"They tell stories about us, you know."
— Eddie Nigma, a.k.a. The Riddler, "When Is a Door"
Cover to Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? The Deluxe Edition © 2009
DC Comics. Pencils, Inks: Andy Kubert. Colors: Alex Sinclair. Typography: Unknown.
Last May brought the 70th anniversary of Batman's debut in Detective Comics #27, as I wrote around the time of the actual event. DC Comics marked the occasion by killing him during a storyline called RIP. Or, actually, it didn't.
I say that for three reasons:
(A) The 70th anniversary wasn't really "marked" at all, to my knowledge. I'm only a casual reader of comics these days, true, as opposed to the die-hard fan turned self-appointed scholar and journalist that I was for the middle 15-20 years of my life. So it's possible that at conventions and in industry magazines DC was promoting writer Grant Morrison's run, which has included the latest passing of the mantle from Bruce Wayne to Dick Grayson, as explicitly celebrating the character's seven decades of existence — Morrison has been referencing Batman history right and left. One might also argue that 70 isn't as ballyhooed a birthday as golden or diamond jubilees when it comes to pop-culture properties. Yet DC failed to capitalize on the 50th anniversary of its marquee band of superheroes, The Justice League of America, earlier this year. It also let many months lapse after the 75th anniversary of the very first proto-DC publication before addressing the issue (no pun intended) with so much as a designer icon.
(2) Bruce Wayne didn't die during RIP, the storyline that ran in DC's main Batman series — and had its logo branded upon affiliated monthlies (Robin, Detective Comics, Nightwing) — but in the pages of Final Crisis, a line-wide DC Universe crossover also written by Morrison. RIP as a title doesn't guarantee that an actual demise is involved, of course; heck, even stories billed "The Death of..." very rarely feature in-continuity, for-real deaths of the character in question. We did see Darkseid's omega beams strike Batman in Final Crisis #7, though, and while the beams have been known to teleport or outright vaporize living beings (who can later be reconstituted at Darkseid's whim) we also saw Superman holding Batman's skeletal remains, which were later briefly animated in another DC Universe crossover called Blackest Night. Many readers were upset by this, not so much because they didn't want Bruce Wayne gone — nobody truly believed he'd be taking a permanent dirt nap — but because it felt like a bad-faith bait and switch to kill him off (however temporarily, given serialized superherodom) in another series when something called RIP was coming to a head in the pages of Batman itself, especially since RIP was the culmination of a set of sprawling, often daring, occasionally gripping Morrison Batman arcs and Final Crisis was just, well, sprawling.
(C) Notwithstanding what it says in those last couple of sentences, Bruce Wayne apparently didn't really die at all. And I don't mean that in the sense of him merely being a fictional character, although oddly enough that very fact is an enjoyably meta aspect of Morrison's overarching Batman stint as well as the non-Morrison book I'm about to review. I mean that it's been confirmed that the character seen sitting in a cave at the end of Final Crisis is indeed Bruce Wayne, skeleton be darned — and that he's currently fighting his way through the timestream back to modern-day Gotham City in yet another Morrison-written homage to some of the goofier tales of yesteryear called The Return of Bruce Wayne. That limited series is running parallel to the ongoing Batman, Batman and Robin, and Batman: Streets of Gotham, among other series, which feature a new Dynamic Duo consisting of Dick Grayson (the first Robin, ward and then adopted son of Bruce Wayne, later known as Nightwing) and Damian Wayne (Batman's possibly biological and possibly cloned son, or so my fuzzy recall of Morrison's Batman and Son storyline has it, based on a tryst with Ra's al Ghul's daughter Talia in a graphic novel long considered to be out of DC Universe continuity).
© 2008 DC Comics. Credits as below.
Moore wrote the justifiably legendary two-parter "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" for the September 1986 issues of Superman and Action Comics, homaging decades of Superman lore that was being put in storage after Crisis on Infinite Earths. Unlike his cousin Supergirl or the contemporary Flash, Superman hadn't even apparently died during that Crisis, as Batman did in early 2009; there was, however, a clean (all right, jagged) break between the pre- and post-Crisis continuities in 1986, whereas Final Crisis took place within ongoing continuity. Gaiman therefore chose to tell a tale set outside the DC Universe and paying respect to periods past in more metaphysical fashion than did Moore. That the title "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" references Moore's story isn't necessarily inappropriate, but they're different animals.
