Clark Kent does not track the sales data. The most emphatic statement that the character really is Clark, not a Kryptonian superhero, came in Man of Steel #6 in 1986. The major sales collapse has come more recently.

Is it the tone of the stories? Superman's relationships? No – the darkest eras of Superman stories have sold just fine, and so have the lightest in tone. Bringing the Kents back to life did not hurt Superman sales. It is possible that his marriage to Lois Lane has been a contributing factor in decreasing interest, but that event happened in one issue, long ago, and Superman's sales have fluctuated both up and down since that time; if it has hurt interest by making Superman less macho, there's no real way to test that, and clearly the biggest fall in Superman sales happened well after the marriage.

Is it the increasing extent to which Superman has lost his initial encounters with enemies who match his power? Possibly. While Superman had glorious sales when this rarity became a cliché in the Sixties, it is interesting to track how consistently there has been an increase in the incidence of Superman being weaker when he first encounters an opponent. Taking as a sample the first page where Superman goes into action for one issue of Superman for each year, I coded his physical and personality traits as displayed in that page, counting the number of panels showing him at a physical advantage, or disadvantage, the number of panels in which he expresses confidence versus doubt or confusion, and so on. Then Superman's physical and personality toughness can be calculated by the number of "tough" traits shown versus the overall number of tough and weak traits. The following graph (click to enlarge) shows how those have tracked over the eras of Superman's history.

Some items of note: Superman was physically most dominant in the Fifties, with his battle outcomes declining sharply as his foes grew stronger in the following decades. Both his physical and personality dominance escalated in the Byrne era, despite his literal power-down: The self-doubt of the late Bronze Age was removed and replaced with a touch of farm boy disorientation but a larger helping of determination and confidence. And while Superman's personality was at a low in the late Nineties, his confidence rebounded in the 2000s.

However, one quantity that has steadily declined is the number of fights that begin with Superman taking a beating, with his victories just as inevitable by story's end, but those victories come later. In part, this is a reflection of stories that span multiple issues. In the 2000s as in the Fifties, Superman must struggle in the "Complication" phase of the story, but now that lasts much longer, potentially more than one issue. Page per page, Superman spends more time losing than he used to.

In my view, the greatest source of Superman's decline, though there are many to point to, has come from his relative decline in the DC Universe as a whole. His absolute power-down in the Eighties still left him more physically powerful than during the early years of the era of his uncontested dominance from 1938-1963. But as the post-Crisis era has gone on, Superman has encountered more and more situations where he is physically outclassed by recurring characters.

Consider Superman's first appearance in each JSA/JLA team series. In his only JSA adventure, he won an easy victory. In his first JLA action in 1960, he arrived at the end to mop up. In his first JLA action in 1997, he was immediately taken prisoner, and remained a captive while Batman began defeating the enemy.

Consider Superman's appearance in a 1977 issue of Flash. The speedster, running from a powerful energy fist, ran to Metropolis and led the fist into the back of Clark Kent's head, where it splattered apart. Superman's appearance in Flash Rebirth showed Barry Allen insulting Superman as he left the Man of Steel in his dust.

Consider Superman's easy dominance over his JLA teammates in 1963, and consider Captain Marvel decking him with a sucker punch in 1997.

Consider Superman's 1977 appearance in Batman, where his powers allowed him to laugh his way through a faked physical defeat while wearing the Batman costume with Superman's appearance in later Batman stories such as Hush and Frank Miller's Dark Knight stories where Batman manages to use his tools to beat up Superman.

Consider Superman mopping up a whole crew of White Martians in 1977's JLA #144 and his helpless captivity by White Martians in 2001's JLA #57 as well as the observation by J'onn J'onzz in 2006 that Superman is perhaps not even a rival to the Martian Manhunter.

Consider Elseworlds where Superman is tortured and killed by Gog, or left by Lois Lane for being pathetic and self-pitying when he loses his powers.

Heat flows from a warm body to a cold body. And DC writers, when they have another character's success to call their own, routinely use Superman as a punching bag to demonstrate that the other character is worthy of esteem. In many cases, as with Martian Manhunter, whatever is lost in Superman's stature is certainly not being made up for with the minor character's sales.

The single most important creative decision by DC is the one responsible for Superman's sales drop since 1980 and Batman's surge during that same time. In very simple terms, DC decided to make Batman stronger, and lo, Batman rose in stature. They decided to make Superman weaker, and lo, he sank in stature. While many separate stories oversaw this change over a span of years, the signature moment in that reversal of fortune came with Batman's eloquent dismantling of his erstwhile ally in The Dark Knight Returns. That moment alone, however, was not the unraveling of Superman's whole franchise, which still had a vibrant decade to come. But it was an inspiration to other writers who sought to steal heat from a warm body. Superman lost fights in the Sixties, to his own villains, but he always managed to prevail in the rematch. As he lost to other heroes, or saw his stature in the DCU otherwise diminished, that has been for keeps.

There was a time when Superman's name appeared on the company logo: "DC", "National", and "Superman" shared the billing. There was no question that he was the company's flagship character, distinctly above Batman, and incomparably above any other series. Since then, particularly in the past 15 years, Superman has been used like a bank, with creators making withdrawals from Superman and investing them in other characters. Sometimes, as with Batman, the loans pay back. Sometimes, as with the Martian Manhunter, the loans disappear. These unrepaid loans have spent Superman down out of flagship status, still strong in merchandising, but in comic sales, distinctly trailing Batman and Justice League, of late trailing Green Lantern, perhaps on trend to sink below the Flash. And that is how it stands coming into September 2011, with a new Superman #1 and a new Action #1 going on sale. It is up to the creators to decide whether there will be a #1 inside those issues or only on the covers.

Avengers Trailer

2011-07-22T01:36:00.000-07:00

This week, a copy of the trailer for the upcoming Avengers movie was leaked to the web. Besides general issues of quality, the trailer is hard to follow for content as it has a frantic series of cuts between action clips. As I did with the Dark Knight Rises trailer earlier this week, I have tried to make things easier (if less fun) to watch. I have re-cropped, brightened, edited, and finally slowed down the clip. This is not as thrilling as the original trailer, but it lets fans get a better peak at what they'll finally see on the big screen.

I am not particularly knowledgable regarding the comic or film franchises, but I trust that others can fill in the blanks. There is nothing here that couldn't be seen by pausing the cruder copies, but I think it's a little easier to see in this form.

Dark Knight Rises Trailer

2011-07-19T01:45:00.000-07:00

A year from now, director/producer Christopher Nolan's third Batman film will bring the highly-successful series to a conclusion. It is clear from his comments that "conclusion" is a more appropriate word than "end." For creative reasons -- certainly not lack of audience response -- the third film marks Nolan's intended conclusion, with the legend being given an appropriate ending. As Nolan has earlier said:

"Without getting into specifics, the key thing that makes the third film a great possibility for us is that we want to finish our story. And in viewing it as the finishing of a story rather than infinitely blowing up the balloon and expanding the story... I'm very excited about the end of the film, the conclusion, and what we've done with the characters. My brother has come up with some pretty exciting stuff. Unlike the comics, these things don't go on forever in film and viewing it as a story with an end is useful. Viewing it as an ending, that sets you very much on the right track about the appropriate conclusion and the essence of what tale we're telling. And it hearkens back to that priority of trying to find the reality in these fantastic stories."

The same information is indicated by three taglines spread throughout the recently released trailer:

EVERY HERO HAS A JOURNEY
EVERY JOURNEY HAS AN END
THE EPIC CONCLUSION TO THE DARK KNIGHT LEGEND

The scenes in the trailer speak in particular to that last word... the trailer begins with the voice of Liam Neeson (portraying R'as al-Ghul) delivering the same soliloquy heard in the trailer for first Nolan Batman film, Batman Begins. In those lines, he tells a younger Bruce Wayne (at the time, al-Ghul's protege) that he can make himself into something more than a man -- a legend.

The whole business of epics, legends, journeys, and ends points to something bigger and more traditional than what "epic" has come to mean lately. Nolan is declaring here that he intends to make his series of three films a finite account of Batman's career with a beginning, middle, and end. This stands in contrast to earlier media. Batman has usually been presented as a serial, with the next comic book, news strip, or television episode guaranteed to begin more or less where the last one ended, leaving the status quo fundamentally unchanged when each episode ends.

The business, however, of ending the Batman story is not a new proposition. Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which obviously lent its name nearly verbatim to this new film, rocked the comic book world for, among other reasons, depicting a late-career Batman who returns from retirement to a more decisive conclusion. While this was not completely original, it was much more vivid and mature than earlier stories. The momentous nature of what Miller had done was received with admiration by star comic book writer Alan Moore, who in proposing a never-published story of his own, commented:

"one of the things that prevents superhero stories from ever attaining the status of true modern myths or legends is that they are open ended. An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time... in order to meet the commercial demands of a continuing series, they can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of true myth... providing a fitting and affective capstone to the Batman legend... makes it just that... a legend rather than an endlessly meandering continuity."

So that is what Nolan is doing. How will he go about it? It is not clear how much time or how many events elapse between the end of the last film, the monumentally successful The Dark Knight, and the action in this film (or, for that matter, this trailer). We see Commissioner Gordon badly ailing, probably from injuries suffered in the line of duty, speaking, it seems to a Bruce Wayne whose true identity Gordon knows. Perhaps Gordon's injuries are owing to the absence of Batman in the fields of urban combat. Perhaps he was injured specifically to bait Batman and draw him out.

That last interpretation works with the comic book backstory of the villain shown in this clip, the villain Bane who literally and figuratively "broke" Batman in the 1993-1994 story called Knightfall. Bane first exhausted Batman by forcing him to fight many smaller battles first, then took the weary caped crusader down in single combat. The trailer illustrates a fight between Batman and Bane when the exhaustion has already taken place. Note the body language of Batman in this clip, slowed down four times from the original:

In the first frame, Batman's body is angled oddly to our left. Then he teeters his way back to the vertical, bouncing as though he is trying to summon what is left of his last reserves of energy. His mouth is open, indicating that he is breathing hard. He is perhaps on a nonstable surface -- despite the low ceiling and confining spaces, the ropes to the sides also sway as the two men move. A chant in Bane's native Spanish seems to beg Bane to kill Batman:"Matalo, matalo, Bane, Bane." It should also be noted that a third figure appears in the distance, and it seems as though he is filming the fight, no doubt for Bane to use the film to disgrace his physically beaten foe, adding literally insult to injury. We can be sure that Batman will fall, and then rise.

It is unclear if the conversation we see between Gordon and Wayne takes place before or after Bane has taken Batman down -- probably after. The "pep talk" quality of the speech is unmistakably like that between R'as and Wayne in the first movie and trailer and between Alfred and Wayne in the Dark Knight trailer.

Gordon: We were in this together and then you were gone. And now this evil rising. The Batman must come back.
Wayne: But if he doesn't exist anymore...
Gordon: He must, he must.

All of these pep talks go to the first movie's theme, perhaps far too simple, that Batman's story is at its core the lesson, "Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up." It also suggests countless other stories before The Dark Knight Returns in which a warrior who has left the battle rejoins it to avenge a fallen friend. In a story no less epic than the Iliad, Achilles returns to the battles to avenge the death of Patroclus, and Achilles sets off at once to kill the very same foe who killed his friend. In the end, all three are dead.

If Nolan really has the power to kill the franchise, he might have the power to kill Batman in the final minutes of the film, giving the hero the sort of Robin Hood ending that Moore described earlier, and that Neil Gaiman scripted in a recent comic book story which related the story of Batman's death. Then again, unlike Patroclus, Gordon seems to survive his victimization. If Patroclus lives in this retelling of Western Civilization's first great epic, then perhaps Achilles does too.

Boy Wonder (5 of 5): The Second Workout

2011-05-31T16:31:00.000-07:00

Special workout. Birthday workout. If this is my birthday. Or if yesterday was. The days run together. Light running, light lifting, too many sit-ups, not too many push-ups. And the surprise.

The grass is dewy. The sky is pale. The stars are gone, but I can still see Venus. It's important that to know that it's Venus, because one day on a rooftop, maybe, I'll see it and know which way's southeast, and maybe I'll know that there's a fire escape on the south side of the building, and in the middle of a tough fight, maybe, I'll jump south, and that knowledge will have saved my life. Take all those maybes, multiply them, and you get something almost zero. And then you add up all of the similarly unlikely situations, and you get something much bigger than zero. Add up all the improbabilities and you get Batman.

Bruce and Dick again, workout suits, stupidly expensive, except they make sure that we don't blister or chafe, and yes, it's all part of his master perfect vision. Bruce takes two cards out of a deck and hands me the deck. He holds up the cards. Ace of diamonds and ace of spades. I have no idea what this is about. Then he takes off running towards the wooden table in the grass, jumps over it, twists in two axes, and lands running backwards. The cards are standing on the table, leaning against one another. I didn't even see him do it. He jogs back with a toothless grin. "Take two cards," he tells me, then takes the deck from me.

"This is my surprise?"

He nods.

Insanely stressful.

I make the goofiest magician face I can and hold up the two cards, then run at the table. I know how to get my steps, so the launch foot is just the right distance from the table, and that gives me all of a quarter second to figure out how to do the totally impossible thing with the cards. I get the jump right, don't even touch the table, then my body creates a veritable hurricane that leaves all four cards lying flat. One of them slides off the table altogether. I see this as I run backwards. I got the jump and the landing perfect. So my grade is an… F. Bruce is loving this.

"Failure is my passion," I tell him. He hands me the deck. Without cards, he runs at the table, and jumps over. The aces are standing again, leaning against one another.

"You're very cool," I tell him. I take two more cards, make the goofy face, show him the cards, and run at the table again. As I fly over the tabletop, I screw up one card, but for a moment the one is on edge alone. Then it falls. But the aces stay up. Bruce takes two new cards, shows them, runs, and leaves this pair standing. I take two, goofy face, run, and knock one of his pairs over. Mine fall. This goes on for a long time, no talking, not even me. Maybe the end of the deck is a deadline. I'll never know, because after eighteen tries, I get a pair to stay up. Sunlight has lit the tree tops, and when I get back to Bruce, he gives me a clasping high five and musses my hair. A dazzling orange light makes its first appearance at the horizon.

"When are you ever going to have to do that?"

"Whenever it is, you'll be there with me."

"What's the highest point in Sweden?"

"Kebnekaise."

"Who was born on July 20?"

"Gregor Mendel. Edmund Hillary."

I shake my head, disgusted.

"I'm thinking of a number between one and ten."

"Two," he says. I turn around and throw my hands up. Because it's funny to do that. But it was two.

"Dick?"

I turn back.

"The cards?"

I knew that was coming. I name them in the order that they were drawn.

"You want to see a movie?"

This is as relaxing as training gets, to start The Godfather at 5:30 am, when we haven't slept all night. Bruce talks the whole time, pausing it to critique everything. Not the dialogue or the cinematography, but the tactics, the strategy, how everyone could do everything better. And he's the maestro. He compares the movie to the book, to other movies, to hostage crises and commando attacks. To lots of situations that he's been in. We're watching a movie, but it's still the mission, it's still instruction. And I love it. And he loves it.

If a fight walked into the room, he'd jump on it like a lion. His limbs look so powerful, resting but ready. His arms are propped behind him on the sofa, his legs crossed on the ottoman. I make my posture more like his. I'm not embarrassed to copy him. He's always right. He sits like Batman, eats like Batman, breathes like Batman, blinks like Batman. I'll copy it all.

I'm starting to nod off, delirious. I catch myself wondering if he'll notice. I must be sleepy to think for a second that he wouldn't. But it's OK. I don't say 'no' to anything that he suggests, and he doesn't judge my shortcomings. I have to nod and drift for a little bit.

In the resulting half-dream, a third person is there with us. I look over at the sofa, and there in his circus costume, it's my dad. John Grayson, smiling at me. I want him to see me like this. Not a skinny kid, not his little boy. But his, always. He carried me to bed once when I was up too late and fell asleep watching TV. I look at the TV. and know that I have made a tragic mistake in looking away, that that was the last time I will ever see him. I should have sat by him, hugged him, but now it's too late. I know that when I look back he won't be there anymore. I look back and he's not – Bruce is right where I saw Dad. If Dad can hear this, I have to say it out loud.

"He's got me."

Bruce looks at me and smiles. Does he know I said that to Dad? How could he possibly know? – the world's greatest detective.

Without knowing when, I wake up, and Bruce is at it again, or still, Mount Rushmore with muscles, old man eyes, half-smile, talking ceaselessly, what every gunman and victim and gangster did wrong. Bruce talking, talking, wise and powerful, an Greek god in his living room. Facts, wisdom, the secrets of life and death. All of this stuff will stick in my memory. After a century, the movie ends. Thirty hours awake. I'm free to go. Bruce, maybe he'll watch another movie, study new research in epidemiology, push avalanches back uphill.

I stand. I owe something.

"Bruce, the girl?" He looks.

I shake my head. "There was no way." I point at him.

He nods. Very slightly. Batman and Robin.

I'm back at the mirror where I met Robin last night, looking to see if my eyes are tired, like his, but they're not. At the door, Alfred's tap. The final act.

"Master Dick. According to the clock, your birthday has passed, but if we could pretend that it were still yesterday, I can still think myself a gentleman." He holds out the present.

"It's still yesterday. Or tomorrow. I think it's tomorrow." Dense, rectangular, Bruce would want me to know what it was before I opened it. But this is Alfie. It's a framed photo. Impossible to guess what it shows. Nobody could know what's in the photo. Maybe Bruce. Probably. The paper comes off. Heavy glass. I flip it over.

It's a boy, mop of brown hair, holding up a gold watch for the camera. Smiling like the morning sun. Joyous, proud, ecstatic. Nine years old? The watch must be a gift, probably birthday, Alfred being thematic. The boy loves whoever was holding the camera. That's all I've got. Who is this kid?

"That's a cheery boy."

"That was my life. The life of the Manor. Some sixteen years and a month."

Bruce. Little Bruce. Happy little Bruce.

"Now we talk about the past?"

"It pains me. He is teaching you how to read clues; it is written all over him for you to read." I'm blank. "How did he go through these trials that you are going through?" I nod. "Poorly. Tragically."

"I'm ahead of where he was at my age?" Alfie manners. "No way."

He stares, quiet, thinking.

"Death struck twice. A double funeral. The boy heals. A boy should. You did. He did not." Alfie's talking. Let it come. "You want to know how he learned his skills. How fast, how well, how young. How you compare. Master Richard, watching him mature was agony."

"Why?" He's suddenly near tears. He points to the photo.

"Because I love that boy! He was my charge, my light. And I lost him for Batman. That terrible phone call, the news about Thomas and Martha. And he never came home. The weekend wailing and pounding his fists," shaking his head, "it turned into something still more devoid of hope." But.

"He used it. He became Batman."

"He built a black coffin and crawled inside. And he named it Batman. And another façade 'Bruce Wayne', the gay to the grim. But never again my…" He wants to say "boy" but he can't. "Rope" yesterday. "All those years of training. Do you think I ever delighted in how well Batman fingerprints or performs jiu jitsu? I wanted him to come back. And every day that he did not has been my death."

Nothing to say.

"He was all dead eyes. A decade. More. When he actually started going out as Batman, it was the end of my hope. The training, at least it was wholesome. But going out every night, to them, the worst, making himself strong, that nothing might ever really touch him. I'd bring his meals and change his sheets, but his soul was out there. Lost in that sewer. I prayed for him. I wanted my smiling boy back. And then you came."

"I'm a smiling boy."

"Master Richard, I had a brief fantasy once, no more than a minute, that I might join him out there, sit in the car perhaps, be a spark of – perhaps not salvation but light." Head shake. "His mission is in places I cannot go. Vaulting over walls, scaling fences, jumping. I cannot leap from rooftop to rooftop." Very long pause. "But you can."

"I can leap. I can't, apparently, be help beat up one of six bad guys, but I can leap."

"Master Richard, did you see any indication that he has want of more weaponry, that he can't parcel out enough violence?"

"He's like a nuke."

"He needs Robin. During all those grim years of anguish, of course I wanted to dispense my wisdom and tell him that he had chosen poorly. But for so many reasons it is not my place to tell a boy who saw both parents die how he should react. I cannot tell him that. You showed him. You're stronger. And he follows. He knew that when he chose your colors. Your arrival in our lives gave him a new outlook on self-preservation. That's when he conjured up the mantra of five nines. He is on your back."

I point to the photo. "He looked just like that tonight, for a second. After he decked Two Face."

"And where was he looking?"

I don't want to take credit for it, to be that for him. For him.

"Well, slow and clumsy and useless out there, I'm glad I did something."

"You brought back the dead."