Gaiman's story opens with both scripted and visual clues that we're not in Gotham anymore — well, in fact, we are ostensibly in Gotham, but a dreamlike one closer to a melancholy Oz than to Kansas, even if the captioned dialogue indicates that we're not exactly observing a dream. The dialogue, a two-person conversation in boxes of blue and gray, suggests that at least one of the speakers is Batman. Panel-to-panel illustrations, meanwhile, show us a raven-haired beauty parking her Catmobile in front of a total dive, greeting bartender Joe Chill, and predictably being referred to in turn as Miss Kyle when the word balloons commence. Things only get stranger after the ever-stoic Alfred Pennyworth leads her towards an open casket which a double-page spread confirms is cradling the Dark Knight, as a blue caption protests, "... That's me." It's then that the scope of this story's surreality is made clear, with characters from multiple eras of Batman mythology mingling — among them both a Joker modeled after the 1950s Dick Sprang version and one who stepped out of the 1990s animated series, within mere panels of one another, although Gaiman and penciler Andy Kubert are careful never to have alternate avatars of a given character interact. My favorite lines are in the small talk, full of winks that generally avoid the precious, as when Alfred tells Kirk Langstrom at the service that he may sit on "either side of the aisle."
Surreality is a particularly apt description, in fact, since the tale essentially takes place on a plane above the standard comics reality that it supplanted for a month when it first ran in April 2009's Batman #686 and Detective Comics #853 (edited by Mike Marts with Janelle Siegel). The reader becomes witness, along with Batman and his mysterious companion, to a series of testimonials from the Dark Knight's friends and foes as to what kind of man he was and how he died. First comes Selina Kyle's, and it references her 1940 debut as The Cat (later The Cat-Woman, then Catwoman) in Batman #1 and 1983's classic "The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne" from The Brave and the Bold #197 (featuring the Earth-Two incarnations of Gotham's star-crossed couple) before veering into Elseworlds territory and a disturbing conclusion. Much more disturbing to me, however, is Alfred's account of Bruce Wayne's life and death; even if it's supposed to be an ad absurdum commentary on interpreting Batman as insane or an indictment of portraying him too realistically, it's too much of that topic to be remotely enjoyable.
Kubert and inker Scott Williams shift styles to reflect the moods and, if applicable, the times or even specific stories invoked, echoing Sprang, creator Bob Kane, Neal Adams, Brian Bolland, David Mazzucchelli, and more. It's unfortunate that I prefer Kubert's tributes to his own style; his layouts are accomplished, but I've never really warmed to his rendering. I'd have enjoyed the story much more if the baseline art were more in the bolder, simpler vein of his references to Year One's Mazzucchelli and "Autobiography" artist Joe Staton — both of whose work, somewhat curiously although with no complaints from me, are largely used as stand-ins for Kane, Jerry Robinson, and Sprang in the Catwoman vignette; I would almost swear that in one shot Kubert et al. are homaging Dave Gibbons doing a gloss on the Carmine Infantino & Murphy Anderson look as swiped from a Staton panel. Alex Sinclair's colors, meanwhile, are over-rendered in the fashion typical of the past dozen-plus years, working against the attempted evocation of period and against the clarity of the art in general.
Last May brought the 70th anniversary of Batman's debut in Detective Comics #27, as I wrote around the time of the actual event. DC Comics marked the occasion by killing him during a storyline called RIP. Or, actually, it didn't.
I say that for three reasons:
(A) The 70th anniversary wasn't really "marked" at all, to my knowledge. I'm only a casual reader of comics these days, true, as opposed to the die-hard fan turned self-appointed scholar and journalist that I was for the middle 15-20 years of my life. So it's possible that at conventions and in industry magazines DC was promoting writer Grant Morrison's run, which has included the latest passing of the mantle from Bruce Wayne to Dick Grayson, as explicitly celebrating the character's seven decades of existence — Morrison has been referencing Batman history right and left. One might also argue that 70 isn't as ballyhooed a birthday as golden or diamond jubilees when it comes to pop-culture properties. Yet DC failed to capitalize on the 50th anniversary of its marquee band of superheroes, The Justice League of America, earlier this year. It also let many months lapse after the 75th anniversary of the very first proto-DC publication before addressing the issue (no pun intended) with so much as a designer icon.
(2) Bruce Wayne didn't die during RIP, the storyline that ran in DC's main Batman series — and had its logo branded upon affiliated monthlies (Robin, Detective Comics, Nightwing) — but in the pages of Final Crisis, a line-wide DC Universe crossover also written by Morrison. RIP as a title doesn't guarantee that an actual demise is involved, of course; heck, even stories billed "The Death of..." very rarely feature in-continuity, for-real deaths of the character in question. We did see Darkseid's omega beams strike Batman in Final Crisis #7, though, and while the beams have been known to teleport or outright vaporize living beings (who can later be reconstituted at Darkseid's whim) we also saw Superman holding Batman's skeletal remains, which were later briefly animated in another DC Universe crossover called Blackest Night. Many readers were upset by this, not so much because they didn't want Bruce Wayne gone — nobody truly believed he'd be taking a permanent dirt nap — but because it felt like a bad-faith bait and switch to kill him off (however temporarily, given serialized superherodom) in another series when something called RIP was coming to a head in the pages of Batman itself, especially since RIP was the culmination of a set of sprawling, often daring, occasionally gripping Morrison Batman arcs and Final Crisis was just, well, sprawling.
(C) Notwithstanding what it says in those last couple of sentences, Bruce Wayne apparently didn't really die at all. And I don't mean that in the sense of him merely being a fictional character, although oddly enough that very fact is an enjoyably meta aspect of Morrison's overarching Batman stint as well as the non-Morrison book I'm about to review. I mean that it's been confirmed that the character seen sitting in a cave at the end of Final Crisis is indeed Bruce Wayne, skeleton be darned — and that he's currently fighting his way through the timestream back to modern-day Gotham City in yet another Morrison-written homage to some of the goofier tales of yesteryear called The Return of Bruce Wayne. That limited series is running parallel to the ongoing Batman, Batman and Robin, and Batman: Streets of Gotham, among other series, which feature a new Dynamic Duo consisting of Dick Grayson (the first Robin, ward and then adopted son of Bruce Wayne, later known as Nightwing) and Damian Wayne (Batman's possibly biological and possibly cloned son, or so my fuzzy recall of Morrison's Batman and Son storyline has it, based on a tryst with Ra's al Ghul's daughter Talia in a graphic novel long considered to be out of DC Universe continuity).
Double-page spread from "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" © 2008 DC Comics.
Script: Neil Gaiman. Pencils: Andy Kubert. Inks: Scott Williams. Colors: Alex Sinclair.
I'm afraid that I may have scared off "civilians" with the above, something I'm loathe to do when recommending accessible graphic novels. Since the Neil Gaiman stories (drawn by a variety of artists) collected in Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? aren't all that accessible, though, no worries there. It's not nearly as dependent on knowledge of current continuity as something like Final Crisis or Blackest Night, and requires no particular familiarity with recent Batman stories at all, including Grant Morrison's ambitious tapestry of the past few years. But I don't think that the tales reprinted in Whatever, released by DC Comics as a $14.99 trade paperback [ISBN 978-1-4012-2724-1] last month in the wake of a so-called Deluxe Edition $24.99 hardcover [ISBN 978-1-4012-2303-8] last year, will be rewarding to newcomers to the Dark Knight mythos. The title story depends on not just affection for the character and recognition of his various, often contradictory interpretations since 1939, but ideally affection for his having various, often contradictory interpretations, while the older entries that round out the volume push different yet similar buttons.