I look at my feet and Alfred's gone. He's gone so I can let it go, cry for the third time today. But I'm too tired. I speak to the air again. "See you tomorrow, Bruce."

And I lie down to rest on Napoleon's bed.

Boy Wonder (4 of 5): The Second Girl

2011-05-08T15:35:00.001-07:00

I don't feel like the safest person in the world anymore. Not to point fingers, but the masked man doing 175 mph in a 35 zone is the main reason. I don't know why we're going five times the posted speed, but I suspect that it's pretty important. I don't ask because I neither have nor want his undivided attention. Let's keep Batman's eyes on the road.

When you slow from 175 down to 65, it's brutal. It feels like hitting a brick wall. Bruce has shown me film of astronaut training, a guy's cheeks pulled way back by g-forces in a centrifuge. That's the sort of thing that's happening here when we take a turn. I'm trying to do math in my head, kinetic energy varying with v-squared, just because it's more calming than what's going on with the jerking and the turning and the squealing. Even Batman's head is leaning way forward when we slow down. There are eight monitors on the dashboard, and he uses one hand to change views while steering with the other one. And it's terrifying that he does that. Has he suddenly gone rogue? Is his driving going to kill both of us in the next few seconds? I think about training, how he does everything perfectly. Whatever this is, he has to be able to do it without killing us. He always knows what he's doing. When we're done rocketing around the turn, we accelerate again, from 65 up to, yes, 175, and when nothing else can reassure me, I try squaring 175 in my head to find our kinetic energy, and then Batman interrupts me mid-math by grunting out a two-word explanation, "Girl killer."

When the acceleration is done, it's a more comfortable ride. We're on the expressway, doing 185. We're obviously going after the killer. Is Batman risking his own life and mine to get the guy? A calculated risk, ends justify the means? Five nines out the window? I'm in Batman's video game now. Where is this going?

We switch lanes to go around a car, and my head snaps to the right, then back to the left. We speed up some more; I see the number 195. Then Batman has time to think, so he talks, two words at a time, this chase straining even his mental abilities. The girl killer has a girl, who's probably in his car. The parents reported a license plate number, and Batman's camera network is tracking the plate as it moves through his private checkpoints. Batman sees on those monitors where the car is and where it's going, but if it leaves the grid onto a side street, we will lose it. And then the guy will have hours before we find him again. The sicko's M.O. has him raping and killing the girl during those hours. So I shut my eyes and think, "Go, Batman. Do this."

Unfortunately, we leave the expressway, another brick wall of deceleration, 195 down to 75. I hate the "squared" in the kinetic energy equation. Why does it have to be there? We squiggle side to side with incredible ferocity, then I'm slammed against my door and we accelerate again. I realize that the girl killer doesn't know that we're coming for him. He's driving past cameras that are giving us his position, but he has no idea that the cameras are there, or that Batman's watching him, and bearing down on him. We are going to catch him fast. Very fast. Less than two minutes. I don't know about Batman, or the girl killer, but for me it feels like two days. Probably longer for the girl, who thinks she is going to die, and is right to think that.

The morning Bruce told me about the second victim's grave, what the grave told him about what happened. The week before, he told me about the first victim's grave, and it was bad enough. But the second one was worse, which means this psycho is getting worse, and it's maybe better that the world had never existed than for this guy to get to do to the girl what he wants to do. He's evil in human form. A reptile. Just awful. And if he gets off the camera grid, he gets to do it. So go, Batman, go.

I grab the armrests and ask myself if I can keep from throwing up. I can't feel if my stomach is still down there. The buildings lining the street are a blur as we throttle down mercifully empty city streets. The pulse in my neck is getting in about two beats per block. I figure out what all of the monitors on the dash are for. Using his network of cameras, he sees the view down each side street, scrolling three intersections ahead so that he knows that the side streets ahead have no cars in our path. If he were to see an imminent collision, he'd have a few seconds to slam on the brakes. Which I hope does not happen. Or speed up, which I really, really hope does not happen. He also has to worry about the reactions of terrified drivers going with or against us, and I can't even guess what we'd do if someone freaked out and did the wrong thing.

When did Batman first think that this was a thing he might have to do? How did he practice? If this is what a Batman has to be able to do, then I'll never be Batman, at least not a Batman as good as this. I imagine future defeats, where Dick Batman will let some girl die because I'm not as good as Bruce Batman. Love the hard part. Is knowing that someone will die because of me the hard part I have to love?

Math is more comforting, until I discover the terrifying fact that we are going through red lights at over one quarter the speed of sound. I look at how Batman is processing those eight monitors and the view out the windshield, and it occurs to me that this is the hardest thing I've seen him do. This isn't a horror show. It's a miracle, a man driving at airplane speed to change the rule that says the killer with the girl in his car is going to get away. But this girl has Bruce Batman coming for her. He says, in a clipped tone, "Call the police." I grab the red phone, the direct line, and forget about the blur and vibrations. A man's voice answers, and I say, "This is Batman and Robin." I hear the brakes squeal as I wonder if that means that we've closed on our destination. Somehow Batman reads my mind and nods. I continue, "We are pursuing a criminal near the twenty-eight hundred block of Drake Expressway. Please send a patrol car for pickup." Did I say that right? I see a car ahead in our lane. The car we're chasing. The voice on the phone says, "Yes, sir," and hangs up. Batman flicks off the headlights and the brakes bite into our crazy airplane speed, smoking tires burning up the asphalt. Batman's like Neil Armstrong now, taking us to the lunar landing. This rocketship will soon be a car, a parked one, as the girl killer drives without knowing what's about to happen, and in that respect, I'm right with him. What will Batman do – flash gumball lights and ask the sociopath to pull over? Whatever Batman's plan is, I'll see it as it happens.

Suddenly, it occurs to me that we've already won. Catching the car before it went off-grid was the hard part (love the hard part). What could go wrong now – that Batman would lose the fight? It's over. The girl will live. But before it's actually over, the ride has to end, and we're still doing seventy, overtaking the psychopath, who only now senses that something's wrong, besides his twisted brain, as we pass him on the left. Then the braking gets very hard, and Batman steers into the other car's path, jamming my door (which is a sturdy door, I'm sure) against the left bumper of our prey, forcing it into a wild, sparks-flying contact with the guard rail on its other side. Whatever the girl killer is doing, the Batmobile's brakes are shutting down his intentions, and then with a lurch, we come to a total stop. My door and the guard rail have pinned the car in place as the girl killer opens his door, steps up and runs over his door and our hood, dreaming that he's going to get away on foot.

My perception is broken. I haven't even noticed Batman moving until I see him through the windshield, coming at the girl killer, who stops running (which is futile) and turns to face Batman (which is more futile). Batman could put this guy in the hospital by throwing an orange at him. The purple streetlamp lighting makes both of them look crazy, out of nightmares. But the girl killer didn't expect this, didn't prepare for it, while Batman, who did the nerve-jarring driving that left me shaken, is out there calm as always. And I know from past lectures what he's going to do and why. He's not furiously angry, at least, he's not going to wreck the guy's body out of anger. He'll wreck the guy's body because it will be a lesson to everyone who meets him in prison. It will intimidate them. The girl killer is about to become Batman's advertising, and it begins with this moment of intimidation, the inevitability that the girl killer can sense. The psychopath is short, dark-haired, hunched and baring his teeth. He's an evil, wicked animal, no challenge whatsoever for Batman, who is light on his feet, moving like a boxer, a matador, signaling "Come here" with eight fingertips, then moving in, bringing the five-mile chase down to one arm length, and then it slams into the girl killer like a runaway truck. Batman's right hook lifts the girl killer into the air. It doesn't look like the sort of blow that a human could deliver or the sort of blow that a human could survive. Batman gets in two more limb-breaking shots while the girl killer is airborne, and there's a sense of justice, a memory of the two dead girls, that makes my lips tremble and smile, and I feel compelled to say when the girl killer's short flight has ended on the pavement, "Get up." I'm almost crying, so glad that Batman can't see or hear me. "Get up and fight Batman." I wish he would, but he can't. He won't be standing up now or anytime soon.

For a few seconds I stare at the crumpled heap that has just had justice knocked into it. I wonder about the girl, and look to my right. She's in his arms, Batman's arms. He has her, in the same arms that held me this morning. It's going to be all right for her. She knows that now. He has her, like he has me, and the whole city, and I make a silent declaration that anyone who criticizes this man has to be told. Anyone who calls him a vigilante has to know what he just did, has to know that when a girl is in the girl killer's car, there isn't a single idea in the world that makes more sense than Batman. The world and all its rules had her tortured, dead, and buried, but now she's alive and all right, and if this were the only thing Batman ever accomplished, then his every action was worth it.

He's saying something to her, softly, the right thing, like he told me, "You can't bring back the dead." Whatever he's saying has to be right. I open the back passenger door for her, and he leads her inside. I shut the door and follow Batman's bull-horns gesture to the other seat, beside her. Batman's standing in the red and blue flashes of police cars, talking to the paramedics and the ambulance driver, and handing a digital camera full of evidence to the cops. The girl is much calmer than she should be. Whatever Batman said to her must have been perfect. And instead of being alone in the back seat of a scary superhero's car, she's sitting next to me, a minor hero, her age, which is hopefully comforting. She looks very tired, with smiling eyes half closed.

"Who are you?"

"Robin."

"Hi, Robin. I'm Emily."

"You're all right, Emily." She nuzzles into her seat.

The car's moving again. Batman's taking her home. Nobody says anything until we're in the East End, and I'm opening her car door. "Good bye, Robin." Her parents are on the lawn, running to her, deliriously happy. Her mother thanks Batman. I take my usual seat. Before the car starts moving, I say the things I wanted to say before the girl got into the car.

"Bruce."

He looks at me.

"There was no way. There was no way she was getting out of that."

He looks through the windshield.

"She's OK. She's with her parents."

"Two aren't." Pure oxygen. Burning him up.

When we're moving, he picks up the phone and becomes someone else.

"Hi, Marty. Marty? It's Bruce Wayne. I know. I know! I just got a call, Marty, and it woke me up. Police. Of course. Hey, I wasn't alone, you know. Listen up, Marty. The police have a guy, the guy's who's been killing girls. Yeah. Name's Raul Castor. I want Danzig to help the D.A. nail this case shut. Starting at eight a.m., he should know right now, him and his team. Saturday, Monday, whatever, get them on it by sun-up. Call it pro bono, it'll be amazing P.R. It's pro-Wayne. One point six if he walks. Three point two with conviction. Yeah, that's wake up at five a.m. money, isn't it? Ha. Make the call and then get back to sleep, Marty. You're the best. I want you in my box at the NBA Finals. Bring sixteen. Write it down so you remember when you wake up! Ha, I bet. Make the call."

"Three point two. Million?"

"I have a lot more money than time."

"Who's Danzig?"

"Larry Danzig. He's the ace of spades."

"He could pin the Kennedy assassination on Castor?"

Bruce laughs. "He could pin the Lincoln assassination on Castor."

Some time goes by. It's getting light out.

"I've got a surprise for you when we get home."

"Napoleon's socks?"

Boy Wonder, Part 5: The Second Workout

Boy Wonder (3 of 5): Two Face

2011-04-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

Van Halen, covering a classic. Robin costume: boots, tunic, cape, gloves, and mask. Eddie Van Halen lets it rip and I'm stretching, crouching, punching the air. Mouthing along to the mirror, watching Robin mouth back, "You got me so I don't know what I'm doin'." My arms are huge, rested, ready. My air guitar is great. I wish Lori could see this, but then again, probably not. I face the mirror like a gunfighter. Robin and Robin. "I only want to be by your side." Punches. I'm very ready. Lori, wow, long blonde hair, gorgeous. "You really got me. You really got me. You really got me. Oh, yeahhhh." I'm out the door, in Wayne Manor's crazy wealthy hallway, walking past Impressionist masterpieces, and still nobody can see me, punching the air out, "You really got me. You really got me." The hard rock behind me getting thin and quiet as I walk.

I walk through a big clock and down the stairs into the cave. Bruce is all suited up. He's Batman. Holy cow. He's tinkering with some tiny video camera. My heart is loud enough to hear. He's not going to look up. "Dick," he says.

"Deeck? Who ees… theese… Deeck? I am Bonaparte." I roll my neck through a stretch, and kung fu punch the air several times. He's not even looking. Oh, well, that was for me. "Robin," he says, still not looking. Hey, that was funny.

For my benefit, Batman spreads out the blueprint of the building. Batman's all black, of the night. He points out how we'll enter from the roof and where Dent's gang is going to be.

Alfred brings us drinks and I tease, "Ah, Alfred?" I point to the table. "Tic Tacs." Alfred smiles, but this time Bruce doesn't. Bruce isn't even here. I pick up Batman's mood, real quick, right now. Tactics. He goes over our route and what will happen. Twice. Then I repeat it back to him twice. Then he says it two more times and ends with, "There will be no deviating from this." Couldn't Two Face's gang make us deviate from the plan? I don't ask. It became night outside because Batman wanted it to become night. I keep that thought to myself.

I wish there were music in the car, but there isn't, so there must be a good reason why not.

The doors of the car slam shut, sounding expensive and perfect. We're standing in a dark alley and it's history just that we're standing here, but no one is here to see. Batman and Robin. I catch myself staring at the car, Batman's car. We'll climb the closer building, go across its roof, and then enter Dent's building from its roof and move down. Dent's headquarters, Batman calls "The Target." The building we climb before going to The Target is called The Stage. That's Batman's language. This kind of thing is obvious to Batman. He's been doing it for years and he always wins. My hands are sweating inside the gloves as we climb The Stage. My feet are sweating. If I had a mustache, it would be sweaty. I'm actually really good at climbing buildings. But this is combat, action, live performance. I'm a superhero, or I will be in about one minute. I've seen the best gymnasts in the world, but the way Batman glides from the rope to his feet is a symphony. He's better at this than I am. Even this.

On The Stage's roof, we share eye contact before he turns and takes a few steps forward. He pauses to turns back and spin his index finger in a circle. That's a hand sign that means "Stay sharp." Then he moves like lightning, smooth like a walk, but fast like a run. He looks huge, bigger than ever, and supernaturally smooth, like a mountain on ice skates. I can't keep up. I want him to stop and take it easy, but he speeds up and jumps through the air, landing on The Target. I'm already in the air behind him when he lands noiselessly. And that moment in the air is the greatest moment in my life, and in the history of Gotham City. They should put a plaque here. "On this spot, Batman and Robin first went into action. May 6, blah blah blah." One day, when I have Bruce's money, I'll buy this building so that they can never tear it down. I land and make a little noise. I rise into my walk and he's already picked the lock to the staircase, way faster than could possibly make sense. Maybe I misunderstood the plan. Maybe he came here earlier so that it was already picked. Even he couldn't be that fast. His fingertip repeats, "Stay sharp," and he disappears inside. I go in next. Batman and Robin.

Walking down a dark hallway is the new greatest moment of my life. Somewhere ahead in the black is Batman. We could run into anyone, anybody, and win the fight. He'd win the fight, so we'd win the fight. Two Face's gang, a lion, the Russian Army, anybody. He'd win. At this moment, I am the safest person in the world: Robin, following Batman. I think about all of the things that we do in training, all of the things that he's perfect at, and in this darkness I smile thinking about what's about to happen. To them. Crooks. I don't care if it ever ends, this walk in the shadows. Because he's there, leading me through the darkness.

Then he's out in the light, and then I am, up a level above Dent and his henchmen. They could see us, but they don't look up. We make no noise – even I don't. Batman makes bullhorns of one hand to point to my mark. I have the noisemaker in my hand and hope that I don't mess up. My heart is going wild, and so is time. I imagine I can see myself, and I think I probably look cool. Blazer to superhero. Dress-up. Don't mess up.

This level is a catwalk over the floor below, where Dent and three tough guys are standing, talking. I'm right in the open, near the rail, looking at them. They would have to notice me pretty soon, except that the plan is about to happen to them. Batman runs around to the right, going into motion that won't stop until these guys are on the floor. He jumps the railing, which would be crazy if absolutely anybody else were doing it. I squeeze the noisemaker, which makes one loud metallic pop, and my job is done. Dent looks right up at me, the world's new number one smart-aleck. I'm smiling in my superhero costume while Batman is grabbing the steel pole, ten feet into a sixteen-foot drop, swinging by his left arm, at crazy velocity through a one-eighty in the air, right into the two guys who were just starting to look at me. And in zero time, those two are done. I have no idea what Batman did to them. He only has two hands; I guess he used both of them. Those guys are falling. Batman turns to make two fencing lunges at the third guy, then lets loose a big left hook. Three down. I want to enjoy this but it's happening way too fast. I wish Dent would look up to see me still smiling at his half-ugly face.

It's almost scary how much time Dent has to reach for his sidearm. If it weren't Batman, Dent would get the shot off. Batman walks just slowly enough to make it seem like Dent will get the shot off, but of course, Dent doesn't get the shot off. "Harvey…" Batman says with fake tenderness, like they're old friends, which they are, and then a right hook slams Dent, and that makes four.

Batman said there would be five, and I start to think that he was wrong when Batman cocks his head and hears the fifth guy who is just now walking in, below where I'm standing. The fifth guy is now one-on-one with Batman, which is neither smart of him nor lucky for him. This is the first time in the fight that I see Batman's face, the first time I see that evil demon scowl anywhere outside of a nightmare. It's one of a zillion things that Batman knows how to do to make his unfair advantage unfairer. The fifth guy has to know that he has no chance before he absorbs two punches to the face. So that was five. Gotham City has a lot of problems, but Batman winning fist-fights is not one of them.

Batman's the only one left awake downstairs now. He cocks his head again, and listens, and when he knows that there's no sixth man, he looks up at me and surprises me by grinning, a big stupid kid grin. That was Bruce, Bruce is here now, but I didn't know that he had that in him. The only surprise of the, oh, ten seconds that it took us (him, us, him) to defeat the Dent gang. It'd be pretty cool if Lori could have seen how I did that, how I clicked that noisemaker. Dress up, no mess up.

I jump the railing and land on my feet. Batman is showing me how to collect evidence when the police show up to take Dent's people away. Batman talks and the cops listen. I figure someone will ask Batman who I am, but people don't ask him obvious-seeming questions. Batman doesn't say the word "Robin." He refers to us as "we", then "we" jog up the stairs and disappear back into the dark hallway. His fingertip says "Stay sharp." Why?

On the roof of The Stage, we debrief.

"Robin. Who was the most dangerous person in the room?"

"You."

"Who else?"

"Me."

He laughs. This is the best life anyone could possibly have. The answer is Dent, because he wasn't scared, because Dent's warped. But the important thing is that I said "Me" and Bruce laughed. And at no point did I mess up.

"Batman. Was that five nines?"

"Fifty nines."

"They had no chance?"

"No chance."

"What's the most guys you've ever beaten up at once?"

"Eighteen." Not bragging, it's just got to be true.

"Was that five nines?"

"No."

I thought everything that he did had to be five nines. I don't understand, but his tone cut it off. There must be something better for us to do with the rest of the night. Batman will lead me to it.

We rope down The Stage back to Batman's car, and when he's on the rope, I feel what nagged at me before, how it stings that Batman has replaced dad and how I enjoy that he's invincible. He's not going to die from this rope breaking, or from five guys with guns. Or from eighteen guys with guns. He's as big as Mount Everest and moves like a panther and paints Renaissance masterpieces with his left hand while defusing nuclear bombs with his right hand and solves riddles in his mind. He's everything that would have saved dad's life, mom's and dad's. And I'm so proud of Bruce's invincibility that it hurts that dad wasn't what he is. It hurts that I have to think about this. But that's not Bruce's fault, and it wasn't dad's fault. Now I'm on Bruce's rope, following him up, down, anywhere.

His feet hit the alley, and then mine do. Batman sits in the driver's seat again, reads something on the computer and says gravely, like we're in immediate danger, "Robin. Get in the car." He's actually upset. Something is more important than Dent. I'm in the car, which peels out and turns, pinning me against the door before I can get the seatbelt on. Batman's an extremely dangerous driver. Or maybe a really good one.

Boy Wonder, Part 4: The Second Girl

Boy Wonder (2 of 5): The First Girl

2011-04-05T07:36:00.001-07:00

Under the school blazer, my arms and chest are buff, but rubbery. I face the mirror square on, then turn to each side a little. The school uniform. The one that says money. The one I'll wear tonight says – what? Crazy?

Alfred tells me that I'm impeccably groomed. I'm sure he'd have a nice way of saying it if I weren't. Walking reminds me that under the khakis I'm just as rubbery. My lungs are hot, too. This is how it feels to start to become Batman. So as Alfred drives me to school, I ask like I usually do, about him, about how he did what I was doing when he was my age. But he did it alone. He didn't have a Bruce to teach and lord over him, just the idea of Batman that he discovered like Lowell discovered Pluto. It was always out there in the dark, and he found it, and now I'll be the second one, eventually. Alfred must think I'm obsessed with Bruce, but of course I am; his dreams own me. He let me go with him to haul in Zucco. I wore the cape and mask then, but I was untrained, and I did nothing but watch. I'm afraid to ask Alfred about why, it seems too frank, an open secret.

Bruce had me go with him to see my parents' killer brought to justice. Alfred nods. But it was for him, wasn't it? Not me. It was what he wanted to do, but never got to, not as a boy, because when he was a boy, Batman was just an idea, not fists. Alfred asks if I'm studying psychology at school, which ends the discussion. And there's enough to think about just breathing and feeling that burn, and the six subjects I study at St. Mark's and the fifty I study with Bruce.

My right arm's so tired that I want to shift the bookbag to my left shoulder, but it's just as tired. The books are so heavy. When the school year started, Bruce thumbed through each of the books, looked like he was making a careful decision, then said, every time, "This is important." I can't imagine what he wouldn't say is important. So everything must be important.

Mr. Newman talks about trigonometry, and I realize that nobody, not even Wainwright, cares about it as much as I do. This is one of Bruce's subjects, angles of coming at someone in a fight. Bruce does the math, he preaches it like it's religion, and he adds in the subject matter of the limits of human perception and action. If you swing in on a rope (ro-ro-rope) fast enough, at the right angle, a guy with a drawn gun cannot humanly shoot you before you kick him in the face. And isn't that a little better motivation than knowing how much roofing material you'll need for a roof that Mr. Newman invented on the whiteboard? But this is still time to use to my advantage, to make sure that I know what sine and cosine mean. To really, really know. I'll take your tests, Mr. Newman. You can pass or fail me. I just don't want to see disappointment in Bruce's eyes. Not ever. Wainwright, you're not going to beat me in this course. You only love math. I know about five nines, Bruce's rule that in every risky situation, the probability of coming out OK has to be 99.999%. Then he can do his thing for 10,001 nights and still make it – probably – to old age. He can tell you in every situation what the probability is and whether or not a risk is warranted. So what's motivating you, Wainwright?

Gym, ridiculous that I have gym. I move like a sloth, I'm so dead. It has to be part of his plan, that I'm so tired that no one will suspect that I'm Robin, once Robin is famous. On a windsprint, I fall down, and there's a little blood in my mouth, and Coach Miller thinks I'm a klutz. Love the hard part. I can't shoot a basketball, either. Everyone notices. Love that. Love running stairs. Love it!

It's a chem class for the ages. Miss Larsen announces her plan to place one splint of wood in air and one in a beaker of pure oxygen, and she's got sixteen boys' undivided attention. Bender chants, "Fire, fire, fire!" It is pretty great. For someone who doesn't see the things I see with Bruce. Even I want a good view, so I'm standing on my desk, then Bromley's desk up front. She lights the one in air, for no purpose that any of us care about. It's called a control. We're standing on desks, cheering. Which one of us looks like he wants control? Then the one she pokes back into the oxygen and hey, now! It almost explodes. It looks like the sun. The other guys riot. I can't stop staring at it. And then there's not much wood left and we harmonize on a long "Noooo!" She tells us to sit down and then talks about atoms and how the splint in air is still burning, but nobody's listening except me when I realize that Bruce is the splint in pure oxygen and that his beautiful amazing life is going to burn him out too fast. Maybe the five nines will save him. And if not, what would he do? Stop being Batman and live a long life in the ordinary air with all the other billionaires?

Lunch. When nobody's talking, I think about Bruce. Is he awake yet? Is he planning my training? Is he looking at fingerprints? From the girl's grave, maybe?

I meet with my advisor, Roberts, in his classroom. He talks about my grades, which are great, and my goals, which are made-up. I always figured I'd be a poor circus performer or that I'd leave to be a sell-out. So I could be a doctor or something to keep myself busy, but actually, Mister Roberts, I'm going to be Batman when I grow up, and the whole program here is nothing compared to what I do weekends, mornings, and evenings. And, oh, yeah, we have enough money to eat. I just tell him I want to get into a good college. He says nice things about my progress. He couldn't handle two minutes in Bruce's program. Heart of gold, though.

I'm staring out the window while Ms. Keller talks about William Blake, and I imagine Bruce writing essays about poetry. It seems so unlike him, but obviously, he'd be great at it. Tyger, tyger, burning bright, in pure oxygen you're going to die some night. He has to. I look at the green leaves outside, green like the Robin gloves. Does Ms. Keller have anything at all to teach Bruce? Did William Blake? We're doing something nuts, aren't we? I'd like to see Bruce's essay on Tyger, Tyger.

Alfred will pick me up at 3:40. He knows that that I actually get out at 3:20, but he insisted. This is the one slice of the day that's not planned. It's a gift from Alfred to me. Anybody doing a sport, debate club, the yearbook, the school paper, or the spring musical is already busy. I don’t do any of those things. I sit on the steps and talk with the nicest guys, kids who are just squeaking by. Chester's talking about how he hates it when his parents fight and then compete for his approval and how messed up it is, and I agree, obviously, but I'm looking at the girl and not really paying attention. And I feel bad for walking out on Chester but I say that I'm going to go talk to her, and he endures the rejection.

I notice that I'm not actually nervous as I walk right towards her. I have way too much in my life to be nervous about to let a girl shake me up. Her name is Lori, and she goes to St. Mary's, and her mother is late. I hope her mother ends up later, at least 3:41, but I don't say that. I could tell Lori all kinds of things about her that I can deduce from cat hairs and so on, but that would be creepy, wouldn't it? She reminds me that there'll be a St. Mark's – St. Mary's dance tonight and asks if I'll be there, and I tell her I won't, and I feel the cost in every part of my fine form under the blazer and khakis. It is sad, isn't it? She asks how old I am. Fifteen today. She's nice. Alfred pulls up, and I wish he'd drive past but the gift is twenty minutes, not twenty-one. I look at Lori again and really enjoy it, and she says, "Happy birthday, Dick Grayson!" I tell her that I hope that she doesn't go to the dance and she says, "Maybe I won't." Then I love the hard part and get into the car.

Alfred says "Special night tonight." I tell him about the pure oxygen and he frowns. I spend the rest of the drive watching green leaves like Robin gloves going by.

In my room, there's this insane new bed. The simple but functional bed is gone and there's this museum piece, dark wood carved into flowers and vines, looks old. On my dresser there's a card that describes the bed, designed and crafted in 1804, six artisans, wood from the Vosges region. Florence this and Malta that. The card is like a history lesson. The bed is like something out of mythology. The card is printed in some crazy expensive way, lavender and lilac, gold lettering. The card alone must have cost more than the whole circus where I grew up. At the bottom, it's signed over the fancy printing, "Happy Birthday! –Bruce!" What kind of a bed deserves a card like this? It's mine now.

This is my bed. It used to belong to Napoleon.

Boy Wonder, Part 3: Two Face

Boy Wonder (1 of 5): The Workout

2011-04-04T00:54:00.000-07:00

"Two." Sharp breath. "Hunned." Elbows on knees. Hands on head. Ribs ache.
"Four hundred and eighty-seven," he answers slowly, showing every breathless syllable. We both know that this means that for the first time, I finished before he reached five hundred. And I have no idea how he can count my sit-ups and his at the same time. He's already on his feet walking towards the outdoor rope structure. His yard is so big that guests don't even get over here to ask why he has it. I get on my feet, thinking again how impossible this is. I'll never be Batman. Without looking back he says, "Good job." He's a silhouette walking through the night. I catch up.

"The ropes. Your thing. As a gymnast. Are you glad that the sit-ups are done, and now we're going to do the ropes, the thing you're best at?"

"Most definitely."

"Don't think that way. Love the part you're worst at." I'm the worst at all of this, Bruce.

"If you dread the hard parts, it eats your will. It forces you to make the decision a hundred times a day. That's too hard. You just make the decision once. The rest flows like water."

"Born again," I say. "Hallelujah. Wash me in the water."

"You're ready for the ropes."

"Well, you know," I breathe, still catching up on oxygen, "my dad always used to say, 'If you don't know the…'"

Bruce vanishes behind Niagara Falls. My legs start to give out. What the hell is happening? I was going to say "ropes" but I didn't, and I can't breathe. Did I say "ro"? Why can't I breathe? It's the spasming breaths that help me figure it out, that I'm sobbing, and that Bruce is holding me. No, the ropes aren't the easy part at all. The ropes are where my mom and my dad were when some rattlesnake of a mobster cut the ropes and I saw them hit. I heard it. And I'm still asking why as sobs and snot wet the bicep of Bruce's expensive workout top. He's got me but Mom and Dad are gone, still, forever, and he knows what I'm thinking, like he knows everything and owns everything and he says the right thing over and over again. And for a minute I just know he's talking, so I wait for the crying to stop and while I'm waiting I listen and hear him say, "You can't bring back the dead." Is that really the right thing to say to me? It must be, or he wouldn't be saying it. It must be, because I do great in the rope workout and when I'm running the last lap of the 3200, Bruce already cooling down, having run nine-something, I'm loving that this is the really hard part, worse than the sit-ups. I'm kicking ass at all of this, and one day I'll be Batman.

We cool down, then we walk. During both, he talks and I listen. He tells me things that would ruin anyone's day. A liquor store robbery that put the clerk into the hospital. Bruce got the crook. That wasn't so bad. A car thief. Bruce got him, too. Not bad at all. Searching the shallow grave where a child molester buried one of his victims; that was just brutal. He's just giving too many details about the girl in the grave, and it's too sad. Bruce's rules in my head tell me what to feel. "You can't bring back the dead." "Love the hard part."

The sun's coming up. Even in my expensive workout top, I'm freezing out here at the table, but I know that Bruce would say it's exhilarating, and he's always right, and I never complain. We play the face game. Bruce flashes a photo at me, then snaps it out of sight, and I have to describe it. It's not even a half second. Thick neck, short hair.

"We did this guy already."
"When?"
"I don't know."
"When."
"Like two weeks ago."
"Morning or afternoon?"
"Afternoon, because I could see it better. It was light."
"When."
"It was a Sunday, because I didn't have school, and we ran in boots."
"So what was the Sunday two weeks ago?"
"The sixteenth."
"So you did know. You just didn't know that you knew. Now tell me about him."

I notice two things about the guy that I didn't notice before, then Bruce tells me six things that I didn't notice either time.

I'm so hungry. Bruce goes into every last detail about how he tracked and subdued the two crooks. He has photos and video as visual aids.This section of the morning is called "tactics." Alfred brings a tray with breakfast. He'd sooner die than say something to interrupt Bruce. I announce with fake annoyance, "We're studying Tic Tacs." Then as fast as I can, I look at their eyes. Bruce smiled. He smiled! That's the best part of the morning. So I hate it. I love the hard part. I want to marry the hard part.

I'm too late to catch Alfred's reaction. Another failure.

We part where we met up, in the hall outside my bedroom. At 5 a.m., I felt guilty, as usual, because he was coming off a night's patrol, and I was coming off a night's sleep. I was fresh and rested. Now my arms are heavy and my side aches. I know too much about the murder of a girl my age. My throat hurts from crying. Bruce beats me at everything. I still feel guilty, but a different kind of guilty.

"Dick. You did great. Have a good day." His hand weighs more than a steak.

I'll go to school. The redhead will give Bruce a professional massage and then he'll go to sleep.

Tonight will be the first night. Out there, with him. Bad guys with guns. If Bruce doesn't say "good job," I'll ask one to shoot me.

Boy Wonder, Part 2: The First Girl

Forum: Batman, Inc.

2011-04-01T17:52:00.000-07:00

This page is just a place-holder for now. I'm looking into placing a forum at this site. I'll update this as soon as possible.

Off-Panel Discussion 2: Orphans

2010-12-28T16:33:00.000-08:00

In the beginning -- the first sentence of Action Comics #1 -- Jerry Siegel's prose refers to Krypton, Jor-El, and Superman, in that order, using generic descriptors: "a distant planet", "a scientist", "his infant son." By virtue of Siegel's choice of sentence structure, the first character in superhero comics is thus the later-to-be-named Jor-El, who is dead before the second panel begins. We may psychoanalyze Siegel and suppose that the early death of his own father led to his creation having a similar detail in his biography. Whatever the case, Superman's life story eventually came to include a double orphaning, with his birth parents dying on Krypton when Kal-El was a baby and his adopted parents dying on Earth as he came to maturity. While some renditions of Superman let the Kents (or just Martha) live on into his career, the first and longest-running account had Superman as a man who had lost four parents. In the earliest history, Superman was unaware of his Kryptonian origins until adulthood. By Action #500, memories of the Els' deaths bring him to tears. As far back as Superman #53, it is a deathbed speech by his adopted father that directs him to use his powers for the cause of justice.

Long before Superman's life story had been fleshed out, the first snapshot origin of Batman appeared in Detective Comics #33. In the case of Bruce Wayne, the death of his parents was not just a haphazard detail, but foundational in the psychology of the character, who vowed war on crime precisely in response to the murder of his parents taking place in front of his very eyes.

In the wave of superheroes who followed, the typical hero is first shown as an adult man, and there is simply no reference to his ancestors. An exception is Doctor Fate, who was first said to have been created as an adult, having never been a child. In a retcon, a later origin had him obtain his powers after the achingly tragic death of his father. And when Batman acquired his sidekick Robin -- one of the most enduring of those early characters -- their lifelong association began precisely upon the occasion of the deaths of Dick Grayson's parents. To a man, the earliest superheroes had no fathers, either because the stories did not mention them, or because their fathers had died. This tendency generally held true with superheroes created by other companies (Billy Batson and Peter Parker were both orphans), and when Hal Jordan was given a more detailed backstory long after his creation, he too became a man who was shaped by the early death of his father. We may also note that Wonder Woman, for very different reasons, never had a father at all. Whether or not Jerry Siegel started the ball rolling, it is clear that a number of later creators took the inspiration and found it compelling -- almost unavoidable.

By and large, superheroes have been without families -- particularly without parents, and most especially without fathers. And while this is a fact of many real people's lives, it is not nearly so common in the world as it is for superheroes. As a variant on the typical pattern, maybe as a token "normal" superhero, Barry Allen was bestowed, though not at at the time of his creation, with a wife and with living parents, a living father whose name was Barry's middle name. But his parents were initially margin characters, little more than props with a couple of speech balloons when they were introduced in Flash #126. And in time, Barry's world came tumbling down, with the death of Iris, and then his own death which was followed, the next Flash series mentioned in passing, by the deaths of his parents, too. In the current Barry Allen revival, his mother has been retroactively (perhaps, because time manipulation was involved, not permanently) killed by the Reverse Flash, and Henry Allen died in prison as a result.

And so, not a single member of the original seven JLA members has a living father, with Wonder Woman never having had one, and Superman having lost two. We may certainly review the ranks of hundreds of mainstream superhero characters and find a few who have living parents, but the fact is hard to deny -- superhero comics are systematically patricidal and not, so to speak, family-friendly. When Identity Crisis killed off the father of Tim Drake, readers should not have been surprised so much as greeted the seemingly inevitable. Although heroes' personal lives run the gamut from billionaires to high school students, perhaps the single most defining aspect of them, besides their crimefighting prowess, is that they have little to no family in their lives.

Comics are fond of imagining things otherwise, and so dead fathers have lived again. Superman has seen the Kents as part of his adult life in the post-Byrne continuity and on the television series Lois and Clark. But writers have also portrayed living parents as a symptom of dystopia, with the whole world going wrong as seen in glimpses in Alan Moore's For The Man Who Has Everything, Jeph Loeb's Absolute Power, and Grant Morrison's Last Rites. Stories like these make out that it is not just window dressing that the heroes have lost their fathers, but essential, an unpleasant fact that makes the hero, and therefore the world, as they need to be.

I've discussed before the family-less nature of Batman before and proposed that it probably excludes him from appeal on the highest levels of popular serial drama. While Smallville gives young Clark Kent people filling relatively normal roles around his abnormal life (and yet, his two fathers also died), Batman is inherently a man without a wife or parents, and so he appeals to the audiences of animated shows targeting more or less the demographic that comics target. As The Dark Knight showed, all the world may want to look into Batman's life for a couple of hours every three years, but it's not a world that every demographic wants to visit weekly.

Do superheroes really need to be fatherless? Does a father inherently belittle the son, shadowing his brilliance? Sherlock Holmes had no father, nor did Gilgamesh. Were the creators of Batman lazy in copying Siegel's fatherless Superman, and the creators of Hal Jordan following suit? Is this pattern a matter of necessity? Clearly, it has been integrated irretrievably into the Batman story, but Hal Jordan and Barry Allen have lighter characters, with origins bestowed upon them from beyond. Can a mainstream superhero have a father? Why don't writers think so?

Off Panel Wrapup 1: We Could Be Heroes

2010-12-14T01:11:00.000-08:00

Gotham City

One night almost a summer night, all of the most powerful men in Gotham City held a council. Tasting duck and pudding, lawmen planned crimes while a criminal spoke of the law. Poorer men carried silver serving trays and linen drapes on their arms. Working much harder than that, a man outside the house sped through a studied routine. He administered tranquilizers to chauffeurs, plugged wires into devices, and puttied explosives into place. His net worth was between two and three hundred times that of everyone inside the mansion.

If a gunman dropped him now, how would the world explain his life and death? A billionaire gone mad with grief, far past the breaking point, dangerous. And, if a gunman dropped him now, the description would go on: Tragic, pitiful, a scandal, a failure. Despite all of that money, those looks. He could have had so much and enjoyed it.

The World

Phoebe Laub grew up in a musical home in Teaneck, New Jersey. As a teenager, she took her guitar across the Hudson River to play in Manhattan. Because the world can sometimes be just, her talent was quickly discovered. She took the name Phoebe Snow and with a voice called a natural wonder, recorded a song that has every virtue of the term "easy listening." Her song, "Poetry Man," reached number four on the Billboard charts, number one in its category, and was nominated for a Grammy. Phoebe Snow, twenty four years old, had a brilliant musical life ahead of her, one that could have matched or topped that of her contemporaries. She could have been Joni Mitchell. She could have been Aretha Franklin.

When "Poetry Man" opened up that world to Phoebe Snow, she was also pregnant, carrying a daughter who would be born in December of 1975. Because the world can sometimes be unjust, the delivery procedure was bungled, choking the baby of air. Phoebe's daughter Valerie Rose was born with severe brain damage. Phoebe did what almost nobody in that situation would do. Told that the almost-blind, almost-deaf, terminally retarded child could only be cared for in an institution, Phoebe brought the baby home to care for her for all of Valerie Rose's life. The challenges that most parents face for a year or two, Phoebe faced for decades, raising a girl would would always be, in some ways, a baby.

Soon finding herself a single mother, Phoebe cut her musical career to half and then to nothing at all. The young woman who had been destined for decades of success on stage made a living from jingles for television commercials. She otherwise performed for her medically-damaged daughter, turning her superstar voice loose inside their home to achieve her greatest musical success -- becoming known and recognized by a person who, doctors had predicted, would know and recognize nobody. The girl who was supposed to die within a year lived to be thirty-one. She was never able to talk, but was able to walk, hug, and go outside with her mother. They knew each other in what Phoebe called exquisite and divine love. And when Phoebe Snow was in her fifties, she was forced by Valerie's death to stop being the mother to a child and to begin again what she had always wanted second-best -- to be a famous singer.

Gotham City

But there was no chance that a gunman would drop him now. Three years earlier on the Kra Isthmus, this man outside the mayoral mansion had used a phony name to enter a contest. He punched, kicked, and threw six men and won a trophy he didn't want in order to measure the certitude that he'd never have to lose a fair fight. He knew the names of the guards on duty outside the mansion. He knew their school records. He knew their marksmanship scores and the patterns of their surveillance. He had profiles of how soldiers on patrol do their jobs and had placed each of these guards in a category. He planned his approach accordingly. There was no chance that a gunman would drop him out here on the lawn before he made his move on the house.

He'd set up a warehouse to resemble the dining room inside the mansion and walked through each role fifty times. He played the tactics out with pencil and paper. He knew where each lamp cast its shadow. He practiced giving the speech he had prepared in front of a mirror, then practiced it again while fighting attack dogs. When this man in black, dressed like a bat, made his move the whole performance would take nine seconds.

The World

It was Detroit's year. The records and numbers make it hard to deny that the 1989 Pistons were one of the best basketball teams that has ever played. They had stars on offense, on defense, in scoring, and in rebounding. They might have had the deepest roster of all time. They certainly had one of the roughest styles of play. And when another team took the court to oppose them during those playoffs, starting on equal terms at 0-0, it was almost impossible to beat them.