A much more satisfying first taste of Batman comics, which frankly will never quite be surpassed, can be found in 1987's Batman: Year One, written by Frank Miller and illustrated by David Mazzucchelli & Richmond Lewis, re-released a few years back in a gorgeous 20th-anniversary edition. The softcover [ISBN 978-1-4012-0752-6] is still in print at $14.99 — a bargain at retail and worth patronizing your local comics shop for, a veritable steal for the ten bucks 'n' change showing up right now online. You can also get the Whatever Happened... TPB at the latter price, and for more-Batman-aware readers with a soft spot for milestones or metafiction I can't exactly not recommend it; I just wish it had been better.
While the current DC Universe was adapting to a world without Bruce Wayne thanks to Morrison's grand plans, Neil Gaiman was asked to, in essence, deliver the eulogy — not one given "in continuity" but one for the fans. Gaiman and Morrison were both part of the late-'80s British Invasion of DC Comics sparked by the success of Alan Moore; they made their bones Stateside reviving or revitalizing such features as, respectively, The Sandman and Doom Patrol. Morrison's Animal Man was a brilliant, sometimes frustrating, ultimately touching piece of self-consciousness that broke the fourth wall, as his Doom Patrol merely broke taboos telling adventure stories about a surrogate-family team of misfit superhumans. Sandman has had the most acclaim outside traditional American comics readership among that era's like efforts, including Moore's pivotal Swamp Thing, but at the time I distinctly remember debating with one good friend in particular the merits of Morrison vs. Gaiman, naming Gaiman the more consistently satisfying writer and Morrison's work perhaps more ambitious but ultimately less satisfying narratively between his undeniably delicious spikes of genius. Their output in the intervening decades hasn't disabused me of that broad judgment.
A much more satisfying first taste of Batman comics, which frankly will never quite be surpassed, can be found in 1987's Batman: Year One, written by Frank Miller and illustrated by David Mazzucchelli & Richmond Lewis, re-released a few years back in a gorgeous 20th-anniversary edition. The softcover [ISBN 978-1-4012-0752-6] is still in print at $14.99 — a bargain at retail and worth patronizing your local comics shop for, a veritable steal for the ten bucks 'n' change showing up right now online. You can also get the Whatever Happened... TPB at the latter price, and for more-Batman-aware readers with a soft spot for milestones or metafiction I can't exactly not recommend it; I just wish it had been better.
While the current DC Universe was adapting to a world without Bruce Wayne thanks to Morrison's grand plans, Neil Gaiman was asked to, in essence, deliver the eulogy — not one given "in continuity" but one for the fans. Gaiman and Morrison were both part of the late-'80s British Invasion of DC Comics sparked by the success of Alan Moore; they made their bones Stateside reviving or revitalizing such features as, respectively, The Sandman and Doom Patrol. Morrison's Animal Man was a brilliant, sometimes frustrating, ultimately touching piece of self-consciousness that broke the fourth wall, as his Doom Patrol merely broke taboos telling adventure stories about a surrogate-family team of misfit superhumans. Sandman has had the most acclaim outside traditional American comics readership among that era's like efforts, including Moore's pivotal Swamp Thing, but at the time I distinctly remember debating with one good friend in particular the merits of Morrison vs. Gaiman, naming Gaiman the more consistently satisfying writer and Morrison's work perhaps more ambitious but ultimately less satisfying narratively between his undeniably delicious spikes of genius. Their output in the intervening decades hasn't disabused me of that broad judgment.
Panels from Page 7 of "Whatever Happened to the
Caped
Crusader?"
Part 2
Panels from Page 4 of "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" Part 1 © 2008 DC Comics.
Script: Neil Gaiman. Pencils: Andy Kubert. Inks: Scott Williams. Colors: Alex Sinclair. Letters: Jared K. Fletcher.
Panels from Page 2 of "Whatever Happened to the Caped
Crusader?"
Part 2 © 2008 DC Comics.
Credits as above.
Panels from Page 4 of "Whatever Happened to the Caped
Crusader?"
Part 2 © 2008 DC Comics.
Credits as above.
The panel referred to in the previous paragraph, as published in