So it should have been truly impossible to beat them in a game with only four minutes left, and the Pistons ahead by eight.

The numbers and records and awards were not mere abstractions. When Michael Jordan took the ball to the right side of the court, he had hard reality in his face – three Pistons to beat. He went by one defender then over a second and finessed a shot over the outstretched hand of the Detroit center, off the glass, and into the hoop, cutting the Detroit lead to six.

After another Detroit score and two Jordan free throws, the lead was still six. His next shot would again be contested by three Pistons, but he elevated above them, seeming giant in flight over men who were actually taller than him – on the ground. The ball danced from his fingertips to the net. With 2:35 remaining, the lead was four.

The powerful Detroit team struck back, and then so did Jordan. a minute to go, the lead was still four.

Just days earlier, Jordan had ended a playoff series with Cleveland with a series-deciding feat sometimes called "The Shot." The physics of that moment seem more curious when seen in slow-motion than at regular speed. The defender, Craig Ehlo, took to the air to raise a hand between the ball and the basket. Jordan, airborne, seems to remain still while gravity pulls Ehlo down and out of Jordan's way. With the defender gone, Jordan finally shoots. In reality, Michael Jordan has to obey the same laws of physics that planets and cannonballs and the rest of us follow. His center of gravity is falling as his lower body extends progressively further downward from his hands, but he keeps his hands and the ball stationary until the lesser man has fallen. Then Jordan shoots. When one has finished marvelling at the physics, one may acknowledge the man's nerve – the shot was good.

The shot over Ehlo ended a playoff series that Chicago would have lost had it not gone in. Jordan repeated this feat with 54 seconds left against Detroit. Piston defender John Salley, like Ehlo and the rest of us, obeyed the laws of physics while Jordan stayed in the air and cut the lead to two.

It is perhaps jarring to recall at this point in the narration that the Chicago Bulls had a full team on the court, and not only Michael Jordan. But they did; two points from Bull Horace Grant tied the game at 97 apiece leading into the game's final half minute.

With nine seconds left, a Detroit possession ended with Piston Bill Laimbeer being called for an offensive foul against Jordan. That gave the Bulls their final possession of the game. The ball was inbounded to Jordan who took the ball to the right side, faced another double team, elevated far more than he needed to, and laid the game-winning shot off the backboard.

The final four minutes had ended with Jordan having scored twelve points versus six from Detroit and four from his teammates. Michael Jordan had hit five for five from the field, shooting in aerial motion, usually while trapped inside a cage of four to six Piston arms, finding moments and locations to shoot from that seemed impossible.

Action movies and comic books are built around scenes where a single man physically bests a group of other men, even though each of the opponents is himself highly capable. How can one man repeatedly beat three? The creator asks the viewer to suspend disbelief. But it happened for real one night in Chicago.

Gotham City
Batman squeezed a bulb with his right hand and the lights went out inside the mayor's dining room. He pitched a smoke grenade through the window and set off two series of pyrotechnics that overwhelmed the senses of his prey, then blew a wall apart. Anyone inside the room, he knew for a fact, would be unable to act coherently. Anyone armed would be incapable of aiming and shooting for several seconds. There was hard data on this. Batman knew this. But a startled guard might shoot at random and might just hit him. It was possible that his career of masked crime fighting would end with his death inside the mayor's dining room.

The wall came down.

The World
The years from 1938 to 1968 were hard ones for Czechoslovakia. Two decades after the country's creation, its existence as a free state effectively ended with its dissection at the hands of Nazi Germany. When World War Two ended, Soviet troops occupied Czechoslovakia and stood watch over a coup that placed the country under Communist rule. Tyranny and oppression followed, according to the Soviet system created by Stalin.

But eventually Stalin died. By and by the leaders of some Communist countries sought to act on their consciences and loosen, just a bit, their grasp of total control, loosen the steely grip that made slaves of half of Eurasia. The first was Imre Nagy, who became Prime Minister of Communist Hungary four months after Stalin's death. Nagy fought to reform the system and liberalize it, while Stalin's favorites manuevered against him. Nagy remained out of power until a popular uprising in 1956 backed him over powerful hardliners. Nagy became the leader of a free Hungary for just a few days. Then came Soviet tanks, installing once again an oppressive regime. Nagy was arrested by the Soviets and eventually tried, sentenced, and executed by hanging.

Alexander Dubček knew of Hungary's example, but he also knew about confronting authority. Dubček had been conceived in Chicago, but his parents were placed in an internment camp in Texas because of his father's socialist views. The family returned to their Slovak homeland just in time for Alexander's birth, then they moved to the Soviet Union and kept out of reach of Nazi invaders. Before the war ended, Dubček returned to participate in an uprising against the occupying Germans, and was wounded in the effort that claimed the life of his brother. Only 23, Dubček was already as much a victim and participant in the Twentieth Century's wars of ideology as any other man. But he was destined to become a far more central figure in the battles to come.

Dubček joined the Communist Party and fought for reform as an insider, perhaps helped by his residence in the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia, removed from the centers of power in Prague. Like Nagy, he found himself wrestling against hardliners. Like Nagy, he found internal support for granting greater freedom to his countrymen. In April 1968, Dubček, then the First Secretary of the Party, made freedom of speech and of the press official national policy. Dubček was intensely aware of what had happened in Hungary twelve years earlier, but sought to keep the situation in his country different by making the liberalizations a matter of internal policy only. While Hungary had sought to change its international alignment from a Soviet ally to a neutral state outside the Warsaw Pact, Dubček pledged his country's loyalty to its Eastern Bloc alliances. Meeting with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev in July, Dubček promised that his policies were internal to the Czechoslovak state and were of no threat to the other Communist countries.

The Warsaw Pact did not, however, see the matter as different than that of Hungary's 1956 uprising. The Soviet tanks came on August 20, 1968, soon reaching all parts of Czechoslovakia. Dubček and other leaders responsible for the four months of freedom, now called the Prague Spring, were loaded into a Soviet military transport plane and flown to Moscow where they were forced to sign agreements undoing most of the reforms. Unlike Nagy, Dubček was not hanged. He returned to Prague and held office in the post-invasion government until an improbable event -- a victory of the Czechoslovak national hockey team over the Soviets -- led to riots that made the hardliners pull Dubček from his positions of power. He was made an ambassador for a short time, then expelled from the party. Dubček ended up in virtual exile working for the Forestry Service in Slovakia. While he had avoided the hangman's rope, he was buried, perhaps, in a more oppressive obscurity, rather than being made a martyr for a cause. The best man that Czechoslovakia had ever produced lived far from the capital, spending the best years of his life administrating trees while tyranny held his country for decades more.

The world had turned many times on its axis by the autumn of 1989. In early November, the Berlin Wall was opened. While events in East Germany and elsewhere promised the potential fall of all Communism everywhere, a similar uprising in China had been crushed with bloody force at Tiananmen Square. Communist leaders in Czechoslovakia vowed that the rising tide of freedom would not wash over them. They would be like China, not like East Germany.

A week after the opening of the Berlin Wall, the tide rose in Prague, with ever-larger crowds filling the city's plazas calling for an end to the four decade Communist monopoly on power. There was no doubt that the crowds were substantial. This time, their leader was a playwright named Vaclav Havel, who hoped to achieve as an outsider in 1989 what Dubček could not as a national leader in 1968. The international situation made it seem impossible that Soviet tanks would come from outside the nation's borders to crush the uprising, but there remained the stubborn government inside Czechoslovakia itself. Whatever we know in hindsight to have happened, there remained the contrasting examples at hand: Would Czechoslovakia go the way of China or the way of East Germany? The players were shaping up to provide a replay of either situation -- freedom or a decisive crackdown. Every day, the crowds showed up. Every day, Havel stood on the balcony of the Melantrich Hotel and spoke to the masses gathered in Wenceslas Square. The police were ready to play their part, one day sealing off the square and beating protestors with clubs. It was a battle of wills and it could go either way.

We know how it went but the crowds in Prague in November 1989 did not know. They saw their ever growing numbers. They looked to events happening elsewhere in Eastern Europe and they looked to Havel. Czechoslovakia would be free, in essence, if the people believed that they would win their standoff with the forces the hardliners had waiting in reserve. But the outcome remained in doubt until November 25, when hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovaks gathered in Prague and looked up to the balcony where Havel had been speaking and saw their destiny in human form. Hundreds of yards away, the country's Communist Party leadership heard the noise and knew that they would lose the battle of wills. They resigned that afternoon, leaving Czechoslovakia to the will of its people. But they did not know why the crowd had suddenly grown so loud, so delirious. Czechoslovakia had arrived at the year, day, and minute when the ideals of 1968 would finally win. And the crowd had raised that roar because up on the balcony stood Alexander Dubček.

Gotham City
He stepped through the smoke, this young man who knew so much. He knew the power of body language, and walked before Gotham's powerful in a language that spoke of their end. His arms and lips communicated power -- his power, and the end of theirs. He knew that he was beautiful like an athlete and that he was terrifying like loss. He walked like a young Alexander, this billionaire who could buy their acquiesence but was going to force it. If he'd been challenged, he would have fought and won. But the force of power that came was to come from his voice.

And the Batman said to the corrupt overlords of Gotham's weak, "Ladies. Gentlemen. You have eaten well. You've eaten Gotham's wealth. It's spirit. Your feast is nearly over. From this moment on, none of you are safe."

The World
There are no superheroes. But one day in August 1945, a thirty-year old American, called the best pilot in the Army Air Force was given just one chance to carry a weapon of unimaginable power. And he flew over the Rising Sun and hit the Axis back with the power of the stars. And if history can give a man a moment to be the Green Lantern, what is not possible?

Opportunities for historic heroism are not common, but they do come to some of us.

The philosopher John Locke argued that because we have seen goodness and power, and because we understand magnitude, we can form ideas beyond that we have ever seen. We can imagine unbound goodness and unbound power, and thus we can imagine God.

Real heroes do not exist to help us imagine superheroes. Superheroes are a reflection of good people, a mosaic of all the best qualities in one person. So if ever a person were devoted to another's wellbeing like Phoebe Snow; and in a brawl against three of the world's best, could prevail time and again, like Michael Jordan in his sport; and when that fight ended could appear with righteousness and history on his side Alexander Dubček, that would be all the superheroics our world would ever need. And we've got it. Just look around.

Off Panel Discussion 1: Us and Them

2010-11-22T23:22:00.000-08:00

Not Happening

In the coming weeks, this blog will host a feature called Off Panel Discussion. My readers are invited to be part of the "off" Panel. A blog post from me to the universe will start the week, and end with a question. Then a wrap up at the end of the week will amalgamate all of the great answers that poured in. The first week starts now. The topic is how superheroes stand in relation to the real world. The question appears at the end of the post.

It's a tale we all have heard. The superhero era was born with Action #1. A look inside to the third feature showed the excited youth of the Great Depression a champion of justice who donned his distinctive suit and used his amazing powers to fight evil doers. Of course, I am thinking of Zatara. But the kids who read the issue in sequence had already discovered Superman.

About twenty years into the comic book experience, creators started spicing up superhero stories with foils who were very obviously patterned to be a variation of the starring character. Bizarro. The Reverse Flash. Thousands of Green Lanterns. Supergirl. Batwoman. Right through to the numerous variant Batmen in Grant Morrison's current run.

Bizarro Is Not Surprised To Meet His Double

What I find interesting about this is that superheroes are in the first place a very strange variant on everybody real. If we consider Superman to be a basic inspiration for all the others, then the explosion of new superheroes in 1938-1941 had already produced numerous variants on the concept. What is it that makes comic book readers (and of course writers) wonder what other variants would look like? The odd thing about inventing Bizarro to give Superman an "opposite" is that Superman already had in Action #1 a double who was his opposite: Clark Kent. Heroic fiction long ago found out that it's more exciting to see a hero come onstage than to have him stand onstage all the time. You can see a reluctant or waylaid hero return to take the field in the homeric Iliad and Odyssey, and the same setup prevails in The Dark Knight Returns. Thanks to Clark Kent, the writer had an excuse to show Superman emerging triumphantly rather than just standing there and being great all of the time.

But with every reading of Action #1, there was another Superman-opposite: The person whose two hands were holding the issue up. In fact, Clark Kent was not just a place from which Superman could emerge, the way that Achilles emerged from his tent. Clark was also a surrogate for us. Jerry Siegel said, "...in one of his identities, [Superman] could be meek and mild, as I was, and wear glasses, the way I do." Clark couldn't get the woman patterned on the girl that Siegel couldn't get. She's after Superman.

In a verbal essay in the movie Kill Bill: Volume 2, Bill famously says that Superman is the real man and Clark Kent is the disguise (which matches Siegel's description) and that Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race. But the last part isn't true. Clark Kent is Jerry Siegel's portrayal of himself. Superman is what Jerry Siegel dreamed of becoming, and he shared that dream with us.

And so, the real opposite figure for a superhero is not another superhero or even a supervillain, but any one of us. I was impressed, though, with some of the comments to my last post, wherein people mentioned the inspirational value of superheroes. And, so, the question:

Off Panel Discussion Question #1: What person in the real world is most like a superhero?

Answers, please -- lots of them! All of the comments here are visible to one and all, and I'm sure they will be excellent. Then I'll post again at the end of the week to provide a wrap-up discussing your answer. Leave your answer in the comments and be the hero of Off Panel Discussion #1!

Whatever Happened To Earth One?

2010-11-20T06:50:00.000-08:00

When I was a boy who went where my mother took me, we went sometimes to a department store downtown. There was a path through the aisles that went to the right, and before one left the aisles full of things for adults, one could smell the vinyl where superhero figures were sold. This is a smell that probably carries some medical hazards that people in 2010 know to avoid, but I thought it was lovely. At its source, I met my heroes. Superman, Batman, the Teen Titans -- the stars of various television and comic book renditions. Not far away was the tobacco-and-magazine store where I bought those comics in a haphazard fashion. I wasn't thorough enough to make sure that I got each month's issue of any particular series, and my collection has many instances where I have only one part of two-part stories.

My comprehension was poor enough that when, many years later, I saw the same Batman television show with the sensibilities of a teenager who read real literature, I was shocked to see that the antics of Adam West and Burt Ward were intentionally comedic. This had been lost on me when I saw it as a child. I enjoyed it on some other level.

I didn't need to be told in words that the comics were aimed at kids, even though certain issues of Detective Comics were unmistakably hardcore. I simply saw that nobody over the age of 12 that I knew was reading any. And so, I stopped buying comics on any regular basis before Crisis on Infinite Earths wiped the shelves clean of the worlds of my heroes. Earth One, Earth Two, Earth S, stacked up not very carefully in boxes.

By odd coincidence, I ended up buying all of three comics during the mid-Eighties and two of them were classics by Alan Moore. This really was a coincidence, or effective marketing on the covers, I suppose. Still, my focus was so absent that when my father picked up the first part of Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow? for me, I thoroughly enjoyed it, but never bothered to get the second part until nine years later.

In early 1989, with a Batman movie set to release, some friends of mine told me about Dark Knight Returns and one of them lent it to me. This was the first time I saw anyone grown and not completely lost in fantasy read a story about those heroes of the vinyl action figures. I'd read Shakespeare and Virgil by that time, and had friends who lived with their eyes deep in real literature. I tried to convey upon them that Moore and Miller had written real literature with the funnybook heroes, and saw some agree and others disagree. A friend and I watched one episode of Adam West's Batman as a drinking game, taking a sip of beer every time Batman lectured anyone.

During a period of three or so years, I read the comics again, and collected -- this time from a gun and comics store -- some of the old issues I'd missed. The comics had grown up while I did, in not very similar ways. Barry Allen was dead. Supergirl was dead.

I started writing for an audience of basically none, little snippets of prose that might be considered a stillborn novel or script. For every plot point on the page there were ten in my head. I imagined just how it would look, how my take on Earth One would go. It was the sort of homage that years later came frequently from DC Comics itself as they set a writer here and there free to re-tell their classic worlds in new takes, "Elseworlds" they called it. And some fifteen years later, when I again returned to the comics, after again taking a long hiatus to let my life happen in other ways, I was shocked to see that some very specific plot points of my unwritten, unread, maybe once-told story had shown up in real comics in the meantime. It felt like ESP plagiarism had taken place. A squad of heroic-seeming villains defeat the Earth's superheroes but leave the seeds of their defeat in failing to actually kill Batman, who stalks back from an Antarctic plane crash to lead the resistance, reasoning from their failure to finish him off what their weaknesses were. I wrote that! Or thought it. And to see that in a Grant Morrison story that was printed some five years later tells me that there were some ideas in the older comics that anyone with the same sensibilities would take from them. Darkseid as Hitler, Earth as the conquered Europe, the Justice League as the Resistance and Allied armies -- this is obvious, on some level. It had to be done. And the idea of a hero fighting back from being abandoned in the frozen polar regions -- well, it had been done before in a Green Lantern comic and Superman II.

Many mature stories and Elseworlds also cover the same material. Superheroes are outlawed. Darkseid or some other bad guy as the conquering Hitler. Blitzkrieg, occupation, Stalingrad and Midway, D-Day, victory. Nobody wrote this story. It happened. We found in my father's old things an "action figure" of Douglas MacArthur and a copy of Detective #286. There was a common idea there, and writers wrote the childhood heroes into modified versions of World War Two using some of the values that made "real literature" good.

They say comic books can inspire a reader but I have trouble pointing to any good I ever did having been inspired by them. Maybe there is some, but it sure didn't resemble what Superman did. No, but one thing I got from the comics is how different the separate takes on the heroes and villains were. The Fifties, the Sixties, my pre-Crisis era, the era that came later, when it was hard to know who was Green Lantern anymore when I saw a comic book shelf and saw no one I recognized.

And after I'd spent a longer time away from them, they pulled me in again. I read about Identity Crisis, then in progress, from CNN. I joined it mid-way, and later read a few other things, older and current. Kingdom Come, and then Infinite Crisis. What really pulled me in this time was the sense of community because I could discuss these things with other fans. I had never really known other fans in person, and to this day I do not. I have had a few conversations, but even driving right past a major comics convention while it is in progress has not made me really want to go inside. Parking nearby to eat with my family at an Italian restaurant is life. When I walk down streets where muggers sometimes strike, I think of the irrelevance of Batman as an idea. A man who refused to hand his wallet over was shot dead not far from where I currently sit. A friend of someone very close to me drowned, and thoughts of Aquaman saving him made me smile and cry. That's what Aquaman can do. He can make you smile and cry when you would otherwise be numb.

For the last three years, I found something very interesting sociologically in the oldest Golden Age comics; at the same time, I found something almost totally different in the cutting edge comics of, in particular, Grant Morrison. These two passions ignited a willingness to act, but not to save drowning men, because I can't do that. I have written, and in this online community, the same typing that I once put into recording, for an audience of none, my own fictional stories, I have offered analysis. At first, I tried talking about the Golden Age comics, but I stopped, and found myself writing regular issue-by-issue analyses of the current comics, and the reason why is very important. That's what readers care more about now. I see the traffic stats for my site. Every comic has a peak of interest that lasts a day or two and then fades. Sometimes a second or third peak occurs if an older comic is homaged, but that is a minority event. The interest for the comics of 1940 peaked in 1940. I've posted on those, but the reason why I am posting has a lot to do with community. Not the hollow metrics of seeing the traffic stats peak, but the active discussion and engagement, in the comments here and on the DC Message Boards. One sees the transient passing of the inspired and cannot long forget that the canonical comic book shows a lone figure commit acts of justified aggression. Justification is easy and many-way directed when it comes from within. Superman said, in the best comic book of the last decade, that dreams inspire us but what do the comics inspire? Probably not more lifeguards. The exciting part of an Aquaman comic is not when Aquaman stares at the beach but when he boards a ship and doles out punishment. That may be what it inspires.

The comics are a wonderful realm for setting the mind free. They invite one to be a detective far more than they propel one to saving lives or stopping muggers. The unexamined life is not worth living. I fell, just by being me, into a yearlong plunge trying to understand Grant Morrison's run on Batman and to answer the question, "Who is the Black Glove?" This remains something that happens online, not in my real life. I feel, in ways I'd like to expound upon later, that the activity has sharpened my mind and borne out the best practices of science and ways of being. I rather deliberately tried to bring the exact same habit from my comic book analysis to the standout television drama, Mad Men, just to see how the whole experience -- looking for subtleties, evoking a response from the online community, carried over. And in a respect, to go back to the discussions I had a long time ago as to whether superhero comics are real art. Understanding them is much the same as understanding real art.

That one can go from the comics to other venues invites that very transition. What is found in comics, and much that isn't, can also be found elsewhere. With the interruption of one part of my online discussion of comics, I will switch gears here. I will in the long run post much less and less regularly, and aim my focus elsewhere, some on this blog and some not. I may in the short run actually post more, to launch a few projects in discussion that seem worthy to me. That Grant Morrison's comics are changing seasons makes this timely. I have been offered pay for writing in a couple of venues and I will consider those.

The building where I bought those figures of the superheroes has long since ceased being a store of any kind. It burned down this fall, leaving a smoking shell. It's the sort of thing that a superhero would have stopped, easily, but there are no superheroes. Maybe some of the firefighters who stopped the fire from spreading were inspired by superheroes. Isn't it pretty to think so?

Batman The Return

2010-11-19T00:51:00.000-08:00

"The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough." -Niels Bohr

Comic book superheroes, even the ones who cannot overfly a continent whilst shooting heat from their eyes, live in a world where the greatest feats of our real world are matched and exceeded by well-prepared mortals on a moment's notice. For some fifty years, Batman has lived in a world that inherits all of the wild premises of the magical and science fiction allies on his various super teams. His own wonders of deduction and acrobatics inhabit a world in which humanlike robots have arisen from the hands of lone inventors. Antigravity, size manipulation, teleportation -- these are part of Batman's world, but have not been a part of his methods. To preserve the formula that has propelled the character through seventy years of success, we never see him ask Superman to provide him with a Legion flight ring. We don't see him teleport into battle even though he routinely does so in JLA titles. There is a rule here which considers the title on the cover to determine what Batman can and cannot do. In Batman: The Return, Grant Morrison starts changing the rules, but not as much as he could have. Batman begins adding to his arsenal, with things that the real world of 2010 does not have, but not -- the rules are being bent, not abandoned -- Red Tornado -level robots and Thanagarian tech. Batman is skipping a few years ahead of where he's been, but not centuries. As RetroWarbird mentioned in the comments to my last post, we are seeing the sci fi of technology, but not the cosmic sci fi of Bruce's last two or three adventures.

"Planet Gotham", the one-shot issue's story title, takes the Batman concept planetwide while bringing some of the DC Universe's wilder technology into his arsenal. The idea of Batman works, so the man who is obsessed with fighting crime has finally taken upon himself to mass produce it, to bring Batman to ten thousand cities instead of one, to protect six billion people instead of ten million. If only it were feasible, it's what a man obsessed with a mission to stop crime would do. And yet until now he has not. But now he is.

This issue begins with an origin, one that happens to revisit a moment from last week's ROBW #6 as well as Last Rites and The Dark Knight Returns. As we know, it is the moment that Batman became Batman and his first act upon doing so was to ask for help. As has been abundantly foreshadowed of late, he is going to ask for more help than he has ever done so far, and it begins with those who have stood beside him in Gotham. It continues in Batman, Inc. all around the world.

Kane and Finger's Bat-Man began by fighting realistic crooks and killers, but that only lasted twelve pages. Soon he was fighting mad scientists and monsters. It took far fewer pages than the length of Batman: The Return for Batman's creators to decide that his victory over ordinary crooks was such little challenge that it was time to put him against something bigger. Return introduces the something-bigger that will occupy Batman's resources as he hopes to fight all crime but may have to content himself with neutralizing this new enemy.

Morrison's first two seasons of Batman have involved a single shadowy force that lurks behind the scenes while sending forth a series of medium-sized villains to challenge Batman before the climactic showdown. In both of the first two seasons, this turned out to be Doctor Hurt. This time, it is the organization that the script pages in Return call Kultek but that the pages in the story call Leviathan. What are these entities? Morrison tells us in the script that Kultek is a sinister organization. The name Kultek is itself mysterious (it means "refugees" in Hungarian, quite likely by coincidence). The name Leviathan is a pointer towards some dark anti-Judeo-Christian religion, familiar territory after the demonic names and backstory of Doctor Hurt. Exactly how these things relate or do not relate remains to be seen. Is Leviathan precisely the same thing as Kultek? Is it a subdivision? Does it relate to Thomas Hobbes' portrayal of tyrannical government? To the Old Testament's sea monster? To the DC Universe's similar characters such as Kobra and R'as al-Ghul? The detailed answers are not here. What we do see in Bruce's two outings against Leviathan, and a third under his surveillance, is a sampling of what is sure to be a longer list of bad guys.

The action starts off with an incredible number of references to knowing and not knowing. The verb "to know" and its negation appear thirteen times, sometimes repeated twice in the same speech balloon. The idea of knowing is communicated even more times using different words. One of the men is named Farouk. In Arabic, that means "he who knows truth from falsity." Batman is, in comparison to his super-powered allies, a man who knows things. He is a detective -- as his enemy calls him, a master detective -- and he usually has made victory inevitable at the moment that he discovers what his enemy is up to.

And so this conflict between Batman and the new enemy is about knowing. Batman says that a thing which is known can beat Farouk. Farouk downplays his failures by saying that Batman will learn nothing from him. Batman seems to know quite a bit about the enemy, possibly from his brush with omniscience at the end of time. The enemy, of course, knows everything about themselves. We, however, know quite little. Who, besides Bruce Wayne, is "Fatherless"?

We know this: Leviathan (which appears in a narration box as though it is the location for the final scene) has some dark master. But the boy hails it. It is an entity, whether singular or plural. They use genetic manipulation to create superpowered beings, as bodyguards for the wealthy, but perhaps for some other purpose. They allow the entities to practice against one other. For those who were keeping score, Traktir held his own against Batman for a while and the Heretic is the one who beat Traktir and a whole team at once. The Heretic, who may just be one big eye under that cowl, is obviously a tough opponent. He also talks about what will happen in ways that imply either prophecy or delusion.

And as much as this seems like a time for a new story to begin, things are compatible with being another dive into the same pool. Leviathan, among its other senses (including a use in Morrison's Clarion The Witch Boy), is like Barbatos is a name from demonology. "Heretic" is inherently a comment about religion. The Heretic looks a bit like the Satanic Replacement Batman, Lane. A dark master controls a powerful web of subordinates. Can anyone stop him? The final panel, showing Batman, is posed very much like he was at the end of Morrison's JLA #11, when Bruce began to wage corporate takeover against Luthor's forces in Rock of Ages. Both even sport the same "To be continued" in the same corner of the page. And we know how Rock of Ages ended up. Game on.

Batman: Next Season

2010-11-17T00:49:00.000-08:00

By the time Grant Morrison's Batman run had reached its fifteenth issue, the structure that had to that point involved various arcs of one to four issues, involving a series of assorted villains, took on a different aspect. At roughly the same time that interviews announced the upcoming Batman R.I.P., the story itself revealed a grand design of singular focus: The entire run, going back to the "Zur En Arrh" graffiti from the first scene, pointed towards one confrontation as a mastermind of inhuman patience brought a plan to destroy Batman to its culmination. This plot and its catchphrase, "Who is the Black Glove?", served as the pinnacle and guiding force of the entire two-year run. Moreover, it went on to serve as the wellspring for the main threat of yet another run, Morrison's sixteen issues of Batman and Robin which served as a sequel, reprise, and parody of RIP. It proved to be a remarkable undertaking to have kept a story so well hidden for over a year and then, in the re-reading, so abundantly obvious, with clues like the graffiti having built up the threat, the plan, and the nature of the enemy himself in many of the issues that preceded Doctor Hurt's final attack.

As the second Doctor Hurt plot has now ended, and a new run on Batman, Inc. is ready to begin, one can see that the original Morrison run is all the more remarkable for having produced the seeds for the still upcoming run even while it seemed to keep the primary focus on the mystery of RIP. A few important non-Black Glove themes that go back to 2006 sat dormant during Bruce Wayne's absence but will come to the forefront in the next year:

(1) Bruce Wayne is a important, heroic identity even when he is not Batman.
(2) Batman is such a great example of human actualization that he should be emulated; both evil and good forces have sought to duplicate Batman, creating one more or even an army of him.
(3) Batman will allow more equality in his partnerships, having seen the failures that result from dominating in all his relationships.
(4) The magic and science fiction that were part of the epic so far will be largely or totally absent from the next part of the story.

If there is a place to look for important symbolism in a story, it is at the beginning. Theme #1, Bruce over Batman, began in Morrison's run with the first words that any of Batman's allies said to him. Commissioner Gordon opened (excepting one line by an unnamed policeman) the dialogue in Batman #655 by asking the masked vigilante, "Is that really you?" On the surface, Gordon is asking if this is the real Batman, not another imposter like the one in the first scene. Morrison is far too careful a writer to open with a line that he didn't mean to have particular significance. What is being asked by Morrison is if the costumed identity, the suit, is really the hero. This question will be underscored in the very next line, when Gordon asks, "Has anyone ever told you how ridiculous you look in that getup?" Gordon later mentions -- again with a meaning besides the surface one -- "the nut in the Batman suit." If we wonder if Morrison is taking the question seriously or not, we can skip to the first issue post-RIP which shows a younger Bruce being asked by Alfred, "Have you noticed how you no longer refer to Batman as your disguise?"

The message continues to come from Batman's consiglieri, his older and sometimes wiser allies. After Commissioner Gordon tells Bruce to get out of town, the present-day Alfred, later in issue #655, tells Bruce that he has to relearn to be himself. And Tim tells Bruce to "combine the two," on the surface meaning to combine the two pieces of advice in one trip, but on a deeper level telling him to combine his two identities. We can already see all of this playing out in Batman, Inc., with Bruce Wayne stepping forward as the public face of the Batman corporation and many trips abroad as part of a recruitment effort.

Bruce Wayne has rarely been depicted as the all-around loser that Clark Kent has sometimes been, but his persona as the dissolute fop goes back to Detective #27, when Commissioner Gordon lights a cigar and muses to himself, "Bruce Wayne is a nice chap, but he must lead a boring life. Seems disinterested in everything." But Morrison shows Bruce Wayne performing stunts that are fully worthy of Batman at his best. In #664, Bruce skydives onto skis saying, "I've always wanted to do that." He goes on to bring a helicopter down with a ski pole after telling Jezebel that he is much cooler than James Bond. Morrison's Bruce Wayne also skydives from a hot air balloon into the city, making a smooth change into Batman in the air. Later, in #675, he fights off Jezebel's attackers without changing into Batman -- we see Bruce Wayne take down two thugs and the Nine-Eyed Man; there is even a panel of Bruce Wayne triumphant in battle with the bat-signal behind him.

In the persona of the Batman of Zur En Arrh, an occasionally dull but effective brute, we see the shortcomings of what Batman is like when Bruce Wayne is taken out of the equation. The implied critique in that rendition (looking quite a bit like his contemporary, the All Star Batman of Frank Miller) lets us know that the pendulum will swing the other way; we will see a Batman who has more Bruce Wayne in his equation. Indeed, we did in the just-concluded Return of Bruce Wayne. The hero operates without a mask in most of the issues, and gets to the end of Darkseid's trap by physically ripping a dark bat-persona out of himself, something that Superman's heat vision cannot do for him. Indeed, the pattern of story arcs resolving with Bruce Wayne unmasked repeats over and over. It happens in Morrison's second arc, when Bruce and Jezebel are watched by two black-gloved hands. It happens again at the end of RIP, seemingly because of Hurt's command that Bruce stop being Batman. Without the cowl, he does so, but is no less a hero. It is not Batman who brings down Hurt; it is Bruce Wayne, who is also unmasked at the end of story arc conclusions in 52 #30 and #47, Batman #702, Batman and Robin #16, and Return of Bruce Wayne #6. The title of that series itself has a meaning beneath the surface, for it is not only the journey of a man returning home, it is the return of a newly important man. Morrison's bat saga promises us in every way the return of a character named Bruce Wayne. And so we should expect to see more Bruce and less Batman. The revelation that Bruce has been bankrolling Batman launches this era formally, but the signs and signals have been with us the whole time.

And what will Bruce Wayne / Batman do in this new era? Theme #2, Duplicating Batman, has made the answer obvious to our hero; anybody with the means to do so has tried to duplicate whatever version of Batman they can. Talia used her genes and Bruce's to breed the ultimate child in Damian. Talia later makes an army of Man-Bats. The Gotham City Police Department had hired Doctor Hurt to turn three policemen into Replacement Batmen. John Mayhew tried to assemble a squadron of surrogate Batmen from around the world. Finally, Darkseid's cronies Mokkari and Simyan tried to make an army of cloned Batmen, using the hero's genetic material and memories -- a plan that might have had fearsome results had the original not stopped them.

Most of the arcs in Batman and Robin continued this theme, first with Dick Grayson a fellow orphan and crimefighter taking on (permanently now, for all he knew) the Batman role better than anyone other than Bruce could hope to. Jason Todd, though, thought that he could improve the brand with his deadly Red Hood identity. Next up, one of the clones went on a brief rampage thanks to the Lazarus Pit. Finally, the Joker wore black and worked as a crimefighting detective.

And so, following the methods of John Mayhew more than the others, Bruce Wayne will now try to duplicate himself, or rather his concept: Batman himself will franchise the Batman symbol, traveling the world to mold other non-powered superheroes in his image, elevating the methods and goals of their crimefighting to his standards. Most likely, Bruce will succeed in what others have attempted; he will make a larger force of surrogate Batmen.

When he does so, he will know how not to approach the matter. Theme #3, Trust in Allies, is introduced when the Knight tells us in #667 that Mayhew's heroes hardly knew one another and that "everybody was in awe of Batman. No wonder it lasted all of half an hour." The awe that the Club of Heroes members have for Batman is obvious throughout that story. With Batman filling the leadership role, attending meetings capriciously, delivering orders, and effortlessly commanding the glory, he becomes the target of envy. Wingman plays Iago to Batman's Othello, joining a plot to kill Batman and the other heroes in return for the Devil's promise of fame. This is quite the downfall from Wingman's debut back in Batman #65, when Batman was shown training him because his "northern European" home country told Batman of an "urgent request for a counterpart of Batman." In the shiny, happy world of 1951, all goes well except for the envy that an injured Robin has regarding Batman's temporary new partner.

But the Club of Heroes story inherits the Batman that Morrison got, the "bat-jerk" we had seen hanging up on Oracle and defiant in his rectitude after R'as al-Ghul used his plans to bring down the Justice League in Mark Waid's "Tower of Babel" story. This Batman, according to #669, somehow gave Wingman the idea that he believed him to be "a bit of a loser", and that he didn't take Wingman seriously. This perception drove the capable Wingman to an unanticipated breaking point, where he would turn to evil in order to be seen as a greatest good. He was tempted by fame thanks to his own moral weakness but also because Batman had, in the words of Iago, "a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly."

It is not only the morally flawed Wingman and the fragile Club of Heroes that breaks on contact with the haughty, superior Batman. He on two occasions even drives Tim Drake away, in #657 and #676.

That Batman will reach out more to allies is also primed as Return of Bruce Wayne ends, with Batman turning to the Justice League, calling them not "my colleagues" but "my friends." ROBW #6 makes a bold point that Batman is a man with the weakness of having been left alone but the strength, since the beginning, of having help. First from Alfred, then from Dick Grayson, who saved Bruce's life not only with his action but with also his levity. As ROBW ends, Bruce turns to his friends for a particular reason: He has been fighting gods and such a fight is inherently not his because he is a man. Theme #4, No Science Fiction, begins in #701 when Batman tells us, with uncharacteristic humility, "I've worked so much to gain [the super-powered heroes'] respect, they sometimes forget I'm flesh and blood." By the end of ROBW, Bruce knows that the science fiction monster has to be beaten by science fiction heroes. He tells us as much and hands the baton to Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern. This ends the part of the story that revolves around Darkseid, time travel, demons, and space medicine. RIP ended with Bruce telling us that he was writing the last Black Casebook entry. Inc. will be what comes after that.

And so begins Batman, Inc. A new season, but Morrison was welcoming it in since his first issue back in 2006. He's been telling us since the beginning that we needed to say goodbye to the bat-jerk and see a man who is more Bruce Wayne, more human, more open -- a part of things rather than the loner above them. We could call it a new approach to the character. Morrison, through Metron, calls it the first truth of Batman. This is a very different take than Morrison's Arkham Asylum presented when it told us, "Mommy's dead. Daddy's dead. Brucie's dead. I shall become a bat." The older Waynes cannot be revived. But Brucie's not dead anymore. A bat shall become him.

Return of Bruce Wayne 6: The Myth

2010-11-10T22:35:00.000-08:00

While Bruce Wayne scored his inevitable victory over Darkseid (or rather the plan that the now-absent Darkseid set into motion) in ROBW #6, the ornate narration visited numerous details of Morrison's run and other aspects of Batman and DC mythology along the way. In so doing, it provided final explanations for a few of the lingering mysteries of the run and also made a tremendous number of comments about the character. Because I have already commented on the basic plot of Bruce beating Darkseid's Hyper-Adapter, I will focus here on the many expressive details that came along the way.

When Bruce first arrives at the end of time, thanks to Professor Nichols' time travel machine, the Archivists use the occasion to store his history into their permanent archive of the Universe. Bruce has an exalted role in the history of the universe – his is the last story to be stored and all of the final events in the universe involve him. The Archivists have a flair for the artistic: They create representations of the key items in Batman's mythic story: The pearls his mother wore, the bell he used to summon Alfred on the night he chose to become Batman, the gun and the bullets that took his parents' lives.

While completing their primary purpose for existing, the Archivists go to great lengths to help Bruce. He takes off the burning gangster clothing from ROBW #5 and undergoes a revival, what they refer, biblically, as a Lazarus Transformation. Affirming the essential, mythic characteristics of the situation, and Morrison's love of sigils, they arrange themselves in a "cardinal configuration", like the four points of the compass, as they begin to work with a Bruce who has regained his memory. Bruce describes the situation as familiar, because the urgency of the moment, and being hunted, is how Batman has spent his entire existence. At that comment, the original menace to Bruce, a bullet, is recorded as the absolute last detail to go into the archive of the universe.

Reflecting Morrison's love of science and technology, Bruce cannot help but be curious about the beings, assessing their hairy appearance as a characteristic of what roboticist Hans Moravec calls "bush robots." They, in turn, are fascinated by him, calling him and his appropriation of Nichols' time machine as one of history's great mysteries. They converse of platonic, universal matters while addressing the specifics of Bruce's problem. The timeline of Morrison's larger story, which began with a being dedicated to knowledge appearing before Anthro, ends with Bruce being assisted by these other beings dedicated to knowledge. Exemplifying Bruce's mythic stature, these beings who record the final archive of the universe are "honored" to assist him. They also tell him that this is to be his new beginning, which reminds us that Morrison's next season with Bruce will be something different and tells Bruce that these beings who know the full history of the universe already know that he's going to win this battle.

When the search party arrives, we have the first of many times that a scene or dialogue from a previous issue is repeated, this time from ROBW #2. This cuts sharply to the origin of Batman -- not the shooting, but the scene from his first night fighting crime, based on a scene in Detective #33, revamped by Frank Miller in Batman: Year One, and tweaked by Morrison to give it the characteristics of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven in Batman #682, illustrated like this issue by Lee Garbett. This scene is referenced three times in ROBW #6, highlighting the importance of the bell that Bruce rang in a way that only becomes clear upon the third instance.

At Vanishing Point, Booster Gold's assistant Skeets becomes the voice of wisdom, telling the search party that the trap Bruce created is actually a time sphere, and it carries them from their doom to the battle in which they will be essential. They escape from the timestream only moments before it ends; this is the third of three final significant events in the DC Universe. Let it be noted that Rip Hunter gets the universe's last words: "The big all-over!"

In the present, the Bruce/Hyper-Adapter hybrid easily takes down a group of JLA members which conveniently contains none of the original or Satellite Era members. When his rampage leaves only Tim Drake standing, Tim plays a card that Bruce used to stop the monster of the original Blockbuster story in Detective #345 -- he removes his mask and allows his humanity and familiarity to stop the invincible threat. Bruce, amnesiac, remains hostile, but slows to a creak, chilling the room because of the contact he made with the universe's heat death. His nose bleeding to reflect the internal struggle, Bruce's words turn tender. "I know you. Tim." More meaningful than first names, he later, more poignantly says, "Robin."

It is this measure of control that Tim helped Bruce achieve that leads him to submit when Wonder Woman arrives. In Batman #701-702, Bruce reminds us that while he is a man, these other heroes are themselves mythic and gods. Wonder Woman sees the story in her own terms, calling the Hyper-Adapter a Fury and probably in reference to Pandora, asking if Darkseid opened a box to let that demon out.

Under the power of Diana's lasso, Bruce speaks the truth while we see the words of the Hyper-Adapter struggling to manipulate him, associating the identity of Diana with Martha Wayne by saying "Mother betrayed you! Mother lied! Mother Box lied! Tell her nothing! Tell mother nothing!" Apparently compelled to obey the letter of its command, but not the spirit, Bruce continues to tell Diana everything she asks while triumphantly and hilariously vexing the Hyper-Adapter by punctuating his words with the non sequitur "Nothing." It asked him to tell her nothing. He told her everything and also told her, as it commanded, "Nothing."

As a hint of the Darkseid-Doctor Hurt association which is reinforced later, it continued its rant with lies about Thomas Wayne, much the same as Hurt would have had Bruce believe: "Father hated you! Stay lonely! Stay dead forever father fear!"

With his memory intact, the Hyper-Adapter goes on the attack, with "time" being shown to us, in the form of the Hanged Man tarot card, which symbolizes devotion to a worthy cause and also displays the petrine cross which was so notoriously removed from the cover of B&R #15. We also see the pearls and bullet and the Wayne murders, the eclipsed sun from Bruce's legend-inspiring adventure in ROBW #1, the "HAHAHA" of the Joker, symbols of games -- cards and chess, a bat and the bat-symbol, and a constellation. These tokens of what Batman is are alluded to with single-word speech balloons covering everything from the Wayne murders to the Joker's apophenia-inducing puzzles to a "ka-pow" right out of the Adam West television show.

We know that Batman must win. But he once again out-plans the enemy plan. Batman needs a time sphere for his plan to work and though the Hyper-Adapter disabled one, the search party arrives with a second one. Batman reckons that urban pollution alone is one weapon against the Hyper-Adapter -- for air to pose a danger to an alien threat is as old as The War of The Worlds. But he hits every right note at once with the masterstroke of his plan -- he has brought the monster to fight the strongest members of the Justice League on their home ground. They are empowered not only by who they are but because this moment now is the Age of Superheroes (the importance of the era itself being a thing that Libra acknowledged in Final Crisis) and presenting a theme to be developed more later, the monster must moreover fight his friends.

The superheroes, however, cannot tear the Hyper-Adapter out of Bruce -- he has to do that on his own. But once it is out, it stands no chance. In the grip of Wonder Woman, Superman, and Green Lantern, it is helpless, and they throw it where Bruce instructs them, into the time sphere. As they do, Bruce tells us that it, like the New Gods, is an idea made real. He says of it what Vandal Savage's evil thugs said of him at the end of ROBW #3, that it "never tires, never stops." Becoming the image that has defined Bruce, it becomes a bat, as it begins a trip backwards in time to its own defeat. Along the way, it makes the appearance during which it briefly fought Dick Grayson during B&R #11-12. Compelled by the time sphere, it goes back like the time-traveling bullet from Final Crisis, probably making the stop along the way to encounter 1765's Thomas Wayne as part of this voyage and not as a residue from Bruce's previous visit in 1718. Finally, it arrives in 9,000 B.C. where it is killed by Vandal Savage. Its skin later adorns the site where Savage's tribe binds Bruce to the ground and Bruce wears it in triumph, creating the bat-legend that carries forward in time, ultimately linking back to this story and itself. DC Message Board poster dangerdrventure notes that consuming the flesh of this bat form of the Hyper-Adapter may be the source of immortality for both Doctor Hurt and Vandal Savage. Its death is a part of the same story that it thought it was using to doom Bruce and his world, another dramatic example of the folly of working against Batman.

A powerful fever threatens to kill Bruce in the wake of his possession. As he falls, he puts clues together, telling us that Darkseid had tried to incarnate in Doctor Hurt. Given the evil with which 1765's Thomas Wayne began, this does not meet the requirements of incarnation from Final Crisis #4, "the ruin of a powerful, noble spirit." Maybe because of this, Darkseid was not able to use Hurt as he was Turpin.

The narration switches to pure symbols and flashbacks as a near-death experience with Kirbyesque art shows us a conversation between Bruce and Darkseid in the silent battlefield full of tombstones and broken Ozymandius-style statues where the "war in heaven" that beat the good New Gods before Final Crisis had taken place. Moments after Bruce had expelled one bat-demon, we see a flashback to what was truly Morrison's first Batman issue, the scene in 52 #30 in which the Ten Eyed Men cut away Bruce's demon -- a scene that RetroWarbird notes showed a Barbatos-like demon floating away. Lines from throughout ROBW and Batman #701 appear in fragment and show the rush of the story to this one end. We also see that the man in the wheelchair from ROBW #5 was, as many suspected, an avatar of Metron, who reveals that he has set up the Fifth World and says that Bruce can end this threat to his life, and the threat of Darkseid, by articulating the first truth of Batman. And at that, we see the third flashback to the "bell" scene and realize its true significance -- though Joe Chill's gunshots left Bruce alone, vulnerable to the fear of loneliness, he was never alone. He is staring at a bat, perhaps a stop of the Hyper-Adapter on its path to the past. In Batman #682, it is called a "peculiar, beady-eyed specimen, quite unafraid." It ends with Alfred disposing of it in humiliating fashion, sweeping it up and burning it. But at the moment of Bruce's impending mortality -- as in Return of Bruce Wayne #6, he had salvation awaiting. In that story, Bruce's help came the moment he rang the bell -- it was Alfred, who looms gigantic over this story though he is never shown and is named just once. In this story, it is Tim -- Robin. It is Wonder Woman and Green Lantern. Superman. Batman's friends.

The ringing of the bell in the flashback sends a pattern of sound across the whole world. Batman is a figure far more prone to give his assistance than to need it himself. Tim, his partner, recognizes that the way to revive Bruce is to tell him that Gotham is in danger. This is not just a claim they make for its therapeutic value. It happens to be true -- these events take place during the culmination of Doctor Hurt's attack which played out in Batman and Robin #16. Bruce's thoughts reveal in flashbacks that wrap up the mystery of the casket, that it never held anything of power. It was always a red herring for Doctor Hurt to pursue. Its note reading "Gotcha!" was a second barb aimed at Darkseid and his servants using that word, because Bruce knew that it would eventually be seen by them, as it was when Hurt went on to open it at a moment that is probably just slightly after Bruce rises from the icy bath that cools his fever. He thinks of the evil that is Doctor Hurt, and underscores for us, speaking to a mystery that has spanned two years, exactly what Hurt is: "A pure strain of platonic evil." And that there is still time to stop it. Going alone to join the battle with Dick and Damian, Bruce reminds us that his mission is not done, and will not be until "the night is over." As the Archivists knew, the knight's not over yet.

Return of Bruce Wayne 6: What Happened

2010-11-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

This issue is a piece of a puzzle. It fits squarely between ROBW #5 and the end of B&R #15. It concludes ROBW and retroactively concludes B&R and Grant Morrison's 28 issues of Batman. It leads in to Batman, Inc. while also concluding, in some respects, Final Crisis, the Batman origin tale from Detective #33, and the entire timeline of the DC Universe. An ambitious story? And then some.

What happens? Through a narrative that is tangled in time, story lines, different titles, and themes, with characters who are moving forward, backward, and sideways in time, the myth of Batman is rebuilt from the beginning to its absolute end. One very particular adventure concludes: The Hyper-Adapter that Darkseid set loose must be beaten. This, of course, happens. In that respect, the story is very simple. What it says along the way is incredibly complex. I would not want to count the panels, including tiny insets, in this issue, but I suspect that the total number is several times that of an ordinary comic.

How does the final encounter between Bruce and the Hyper-Adapter play out? The Archivists who inhabit Vanishing Point automatically snare it for him, in a trap that will last a while, but not long enough to doom it at the very end. Bruce must escape it, and because his mind is what attracts it, he asks the Archivists to wipe his memory once more. He also asks them to build a time sphere that his friends can use to escape from the universe's heat death while he borrows theirs. And so he jumps, amnesiac, to the Hall of Justice.

The Hyper-Adapter, as clever as it is ugly, has bonded with him, and so it is the Archivist suit that Bruce wears upon his arrival. Satan, as Bruce says in ROBW #2, is hairy; it is not merely a disguise he is wearing: Bruce is essentially possessed, still as dangerous as ever, taking down the JLA while they try to stop him. The Hyper-Adapter directs Bruce to do its ill bidding until Tim Drake talks the half of Bruce that is still himself into slowing down his attack. Bruce allows Wonder Woman to lasso the composite pair and let them both speak their truths. At that point the Hyper-Adapter becomes its full self, still bonded to Bruce, threatening his life and all of time. And at that, Bruce's plan is itself revealed. He knows that he is not a god and cannot face true evil on a mythic scale, but that he is not and never has been alone. He cannot beat the Hyper-Adapter, only purge it from himself. And then his friends take over. In the time of superheroes, the JLA is unbeatable: Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Superman can beat the Hyper-Adapter, and by bringing it to the JLA, Batman has made it just another monster for them to beat. It has destroyed Nichols' time machine so that Batman cannot banish it, but as always, he is a step ahead. As soon as the time sphere brings the rescue party into the fight, the three big guns of the JLA wrestle the Hyper-Adapter inside, and it is taken into the past, in the form of a giant bat, where it is turned into an element of its own story: Vandal Savage kills it, where it inspires the bat legend that Bruce's adventure in ROBW #1 created for the Miagani.

This leaves Bruce barely alive, a medical threat which is resolved with ice water and by telling him that Gotham is in peril and needs him. That sounds like a necessary lie that Tim Drake thinks of, but it happens to be true: Bruce, having returned safely to his own time with his health, mind, and life intact, leaves to go help Dick and Damian beat Doctor Hurt, which we already saw take place.

On the simplest level, that is how Batman escapes from the trap that Darkseid created for him in Final Crisis #6: With his brains, his ability to survive, and a little help from his friends.

The larger part of the narration, though, embeds inside the plot the resolution of numerous plot points from Morrison's entire bat-saga, along with a sort of essay about Batman and the most endless Batman story of them all. That will be the subject of a second post, appearing here later today.

Batman and Robin 16

2010-11-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

One has to give Doctor Hurt credit. While most villains over the years have gone down easily when opposed by Batman, Hurt stayed alive, uncaptured, and largely on the offense until he had to face the combined efforts of two Batmen, one Robin, and the Joker. He was formidable enough that he had, and passed on, opportunities to kill both Batmen in a failed effort to achieve an even larger victory. But his elaborate plans kept the heroes off-balance for years. What was puzzling them -- and us -- was the nature of his game.

For Hurt, this issue begins and ends underground, and he spends most of the middle underground. All three of these subterranean scenes are memorable. First, we see the ceremony which is not quite the origin of Doctor Hurt -- he is already devoted to evil and practiced in Satanic rites in 1765 when he manages to raise a bat apparition that he takes for a demon and which somehow, perhaps telepathically, utters cryptic messages totaling just 22 words that forge a deal with Thomas and drops clear references to Darkseid.

Key parts of Hurt's origin as Thomas Wayne -- not Bruce's father but a young man in the Wayne family looking a lot like Bruce in 1765 -- had been hinted at over the last several issues. The issue begins with a faithful retelling of the ritual from Peter Milligan's 1990 story "Dark Knight, Dark City" in Batman #452-455. Six men prepare to sacrifice a woman in order to raise a demon, Barbatos. Thomas -- Jefferson in Milligan's story, Jefferson or Wayne in Morrison's -- objects at a key moment and the men flee. But in Morrison's version, only five men flee while Thomas Wayne remains to face the demon. As much as we know of Hurt's story, this is when Old Thomas Wayne became something special. Did he receive supernatural powers? He received at least one, longevity, contingent upon various blood rituals, just like Manfred in his deal with Satan in Morrison's 1990 story "Gothic."

What this made of Thomas who, identifying with Simon Magus, called himself Simon and eventually Doctor Simon Hurt, is hinted at in sentence fragments uttered (telepathically?) by Barbatos, then later made absolutely clear when Hurt, looking in a mirror and seeing or imagining Barbatos, says "I live to be your weapon." This line is the absolute nail-in-the-coffin proof that Hurt does not imagine himself to be the ultimate evil, but rather the servant of a greater evil. If we find out more about this Barbatos, we may find out if it truly is what the issue's solicit calls "ultimate evil."

Barbatos is clearly associated with the Hyper Adapter that Darkseid set loose in Batman #702 (in a previously unrevealed detail from Bruce's showdown with Darkseid in Final Crisis #6), and is most likely exactly that. Despite Hurt's vision, we see that no actual giant bat is present, just a large one that Thomas bites into in; if the issue's title had been "Black Sabbath" instead of "Black Mass" the farcical aspects of this arc could have added a guest appearance by celebrity bat-biter Ozzy Osbourne.

Though we see Thomas and Barbatos in their deal, interesting details regarding each and their association itself remain unclear. Thomas is already in search of "the mystery box" which came into being probably some years earlier in time for Jack Valor to see it in ROBW #3. The excitement with which one of the fiends yells "Barbatos!" upon seeing the box in B&R #12 might make one think that the box was the key to Barbatos, but here and in ROBW #5, Thomas indicates that Barbatos is the key to the box. We know that something dreadful is in the box, but it has contained lately and perhaps for a long time a bat-tracer and a note. Why did Thomas want the box? Is Barbatos, in saying "Omega Adapter," identifying itself or is it a different thing, perhaps not Apokoliptan at all, speaking of the box? This remains unclear and may be part of the true finale to this story in ROBW #6. Another riddle is why this encounter took place at all -- Thomas thinks he brought it about, but was making Hurt part of the Omega plan? If so, pestering Batman seems like an irrelevant add-on to a plan to destroy the world, particularly odd in that Hurt's major blow already came before Bruce faced Darkseid. A smaller riddle is why Barbatos calls Thomas "dark twin." Maybe it is exercising its knowledge of dead languages -- "Thomas" means "twin." Maybe Thomas is the actual twin of an 18th century Wayne, Darius or another. Or if this really is all about Bruce, maybe Barbatos considers Thomas to be a twin to the object of its primary objective.

The battle in Wayne Manor features Bruce Wayne, in a surprising reemergence that seems to be factually contradicted by last month's Road Home story. And so, in his great return, Bruce is a man who surprisingly comes back from a long torturous journey to stand beside his son (and closest friend) and fight against a large number of enemies who have taken his home -- this is the plot of Book XXII of The Odyssey, a chapter commonly called "Death in the Great Hall." This is Batman's version of that story, right down to the bow and arrow that Damian uses.

The Dynamic Trio, each of them taking on 33 Fiends, is easily able to overwhelm the muscle in Hurt's plan, and the story thereafter refers much more to Morrison's Batman story of 2008 than to Greek classics. Just as Bruce descended into Arkham in RIP he descends into the Batcave. Just as the Joker taunted him by loudspeaker then, Hurt does so now. Just as Jezebel called out for help then, Alfred does so now. And just as the Joker then shouted in triumph that Bruce was finally finding out what it was like to be him (the clown at midnight), Hurt shouts now, as he locks Batman in a vault, that Bruce is finally finding out what it is like to be "second best," "the Devil in Hell." That is a reference not only to Hurt's role as an outcast but to the "fallen angel" brand of Devil who regrets having been cast into Hell, second best to the king of Heaven whom he could not overthrow. Rolling on with references to the earlier story, Hurt quotes one of the lines that the Army doctor who inspired Hurt had in Batman #156, "One of man's most primitive fears is loneliness," which was also cited by Morrison in Batman #673. And then, in a moment that fandom has been waiting for, the story offers the real meaning (Hurt's meaning, anyway) of RIP as he curses Bruce to "Rot in purgatory."

Above ground, Dick and Damian take down Professor Pyg who identifies himself as the pig named Napoleon (who was himself an allusion to Stalin) from George Orwell's Animal Farm. With a burning "Mommy Made of Nails" and one lie, they neutralize Pyg by turning his own victims upon him.

Below ground, Bruce, probably having cracked his grandmother Betsy's story from ROBW #5, tells us that Hurt was the one who had been kept in the secret room, undoubtedly the criminal whose activities brought drug and rape allegations down around Bruce's father. And when Hurt claims to be Bruce's father we can see that he's no longer just flailing for a way to get a psychological edge -- he actually cannot stop speaking and possibly believing delusions about his identity, putting the lie retroactively to his implication a few pages earlier of knowing what the Devil feels like. He exults in being for Bruce what he has so long been for the readers, an endless puzzle, a case we can never close.

The Joker leads Hurt via a trail of 1-and-8 dominoes to a Clint Eastwood showdown with Hurt that leads him to the banana peel we saw prominently last time. A look at the line of Poe scrawled on the door of Alan Wayne's tomb reminds us once more of the dark, flapping things that visited the protagonist of The Raven, Bruce in his study as shown back in Detective #33 (Morrison, in Batman #682, has the bat land on a bust to copy The Raven more closely), and Old Thomas himself in this issue's first scene.

And so, mirroring the final events setting up Bruce's worst moments going into RIP's final issue, this story's final issue has Hurt's face smashed into glass before he is set laughing by Joker venom and buried alive in a coffin. This is also how the Joker disposed of the real Oberon Sexton, but Hurt, being immortal (why he has aged enough to play Bruce's father is not addressed), just may get out of this trap at his leisure, if his inability to perform blood rituals and "space voodoo" doesn't do him in down there.

Both the Joker and Hurt are hit by Bruce at comical punch line moments, Hurt asking Barbatos for a sign and the Joker asking what could be funnier than his stint as a crimefighter. He ends, though, as a gravedigging clown, taking us back to the prose issue of Batman #663, not to mention Hamlet.

The main story at an end (give or take ROBW #6), the issue confirms Damian's emergence as a thermonuclear-bomb-defusing superhero and then gives us the set up for Batman, Inc. With Bruce Wayne deciding to make public his role in funding Batman's war on crime, we are launched into a new era that puts aside for now the dark, twisted ambiguous mysteries that have haunted Batman since he walked past unnoticed "Zur En Arrh" graffiti in Batman #655. As Lois Lane was long fooled by glasses, the audience will likely fail to notice that the athletic man whose former ward is about the right age to be the first Robin and whose son is the right age to be the current Robin might actually be Batman. And so begins a new era for Batman.

Hurt on Hurt

2010-11-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

"Call me Doctor Hurt," he said, to an audience of seven villains. On a logical level, that statement contains a hedge: The head of the Black Glove does not tell the Club of Villains that he is Doctor Hurt -- he merely tells them, and us, to call him that.

Even by the standards of super villains, Doctor Hurt is an avid liar. Among the deliberate falsehoods he speaks, there may be some delusions as well. And yet, his words and the deeds that we've witnessed provide information about him. Grant Morrison's handling of Doctor Hurt has taken readers through two different long stories that make a mystery of who this eminently capable and patient enemy of Batman is. Hurt is not trustworthy enough that his words alone could lead us to know his one exclusive identity -- if he has one. But they do help us narrow down who Doctor Hurt is in the sense of what he is like, and identify the guises he wears, which include some obvious fictions as well as some of the candidates for his identity.

Everything Doctor Hurt says is a voice from two authors for two audiences. Hurt the fictional character says things to whomever is listening. And all of those lines were written by Grant Morrison to let readers know just what he wanted us to at that point in the story. Trying to juggle the two demands and others (such as making the dialogue good) in every line makes all of Hurt's dialogue the result of a many-way balancing act that is awesome to contemplate. It's quite a bit more complex than the bare minimum task that a writer faces in writing Lex Luthor. The result may bend at times the motive to sound like Hurt versus the motive to tell readers just enough and not more.

I will highlight a few different personae within Hurt's voice, and the voices and actions that reflect his attitudes about himself. These are not definite declarations of identity: to say that Hurt speaks as though he is the Devil is not to say that he necessarily is the Devil, any more than he is Alfred when he pretends to be Alfred in Batman #679. The qualities and identities that I will track here, quotation by quotation, are, with a pithy one-word code for each:

Devil: A supernatural being dealing out earthly rewards in return for corruption.

Sadist: A man who likes others to suffer as a pleasure for him in its own right.

Wayne: A Wayne who was born long ago but is still alive.

Thomas: This code indicates specifically the father of Bruce, not the Wayne who went by that name centuries ago.

Rules: A man who is on the inferior end of complying with arcane supernatural rules, implying some other power is offering something in return for his compliance with its evil requirements.

Poor: A man who has a poor man's contempt for the wealthy and out of insecurity from that past, he exults in his access to wealth and power now.

In terms of that code, here is Hurt in his own words and actions:

"The Black Glove aims to deliver a deluxe service high stakes experience at the very highest levels of the international game.": Sadist, Poor (Batman #667)

"eyewitnesses will be bribed or killed, the widow ruined": Sadist (Batman #676)

"damaged little aristocrat": Poor (Batman #677)

"complete and utter ruination of a noble human spirit": Devil (Batman #667)

"[Batman may return.] Perhaps as my butler": Poor (Batman #678)

[Hitting Alfred over the head with a bottle]: Sadist (Batman #667)

"The usurper never was my son, was he? It was you... you and Martha, my adulterous witch of a wife, am I right?": Thomas (Batman #679)

"I'm Doctor Hurt now": Wayne, Thomas (Batman #679)

"We intend to ruin him in every way imaginable. Body and soul.": Devil (Batman #679)

"the Black Glove invites you, some of the richest people in the world, to play a game with human lives.": Devil, Poor (Batman #680)

"Can the ultimate noble spirit survive the ultimate ignoble betrayal?": Devil (Batman #680)

Joker: "I found out who Doctor Hurt is and why he hates you.": Devil? Wayne? (Batman #680)

Joker: "devil is double is deuce, my dear doctor. and joker trumps deuce... pleased to meet you, admire your work, but don't, don't, call me servant.": Devil (Batman #681)

"I'm your father": Thomas (Batman #681)

"Hole in Things. The Enemy.": Devil (Batman #681)

"Unless, of course... unless Batman agrees to serve the Black Glove. And willingly dedicates his life to the corruption of virtue. Ready to deal?": Devil (Batman #681)

"Then I curse the cape and cowl, as you will soon! The next time you wear it will be the last!": Devil (Batman #681)

"99 Fiends, like storm crows, lead the way. The 3rd Hierarchy is already at your door, my stern judgment to enact.": Devil (B&R #10)
"Absolves me of all sin": Rules (B&R #11)
"Wounds [in the shape of a 'W'] remind me who I am": Wayne (B&R #11)
"Double You": Wayne, Devil (B&R #11)
"You know what I am": Devil, Rules? (B&R #11)
"reclaim what was always rightfully mine": Wayne (B&R #11)
"walk with me", "Christ will protect you from the bullets": Devil, Rules (B&R #11)
"slate's clear, washed in the blood of the Lamb; free": Rules (B&R #11)
"let it all fall down": Wayne? Devil? (B&R #11)
"Take me home. Gotham City": Wayne (B&R #11)
"return of the king": Wayne (B&R #12)
[opening scene: man pays hit man to kill his wife and son]: Thomas (B&R #13)
"Wayne Manor is mine. Gotham City is mine.": Wayne (B&R #13)
"And soon, when the Black Sun shines": Rules (B&R #13)
"I will break and corrupt this boy": Devil (B&R #13)
"You dare imagine yourself superior to a Wayne?": Wayne (B&R #13)
"...the key to eternity": Rules (ROBW #4)
"you little slut": Sadist (ROBW #4)
"Any attempt to tamper with the locks results in the destruction of the contents, remember? The secret of life eternal is here, in a box only you know how to open, so breathe deeply and do what Doctor Thomas tells you.": Rules (ROBW #4)
"Darius and Mad Tony": Wayne, Poor (ROBW #4)
"we raised batwinged Barbatos and drank the starry venom": Rules (ROBW #4)
"Are you one too? I'll get you all in the end.": Devil (ROBW #4)
"They say he too sought in blood the secret of life eternal… but that was blood of a different sort." ["too" and "different" juxtapose the case to that of Jonah Hex as a bounty hunter]: Rules (ROBW #4)
"I knew this prize would be mine in the end. But even I can't open it without destroying the contents, and that's my big problem...": Rules? (B&R #14)
"Perfectly corrupt, Pyg. Perfectly ugly.": Devil (B&R #14)
"I give you Gotham! The new capital city of crime! Where the only law is the law of might makes right! Where human lives are commodities! Where even men like our stubborn, incorruptible Police Commissioner Gordon must succumb to the new order of things... Soon you'll do anything for what we have to offer, Gordon. You and all the other innocent victims of Professor Pyg's viral narcotic. Instant junkies.": Devil, Sadist (B&R #14)
"Does it hurt now? I have the only thing that can stop the pain right here. But my customers have to do exactly as they're told.": Devil, Sadist (B&R #14)
Betsy Kane: "Then there was that terrible night... and every time I think of his sneering, awful face... The pearls were to identify her to the gunman... Doctor Thomas by day, Bad Tommy by night. Patrick and Silas had to cover up the whole thing. The stolen drugs, the rape charges, the secret room where they treated him for months while my grandson was sent away to a boarding school. He killed my daughter, of that I have no doubt. Then he stood there and admitted he'd turned her into a drug addict and... and worse.": Thomas (ROBW #5)
"You could be the richest man on Earth. You know who I am. I'm offering you the same deal I offered the others. And I bet you everything you can't refuse. Tell me that's not hesitation, Carter. If you don't want the wealth, the fame, the admiration of your peers... what about the woman? Think about what happened when Roderick Kane chose not to play. But don't think too long. Your visitor won't keep forever.": Devil (ROBW #5)
"No one important, Carter. No one who matters.": Poor, Sadist (ROBW #5)
"Barbatos will lead us to the hidden casket of immortality and life eternal. All is prepared for the ceremony of the bat.": Rules (ROBW #5)
"A man's soul is in his reputation, his legacy. Destroy a reputation, destroy a soul.": Rules, Devil (ROBW #5)

"Open the hole in time, Carter... call down Barbatos, the hunter, the finder of great treasure.": Rules (ROBW #5)

[Carter wins Doctor Hurt's wager] "Yes... Well done. I hope that thought will comfort you in the years of lonely obscurity ahead. Now run.": Devil, Rules? (ROBW #5)
Joker: "The big brother you never had is on the Devil's chopping block": Devil (B&R #15)
Joker: "most evil man in the world": Rules (B&R #15)
"It seems I may have returned just in time to protect my beloved city from disaster.": Thomas (B&R #15)
"Our handsome young acrobat will become a human vegetable. Unable to move or feed or change himself. With only broken memories of how it felt to soar.": Sadist (B&R #15)
"All I ask is something small in return. Something soul-sized.": Devil (B&R #15)
Damian: "You're not the Devil! You're a man who lived too long. We know who you are!": Rules (B&R #15)
"Become my creature, submit absolutely to my instruction and when your soul is extinguished in my service... perhaps you'll finally know by the gaping hole that remains what it is you've lost.": Devil (B&R #15)
"[Thomas and Martha] took me in. They showed me kindness.": Thomas (B&R #15)
"Now I've taken his face. He'll be remembered as a criminal, she a drug fiend. Their son mentally ill. The legacy of Batman will be one of monstrous failure and perversion.": Sadist, Rules (B&R #15)
"I will be Batman in my great black car, preying on the weak, in Gotham's endless night.": Sadist (B&R #15)
"The ceremony of the bat has begun. As the sun shines black you and I will summon the spirit Barbatos to open this impenetrable box of ancient secrets.": Rules (B&R #15)
"One last chance to save your friend. Raise your left hand and say...": Rules (B&R #15)
"Well... here we are come to business. Alone at last. You and I.": Rules (B&R #16 preview)

That list excerpts sixty-four of the items that are most revealing about Doctor Hurt's self-image; for the moment, I withhold a few more which indicate something a bit trickier and give us more insight still. The aforementioned pieces of evidence point in several different directions. Cumulatively, they are consistent with this back story:

Thomas was a Wayne born around 1730. Contact with a bat-demon in 1765 gave him limited life extension and perhaps other powers such as protection from bullets or the ability to cast a curse. He has tried to summon Barbatos again, perhaps to refresh his life extension, but has never been able to do so. He has pursued a few evil goals since then: He wants wealth and power, but particularly the helm of the Wayne family, which he considers to be rightfully his. In the meantime, he has come to seek the corruption of all virtue and he leads others, particularly the ultra-wealthy, to make deals that cost them their souls. In pursuit of those goals, he has claimed at least once to be the younger Thomas Wayne, which he is not, and has implied if not stated that he is the Devil, which he may or may not believe.

That account is consistent and is perhaps relatively complete. But there are hints of other important story elements that do not fit easily into that.

[to Bruce] "Remember me? How you've grown, hmm? How long has it been?" (Batman #678) That line may be throwaway trash talking to his enemy when Bruce is down. But we know that Thomas and Martha took Hurt in, so Hurt probably did see Bruce when Bruce was a boy. But he has also seen Bruce as an adult, so it is odd that he mentions that Bruce has grown. This could be sheer rhetoric; it is also consistent with possession of Hurt by another mind such that he doesn't recall, as he's speaking in #678, the Isolation Experiment but does recall meeting the Waynes earlier.

"['W'] is the mark of the shadow, the dark twin." (B&R #11) Of whom? God? Some long-since dead Wayne -- Darius? The much younger Thomas? Bruce? These lines and the "double you" (which is a pun on the name of the letter) mean that Hurt is in his own mind someone else's counterpart, but there is no obvious answer as to whom. Moreover, the "double you" (a pun on the spoken name of 'W') is compatible either with the counterpart concept or with possession.

"200 years ago, Barbatos was beyond our abilities to explain or comprehend -- a demon, a myth. Now we have dark science on our side. A new understanding of time and unearthly lifeforms... In the name of the first red rock and the rage, and the angels and dukes of the dark side inferno pits." (ROBW #5) This line (as well as the chanting of King Coal's men) indicates a link between earthly Satanism and Darkseid and Apokolips. This is consistent with the previously hypothesized back story, but suggests that Hurt has become specifically aware of the nature of the demons to which he refers (the 99 Fiends include dukes) as originating somehow with Apokolips.

"Souls to feed Barbatos." (ROBW #5) This is a line of crucial importance despite its brevity, as the following makes clear:

What motivates Hurt? The answer does not need to be one thing. A person can like both skeet shooting and butterscotch pudding. Hurt is (a) a sadist; (b) a man who believes that the supernatural offers him a reward that he is seeking; (c) a Wayne who wishes that specific fortune and empire to be his. Is he also (d) the principle tempter in the universe, the Devil? "Souls to feed Barbatos" does not deliver a clear negative answer to that, but it indicates that most of the quotations tagged "Devil" above can be explained more simply: Hurt believes that what he seeks from Barbatos can be obtained by paying Barbatos with souls. When Hurt spoke of destroying Bruce's soul, he identified himself as a being who seeks evil for its own sake. But the indication that the souls are for Barbatos gives a simpler explanation of his motives: He is still motivated by more than one thing, the (a), (b), and (c) above -- he is a sadist who wants to be the principle Wayne and get some deal (probably for immortality) as well. But there is no evidence that he has a separate motive to collect others' souls. In "Gothic", Manfred acted to cause deaths in order to further his goals, but only because it furthered his goals. He says "Regrettably, this involved the regular spilling of blood." (LOTDK #9) He goes on to call the murders he commits "atrocious." They are a means to achieve an end. Hurt's line "Souls to feed Barbatos" is consistent with Hurt regretting what he does as a means to achieve his desired end. On the other hand, as a sadist, he may enjoy it quite a bit, and his characteristic smile suggests that he does. But he has a motive besides doing it because he is the being whose purpose is simply to do such things. He believes that he is gathering souls to pay such a being.

While this makes it simpler to explain his actions as those of a self-serving man (the "Rules" role that Hurt plays), it doesn't contradict the more complex possibilities that he is also the Devil or is possessed by the Devil and speaking with multiple voices. There remains the interesting dimension of the audiences to whom he speaks. The following people are present when Hurt asserts or may assert that he is the Devil: Lane, the Joker, Bruce, Dick and Damian, the doomed priest, Nichols, and in vaguer terms, others. If he is sure that he is not the Devil, why would he lay the "deal" act on so thick? Why would he say "You know what I am" with the impersonal pronoun instead of "who"? When Damian says that Hurt is not the Devil, why doesn't Hurt say, "Well, of course not. But anyway..."?

This is where the audiences make it complex. Hurt may have told Lane something so Lane would tell Bruce. Hurt could say that he's the Devil because he believes it, or he could be a man playing by Rules who thinks that a soul is only ruined if a person deals with the Devil than if a person just accepts a thing they want. Maybe he debases the priest (who isn't going to live to talk to anyone else) by telling him that he is blessing the Devil. And therefore, anything Hurt says can be explained by two motives so that there is evidence of both possibilities -- that he believes that he is the Devil; or, that he finds it useful to ruin souls for Barbatos -- but proof of neither.

And what did Hurt say to the Joker off-camera in #680? He told the Joker who he was, then the Joker said that what he found out is part of why the Joker would not join forces with Batman against the Black Glove. The Joker later calls Hurt the Devil, which is a viewpoint (fact or fiction) that he only could have gotten from Hurt, so clearly Hurt told the Joker that he is the Devil. Why lie to the Joker? Is that a soul that is not yet ruined? Maybe Hurt also told the Joker that he began as a Wayne. Clearly, the Joker's investigations as Oberon Sexton have led him to that knowledge by now, but the Joker already wanted revenge on Hurt before RIP ended. Because he's a relative of Bruce? Because he tried to do the Joker's job of eliminating Batman? Or because the Joker wants to trump the Devil, taking it as a personal challenge to be a bigger villain?

Likewise, Hurt's motive for trying to get Bruce becomes ambiguous: Is it because he's the tempter of souls and wants to corrupt "the man who has no price, the man who cannot be bought or sold or swayed from his singular path"? (Batman #663) Or because Bruce is the "usurper" holding the empire that Hurt, the rejected Wayne, believes is rightfully his? By surviving when Chill was meant to kill him, did Bruce ruin Hurt's plan to begin posing as Thomas? Even Hurt's motive for taking the Wayne empire is ambiguous: Does he want the house or free rein to hunt for the casket?

The audiences make it complex and the double audiences -- characters inside the story and we outside the story -- make it doubly complex. Look at the timeline of the evidence above. Ordered by publication date, we see one thing: Of the first stories to be published (by the end of RIP), there are many pieces of evidence for the Devil persona, followed by Thomas, with Wayne and Rules basically absent. Of the stories coming later, Rules and Devil are the leading themes referenced, with Wayne arising as a common theme, but much less prevalent.

Alternately, consider the evidence in terms of Hurt's personal timeline. We see a trend that is the reverse of publication order. Of events taking place before Batman's career started, the Rules motive is easily the most prevalent, with Devil, Wayne, and Thomas making only a couple of showings each. Of the events taking place after Batman's career started, the Devil persona is clearly the most prevalent. If we had seen this story in the order of DC Universe chronology, we would have seen a man make some sort of infernal deal to start the story, with a pretty clear track as it unfolded of who he was and what he became. The narration did the opposite: We had an utterly ambiguous figure who was revealed to us, one hint at a time, as the Devil, before the backstory was shown, one hint at a time, as to how he became who he is. And so the origin comes last, tomorrow, in Batman and Robin #16. At least, the preview shows us the beginning of the origin. At least, we may see more of the origin. We may not. As Morrison said in a recent interview, "At the same time it comes to an end now, so we learn a lot more about him, but I did want to keep a little bit of that ambiguity in there because that's what he's all about." The double motives and folding logic as each line in the story is told for two audiences has been so far a masterpiece of ambiguity.

Batman and Robin 16 Preview

2010-11-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

The preview to this week's upcoming Batman and Robin #16 opens with a scene that captures a key scene from Peter Milligan's "Dark Knight, Dark City", a 1990 story that is exerting a heavy influence on the ending of this part of Grant Morrison's long Batman saga. However, while the original comic's scene matches this one in many ways, the small differences in the preview suggest something very fundamentally different instead of trivial.

We've seen these underground demonic rites three times now, counting Milligan's story and such a scene in Return of Bruce Wayne #5. In all three, when a group is about to commit itself to the will of an evil spirit, one man backs out. In ROBW #5, the man is Carter Nichols. In DKDC, the man was named Thomas -- Thomas Jefferson. In the B&R #16 preview, the man is also named Thomas, but is probably Thomas Wayne, as seen in ROBW #4, who goes on to become Doctor Hurt.

The great difference between this scene and the corresponding scene in the original is that in the original, the intended sacrificial victim is trapped alone in the cellar with what proves to be an actual large bat, but which manages to speak across the centuries to Batman when he frees it, and the woman's spirit, in the present. It should be noted that the DKDC story has certain parallels to Morrison's own "Gothic", which was being printed at the exact same time; an ad for DKDC even appeared in one issue of "Gothic."

Because the man who is trapped appears to have planned this moment he, not Jefferson, is probably the one who objected and caused the others to flee. In any case, this is certain to be the moment at which Old Thomas Wayne (OTW) acquires the life extension that seems to have lasted a touch over 200 years, at which point the aging process must have resumed, or the young-looking man could not now be posing as Bruce's father.

The preview shows us nothing of the source of the demon but the shrine upon which the victim lies. OTW's identification of bells with Barbatos indicates that Apokoliptan technology is probably present, but this is not clear, so perhaps no such artifact is actually in anyone's grasp.

Bruce's jump in time before this scene was to and from 1718, when Jack Valor was 15. Jack appears much older when he writes his journal; he would be 62 when this ceremony takes place, so it is possible that he witnesses the casket after the ceremony took place. His journal begins in 1746, when Jack would be only 43; it's not quite clear how the 18th century timeline works out.

We know that Hurt lost the casket c. 1880 and still had not found it by c. 1980. He tries to use a time machine -- a strange prop in a story about magic -- probably to grab Barbatos from a time when Hurt had seen him before. But Bruce grabbed the device at the moment it opened a portal, and then became something that he himself did not expect -- if Hurt set the device to a time useful to him, then this bat-demon is likely to be Bruce, somehow transformed as Nichols' device grabs him from the path that the Omega trap had set him on, in an image like the actual large bat from ROBW #1. This could be a series of juggling time portals. Maybe Bruce "ditches" the Omega trap here, or maybe he uses Nichols' device to carry it to the End of Time. Nichols' device, we were told, would require a huge energy source which Hurt somehow provides. Dick encounters an energy source in B&R that keeps him from communicating with Alfred. Whatever the logic and logistics of how these stories come together, the elements are all in plain sight. An energy source, evil will, two portals in time, a bat, and a bat man.

What we have yet to see is if this evil, supernatural but often sci-fi-seeming technology has anything truly demonic, in the sense that earthly Satanists would mean the word, about it.

Hurt, who appears alternately convinced that he is the Devil and aware that he is not, is perhaps headed for an existential comeuppance: If he finds out that the demon he worshipped is the good man who is destined to stop him, and that the great spiritual evil is just a sci fi gadget. On the other hand, he seems aware of the latter distinction in ROBW #5: "200 years ago, Barbatos was beyond our abilities to explain or comprehend -- a demon, a myth. Now we have dark science on our side. A new understanding of time and unearthly lifeforms." It doesn't seem that Hurt would be surprised or disappointed to learn that a box full of wires may have granted such power as he's gotten. And if he finds out that he has been "following" Bruce all these years, that's as much a blow to Bruce to have inspired evil as it is to evil to have been duped.

Milligan may or may not have intended for the appearance of a bat in his ceremony to correspond to the one who has, by legend, visited Bruce in his study, inspiring his guise -- a story element that Morrison depicts in Batman #682. Morrison may have been foreshadowing Hurt's fate when we see that bat's body scooped up by Alfred and set afire. Bats and the Devil surrounded in flames -- this is an image in B&R #3, as I show here.

Before Wednesday's finale of this story, I will post on the words of Doctor Hurt, how he describes himself. This preview shows him on the cusp of becoming what he is. B&R #16 will possibly follow his origin with his fate. Exactly what he made of himself in the meantime is a mystery whose answers may lie in past issues, or #16, or nowhere at all.

Old Thomas Wayne

2010-10-29T03:32:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Batman was being hunted by a villain who had not shown his face, but appeared in visions and fears and predictions. Grant Morrison took the template from a benign character, an Army psychologist in a much older story, and made him into what Batman called "the hypothetical ultimate enemy." Like the monster in a horror movie, this enemy, the Black Glove, was scarier for having stayed in the shadows, and even when he'd started to make his move, Batman still called him "a mysterious Doctor Hurt who seems to have appeared out of nowhere." One clue at a time, Grant Morrison has told us that the enigmatic Doctor Hurt, who goes by many names, was in the past Thomas Wayne -- not Bruce's father but a Thomas Wayne who lived in the 18th century and, apparently, all of the time since then.

Old Thomas Wayne, for brevity's sake "OTW", is said to be the black sheep of the family, who led a sect of devil worshippers. As we have seen Hurt's plans come to fruition in two different stories in the present -- first Batman, R.I.P. and then the first sixteen issues of Batman and Robin -- we've gotten some snapshots of his backstory in at least two of the issues of Return of Bruce Wayne.

There is much to say about what Doctor Hurt is, how his statements -- often, provably lies -- may be used to determine what he has been and what he has become, and how the "devil worshipper" from 1765 became "the Devil" plaguing Batman in RIP. Rather than try to take all of that on in one post, I present here the more objective facts of OTW's life. Even in the basics, there are blanks where one can only speculate. But as nearly as can be patched together, this is the timeline of OTW's life:

~1645: Malleus = Nathaniel Wayne. (ROBW #2) He is almost certainly not Old Thomas Wayne, but he's the only other bad Wayne we've seen. His overzealous witch-hunting in the 1640s brought a curse upon the Wayne family and that curse probably took the form of OTW. There is also the journal of unknown authorship, probably Martin Van Derm, at the end of ROBW #2 saying that the Devil was not yet done with Gotham. Any adult alive for Bruce's adventure as "Mordecai Wayne" would be dead before any of the other events involving OTW unless "the Devil" stepped in way before 1765. There is no portrait of Nathaniel in Wayne Manor. Because OTW, in ROBW #4, identifies his meeting with Barbatos as being one with Thomas Jefferson, it seems that the original case of unnatural life extension coming to an evil Wayne must have taken place long after Malleus was dead.

~1730 or earlier: Born. (ROBW #4) Alan Wayne, writing over a century later says that Thomas is "at least" 150 years old. He wouldn't know for sure if Thomas were much older.

1765: The original Barbatos ritual with Thomas Jefferson, patterned on the one in the story "Dark Knight, Dark City." (ROBW #4)

~1880: Doctor Thomas Wayne is trying to get the casket back, and believes it to be the key to the same Barbatos he encountered before. We don't know how he lost access to it after having had it once. At the end of the Bruce/Hex fight, Alan Wayne ends up with it. (ROBW #4)

1889: Jack The Ripper killings take place. OTW is seen leaving by ship for England in attire like classical representations of JTR with accompanying narration saying that he seeks immortality "in blood." This could match the role of bloody murder in extending the life of Manfred in "Gothic." (ROBW #4)

~1978: Thomas and Martha Wayne take Hurt in, showing him kindness. (B&R #15) He poses as young Thomas and begins trying to frame Bruce's parents, believing that the slander will destroy their souls. His stated goal is to feed souls to Barbatos. (ROBW #5) It is not stated that he caused their deaths, but he is working against them immediately before and after their deaths. He obviously desires command of the Wayne estate, having used it soon after their deaths and having now tried to seize control of it at least twice. (Batman #677-681, B&R #13-15)

~1980: Simon Hurt works at Willowwood, in a role reflecting the Isolation Experiment and other evil psychology seen later. It seems like the Black Glove is in a sort of "rough draft", not quite as it was in RIP. For the first time we see him make someone a deal. Even though Nichols does not provide Hurt with his technology, Hurt says that Nichols wins, meaning that the terms all along were for Nichols to do evil, not to help Hurt per se. We can see that Hurt takes his deals seriously in that he lets Nichols go after Nichols turns his back on evil, but condemns Mayhew though Mayhew tries to do evil. (ROBW #5)

~1980?: Newspaper headline: GOTHAM'S HURT MISSING. The original date, seen dimly in Batman #678, was 1978, but the key idea may be that it is about 30 years in the past. It is hard to say where in the timeline this fit in. The terminal nature of the meaning may imply that it represents Doctor Hurt disappearing altogether from public at the end of the events of ROBW #5. However, he somehow becomes a psychologist working with the Army again.

~1988: Jacob Nkele, a wealthy African national leader, wins Jezebel and her mother in a Black Glove wager. (Batman #681)

~1998: Hurt is heading an experiment for the Army. Batman volunteers, and Hurt gains access to Bruce's mind. (Batman #673-674, #679)

~2000: Hurt runs an experiment for the Gotham City Police Department. This ruins three policemen, making them Hurt's slaves. This story is told primarily in Batman #664-665 and #672-674. One panel shows numerous policemen drawing their guns on him when they discover the cruelty and evil of his work. Hurt's whereabouts after this are unknown.

Unknown: Eduardo Flamingo is subjected to brain surgery that turns him into an evil killer working for Hurt. (B&R #5)

Unknown: Lazlo Valentine is subjected by Hurt to psychologically damaging experiences that turn him into Professor Pyg. (B&R #3, #14)

~2006: A monk tries to kill Batman, citing a message from his "dark master." Bruce obviously takes this to be the same mastermind who is after him in RIP. (Batman #681)

~2007: Hurt runs a contest between Good and Evil with John Mayhew trying to kill Batman and other heroes. Wingman, who was tempted by fame as a hero, also took part. This is one instance of an annual meeting of Black Glove members which must go back to the Eighties, but possibly much further. (Batman #667-669)

~2008: RIP. Hurt's long-term plan to bring down Batman unfolds but falls short of killing him. (Batman #676-681)

~2009: Hurt takes up, or resumes, an identity in Mexico as El Penitente. El Penitente has a legitimate belief in the power of a priest's forgiveness. He directs an upcoming attack on Gotham from Mexico before returning to put his plan into high gear. (B&R #4-11)

~2010: Hurt returns to Gotham, taking the identity of young Thomas Wayne and trying to corrupt the whole population. His plan to beat Batman and Robin has just been derailed. (B&R #12-15)

And so, to a respectable degree, we know where Hurt was and what he was doing. And yet the Hole in Things remains. What is his actual relationship with Barbatos, and what does he believe it to be? Is he one man with one mind, or does he host another darker spirit? Are his Satanic leanings delusions brought on by a chance encounter with an item of Darkseid's technology? Before we get to the end of the story that Batman and Robin has been building for over a year, another post in this blog will take choice passages from Doctor Hurt, which contain at the very least a high number of falsehoods, and try to patch together what is going on in the mind of Batman's erstwhile "hypothetical ultimate enemy."

Bruce Wayne: The Road Home

2010-10-28T00:14:00.000-07:00

I read the seven issues of this crossover in a fairly short span of time. It's a fairly large chunk of reading material -- the same number of issues as Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, or Final Crisis -- and it came out in just two weeks.

I haven't read the titles of the various bat-characters besides Batman too much since -- no typo here -- the Seventies. That's not to say none -- I read a few of the Red Robins in Yost's run, and most of the last several of Nightwing, and I've read some others along the way, including back issues pertaining to big events. But mainly it's foreign to me, and it's been a while since I've read that which I've read.

I think crossovers are usually inherently weak because a larger plot is handed to writers who operate better when they are setting their own agenda. To make the parts fit together, there has to be some pretty specific instruction about how each issue begins and ends, and constraints on what happens in the middle. I don't expect much of a crossover no matter which characters are involved, and which writers are contributing.

That may explain the feeling I got at most times, that the writer was largely going through the motions, and following familiar patterns, not much different than, say, JLA comics of the Sixties. The heroes uniformly exceed expectations, the villains are slightly overconfident, and we find those things out mainly because someone is saying them.

Heat flows from a warm body to a cool body, and the comics about Batman's supporting characters usually derive much of their energy from Batman himself. It flatters a supporting character to have Batman guest in their titles; in this case, the crossover is about Bruce Wayne although the supporting cast appear as each issue's title character (Yes, Commissioner Gordon has a tough-looking logo; doesn't your city's police commissioner?). These interactions deviate fairly little from a standard template: Bruce questions his proteges' performance but has, overall, faith in them. Given that similarity, and the requirements to start and end in predetermined places, the stories don't allow a lot of room for creativity.

Fabian Nicieza, who wrote three of the seven issues, gets the most leeway. He also wrote the beginning and ending of the crossover so he didn't, unlike the other four writers, have to pass the baton with every issue's start and finish. He takes advantage of the leeway to create some interesting situations: Bruce working against Dick and Damian, and sparring, as part of a ruse, with Tim. Nicieza also gives R'as an interesting sideplot concerning his memory; the topic of immortals' memory has also come up in Return of Bruce Wayne and before that in the works of Borges; one wonders which inspirations led to Nicieza concocting that subplot for the seventh and final issue.

Two characters who are not the title character for any issue have larger parts that spans the seven issues. Vicki Vale has Bruce's secret and takes a long time to figure out what to do with it. Her hesitancy fills her life with danger and also makes her story overlong and tiresome; we knew that she wouldn't reveal the secret anyway.

The other character to appear in each issue is, naturally, Batman himself, wearing a capeless, Iron-Man-esque version of his usual costume. When not protecting Ms. Vale, he is checking up on his allies in the guise of "the Insider", making his evaluations and generally doling out passing grades.

The compressed release schedule allowed the whole set of issues to come back in two Wednesdays a week apart. The first fourteen issues of Batman and Robin add up to only twice the number of comics but took fifteen months to come out. So, the road home was not a long one. Nor did it provide many sights relative to its length. It leads, it seems, not home at all, because the final stinger tells us to look for Batman, Inc., which will leave Gotham by the second issue. Bruce's return to the modern day earns a lot less fanfare than one might expect from the company's flagship character taking a two-year absence.

Batman and Robin 15

2010-10-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

Batman and Robin #15, the penultimate issue in Grant Morrison's run that christened the title, is where the lines that were so numerous and crossed earlier in the series come -- almost -- all together. From ten figures, some of whom proved to be the same individuals -- identified as villains in the early going, we are now down to three main villains plus countless Fiend henchmen, and the identities are rather clear.

As the entire structure of this run matches the same pattern as Morrison's longer run on Batman, this issue corresponds rather closely to Batman #681, with many story elements here intentionally mirroring story elements there. Parallels can also be drawn between B&R #14 and Batman #680, and so on backwards throughout the runs. The significant deviation from this is that everything stops just short of completion in #15, with some big finale events of unknown nature yet to come. Moreover, the grimmer tone of the Batman run is more bizarre and comedic this time around; Morrison had called it farce, and it's interesting to see that farce can happen with the plot much the same, but a few funny lines and facial expressions providing the seasoning.

Just as Batman #681 began with Bruce as Batman -- the more serious of that dynamic duo -- in a coffin, this issue begins with Damian as Robin -- the more serious of his duo -- in a coffin. The Joker, whose precise plan remains unknown, and must culminate next issue -- acts primarily to set Damian loose on Hurt, much of this shown in the preview. As Damian would want to do this anyway, the Joker doesn't actually do much here, but it is in grand form that he does it, dancing with the skeleton of Bruce Wayne's great-great-grandmother and telling a knock-knock joke. The inherent repetition in a "knock knock" joke ("knock" is repeated; so is the name used in each joke) plays on the theme of twins and counterparts that is all throughout this run. In a line that Damian doesn't understand, he refers to a friend of his as God's right-hand man. "Big Mike" is a brilliant double reference, using the name of the solder-angel Michael who leads God's army against the Devil in Hebrew Apocrypha and the Book of Revelation, and also the first U.S. hydrogen bomb, the test "Mike" being part of the series known as "Ivy Mike". So here, the nuclear bomb that we saw last time, ironic greeting painted on it as in Doctor Strangelove, is the weapon that the Joker threatens to use against his enemy, the Devil. But that's a plot that has to play out next time. The heroes might not need to worry that much: The weapon that the Joker wields in this issue, the "gun" that Damian thinks is aimed at his back, is just a banana. The Joker's nuclear bomb may be a barrel of old rags.

Hurt's plan, though, is culminating now. The city is in chaos, as we see when a woman tries to sell her children to the pimp and drug dealer Lone-Eye Lincoln, who debuted in Batman #678, and appeared wearing this same outfit in Batman #700. Hurt, posing as Thomas Wayne, makes an unknown offer to the city to stop the problem, an offer that is sure to do untold harm if accepted. Hurt also tells us that his desire is to be an evil Batman, driving around the city preying on the weak (the victims of choice named in devilish plans in Batman #666 and B&R #14, not to mention Final Crisis). Hurt's plan to recruit an evil sidekick is to Damian, bargaining for a soul that Damian doesn't even believe in. The leverage he holds is the life of Dick Grayson, who is menaced with brain damage as was Bruce in Batman #681.

But while RIP, like other Morrison stories such as Superman Beyond, had a ticking clock, this story has one that has been peculiarly fixed. Alfred set the clock to 10:47 and it remains at 10:47, even as days go by. If something bad is coming when the clock reaches a certain point, it's never going to happen. The sky, however, is beyond Alfred's reach. The eclipse that Hurt waited for appears in the window over the scene as Hurt kicks in the painting of Thomas and Martha and smashes the white knight figure that I pointed out a couple of months ago.

Outside of Wayne Manor, a chaos suggested by a detail chosen from the center-right of the Triumph of Death painting whose name was the title of B&R #14, Hurt's plan may be undone by a cure that Commissioner Gordon finds: when he is angry enough, he fights off the viral addiction. Emotion as a trigger is also a recurring Morrison theme: Damian was made vulnerable to Talia's spinal control system when he became angry. The means to overcome Hurt's citywide threat may thus be in the hands of the masses and not just the heroes. Ordinary people saving the day is also a Morrison theme from Justice League stories including the "New World Order" story that began his run and the Mageddon story that ended it. An idea that he uses to begin and end his run in another title is apt to end this one. A smaller detail mirroring the Batman run comes when Pyg stares at a snail and gives a speech about horns, duality, deuce, and the Devil, terms that came up in Damian's detective work in #666 and the Joker's sassing Hurt in #681.

Inside the Manor, we find out a bit more about the Hurt backstory: that Thomas and Martha were ultimately entirely good (Hurt's lies to the contrary convinced many inside the story and a few readers as well), plus the entirely new information that they had taken Hurt into their home. The promise of more backstory between Bruce as a boy and Doctor Hurt echoes Hurt's line to Bruce in Batman #678 ("How you've grown"). It also advances a bit the notion that perhaps Hurt planned the deaths of all three Waynes, as suggested by Joe Chill back in Batman #673, so that he could take on the role of Thomas, with this plan being irretrievably ruined by Bruce surviving, and telling the world that Thomas was dead. Hurt's plan now includes wearing Thomas's face (symbolically, but the phrase recounts literal face-wearing through Morrison's run, including Hurt wearing Mangrove Pierce's face back in Batman #667), ruining the Waynes as immoral people and Bruce (as suggested in the dossier as told in Batman #677) as mentally ill.

Dick planned for this encounter with Hurt, but when the plan fails, Grayson improvises, an ability which is Morrison's signature characteristic for Dick Grayson in this run. That Damian knows about Hurt's backstory as a man who has lived a very long time tells us that the book Bruce holds in Wayne Manor in ROBW #5 has come into to the possession of Dick and Damian, telling them everything that Bruce knew at that point in time, including the Miagani whistle that opens the casket. This is all they need to win the day. The casket that Hurt won in B&R #12 holds nothing more than a bat-tracer and a note with the same message Bruce had to the god he defeated in Final Crisis: "Gotcha!" Then Dick and Damian take down Hurt with the signature double-punch seen several times in this series.

The who's who questions remain in principle ambiguous: Hurt believes that he's the Devil, but Damian, who doesn't believe in souls, doesn't. And the lone figure on the final page seems overwhelmingly to be whom we hope he is. There is doubt: A Morrison interview said that Bruce returns after B&R #16; post-return comics previously on sale show a Dick Grayson who seems not to know where Bruce is; eclipses have previously sent Bruce away instead of bringing him back; and, the B&R #8 reveal about the clone showed that Morrison is willing to overturn a "big moment" like the one at the end of Final Crisis #6 with a twist. But everything else is telling us that when Hurt thinks that he's summoning Barbatos, he gets the only Bat God there ever was, with Bruce Wayne speaking in words like icicles, "Turn around, Doctor. It's all over."

Update: Note the Morrison comment in a recent interview: "So in 'Batman And Robin Must Die!' it's all kind of upside down. It's not really a Batman story. It's a Joker story." This means a certainty that the Joker will figure large in the next issue, and thus a good likelihood that he is the Bat-God on the last page.

Also note that the Joker left a banana peel on the stairs leaving the Alan/Catherine tomb. To continue the idea of this story as RIP turned farce, it would be fitting if someone, particularly Hurt, slips on the banana peel next issue.

Batman and Robin 15 Preview

2010-10-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

Grant Morrison's run on Batman and Robin has followed a highly regular structure: One long story with five story arcs of three stories each; the five tie together, but each is readable on its own. This structure may be altered a bit as the fifth arc reaches its third but not necessarily final issue. Issue #16 will end the "season" that Morrison started with #1, but without knowing how #15 wraps up, one can't know what business will be left for #16 to take care of.

The chaos of this fifth arc is structured a bit further with each issue titled for a particular death-themed work of visual art; these are shown at right (clicking will enlarge the image, although the rich detail of the originals is still not evident). It is worth wondering if the paintings unlock a code that would tell us more about the issue that comes out tomorrow. Two of the issues are already in our hands, and there is possibly a bit of detail to decipher.

Hugo Simberg's The Garden of Death shows none of the title figures, but shows, in Simberg's own words, a place where the dead rest on the way to their eternal afterlife. The issue itself begins with a focus on the Wayne murders, through an enigmatic scene that depicts an alternate version in which Thomas pays Chill to kill Martha and Bruce. Then Thomas lives a public life with a private evil side. This is similar to claims that Doctor Hurt made in Batman, R.I.P., but clearly deviates in fact, because Bruce did not die and an evil Thomas did not continue to live on in public. As we saw more of the Black Glove's involvement with the Waynes in ROBW #5, one may speculate that the reason why Hurt did not assume the life of Thomas Wayne (as he is doing now in B&R) is specifically because Bruce was left alive and had borne witness to the death of his real father. This would terminally ruin Hurt's plan, and would add a great deal of texture to Hurt's reasons for hating Bruce Wayne, beyond the already-sufficient motive of his incorruptibility.

The second issue and the Bruegel painting The Triumph of Death share one obvious trait: An abundance of figures. Dick Grayson is mobbed twice by Dollotrons, who are individually by far his inferior in combat, but as a group manage to give him some trouble before another blow takes him down. The mob of Dollotrons resemble the army of skeletons who attack the living (also numerous). This painting also appeared in Batman #667, with Doctor Hurt posing before it in the video shown to the Club of Heroes.

Finally, Dürer's Knight, Death, and the Devil shows three figures who unambiguously represent for Morrison's purposes Dick Grayson, the Joker, and Doctor Hurt -- the preview at the end of B&R #14 makes that clear, with each name appearing over a panel depicting the respective character. So we might expect the stage to be cleared of crowds, and a proper showdown between the three central characters to follow. We also know that Damian will play a major role -- Morrison has said that this will be the moment that his character flaws will be redeemed -- but that could span the range from turning down a deal with the Devil to accepting one for the greater good.

The preview released today shows the Joker holding Damian hostage in what is almost definitely the rail line under Wayne Manor, where the Satanic Batcave is linked to the place where Dick found the casket which is now in Hurt's possession. The Joker dances with a skeleton who is very likely Catherine Wayne from ROBW #4, the woman who died in childbirth delivering Kenneth, the great grandfather of Bruce. Kenneth's son Patrick was mentioned in ROBW #5. This underground passage was where the Joker was attempting to enter when he was struck down, coincidentally, by Talia's plan in B&R #11.

In the battle between Batman and Hurt, the Devil holds the cards, and the Joker has identified him as the most evil man in the world. But for all of Hurt's smugness, that we know that Dick has had Alfred prepare the manor (where else would a knight live?) and the cave in some way that is guaranteed to bring Hurt's downfall. Knowledge is power: We saw Bruce holding the book that was in the casket in Wayne Manor at the end of ROBW #5, and it was clear that Bruce had, to every extent necessary, figured things out. That certainly means that he has figured out how to beat Darkseid's plan in ROBW. It may also mean that at that time, c. 1980, Bruce has left the critical clue (or the book itself) for Dick Grayson. It is clear, though, that at the end of ROBW #5 the book is on the grounds of Wayne Manor outside of the casket unless Bruce actually placed it in the casket at that time. If he did, then he probably altered the casket in some way that will ruin Hurt's plan. If he didn't, then the book is waiting for Dick to find it. The latter is more likely; Dick has confidence in and knowledge of what is coming.

The Joker has said that what is at stake is that "everyone dies", "in the crossfire" of the dominoes falling, dominoes that he started falling, and that no one, "not even me", can stop it. This implies that the Joker has set into motion a doomsday threat that is the real problem to solve; if he cannot stop it, this could be because some mechanism has been put into place. As it's the Joker who is involved, it could even mean that he is compelled to carry out some horrible act that he cannot resist perpetrating. It seems that he means to use Robin as a weapon against Hurt, but the form that this takes may not be good for Damian. It definitely ends with Damian tied up in the Wayne Manor library. Are the ropes holding him a ruse? The cover shows Damian making a Satanic deal; how will events mirror their equivalents in Batman #666?

This story will come to its climax in this issue and the next one. Robin in a coffin ("Robin Graves"... a pun on grave-robbing and Robin being "grave") and Batman with a bullet in his brain. The heroes begin this final act from a position of weakness. This sequel to RIP, with the farcical elements added by the Joker's interference, has yet to up the stakes (the Joker's atomic bomb should do that) while the action and revelations about the past tie up a three-way war. It's hard to predict the course of events, but the Dürer woodcut makes the Knight look very impressive.