Monthly Archives: July 2021

Bats and Legends: “Prey”

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If you want, you can blame Bob Kane and Bill Finger. 

In November 1939, they published their origin story for Batman, in Detective Comics #33. It’s been 82 years, and the details haven’t changed much–Bruce Wayne leaves a theater with his mom and dad; a criminal holds them up with a gun, shooting his parents; he sits in a puddle of their blood and watches them die. This becomes his inciting event–the reason he dedicates himself to a life spent striking fear in the hearts of criminals as a bat. Also, man. A Bat-man, if you will. 

But really, it’s Frank Miller’s fault. Until his work in the 1980s, this story was an inciting incident for the Bat-mythos, but not the sole driving factor that made this dude dress up every night and get frothing angry at petty criminals. With Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, he paired Batman’s hypermasculine power with an almost infantile anguish over the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents. Not only did that create a cloud that has hung over Batman’s adventures ever since; it also has inspired hero after hero to develop their own parental issues, most often in the daddy department (Superman, the Flash, Iron Man, and so on). 

(It’s not that the death of Bruce’s parents wasn’t central to Batman’s mythology prior to Miller; it’s that it became popular to suggest it was practically the only relevant development in Bruce’s life prior to donning the cape and cowl. At one point in the seventies, writers seemed to be embracing a more magnanimous view of the Caped Crusader’s motivators; sure, losing his parents was an inciting event, but then Bruce got training from experts around the world and became inspired to dedicate his life to being a force for good in Gotham. Whereas the whole “PARENTS DEAAAAAD” vibe reads as more of an obsession than a vocation, and leads to all kinds of angst that somehow became hugely relatable to pimple-faced teenagers in the 90s and aughts, not unlike myself. ANYWAY.) 

If you’re gonna dive into psychobabble with Batman, you almost have to pull the Hugo Strange card. (Joker’s up there too, of course, because lately all he does is prattle on about the nature of Batman’s obsessions and how he himself is the inevitable counterpoint/flip side of a dark, dangerous coin. But Strange has a Ph.D, so.) That’s exactly what Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy get up to in “Prey,” published in issues 11 through 15 of Legends of the Dark Knight in late 1990 and early 1991. 

As a story, “Prey” is a bit of a tangled mess. There’s Hugo Strange and Batman, and there’s Commissioner Gordon and a beautiful woman who is as underwritten as you’d expect. Catwoman has an extended cameo, and there’s a role for an overeager sergeant on the Gotham PD who becomes the Night Scourge, a competing vigilante, under the hypnotic thrall of Strange. 

Keeping all of these plot plates spinning requires Moench to paper over a few substantial leaps in the story; as obsessed as the overeager sergeant might be, do we really buy that a hint of hypnosis would turn him into a costumed crimefighter? Would we then also buy that he can hold his own against Catwoman and Batman in hand-to-hand combat? What about Hugo Strange himself donning a perverted Batman-esque costume for a breathy conversation with a lady mannequin to whom he seems inordinately attached? 

Again, the blueprint here is obvious–these are “year one” stories for Batman, so Moench takes his cues from Miller’s inciting work. There’s a Gordon/police storyline, a Hugo Strange storyline, a Batman storyline, and what amounts to a few scattered scenes of pinup Catwoman writhing in bed with her pets before she shows up to play a single impactful role in the overall story. 

Moench feels like he’s checking items off a scorecard for this story, which is a shame, because Gulacy and inker Terry Austin deliver visuals with a heft and solidity that give their version of Gotham and its inhabitants a realistic gristle. Austin deploys shadow with care; paired with Steve Oliff’s colors, it creates a world that is dark, but not impossibly so. There’s enough light to make out color and shape; again, heightened but real. 

Moench does provide a splash of fanboy glee when he introduces the Batmobile to the “year one” era, in a design that’s inspired by Michael Keaton’s conveyance in the 1989 movie but not beholden to it. But moments like that are the exception rather than the rule, and unfortunately “Prey” loses its way pretty early to become wandering and listless.

***

Tegan O’Neil takes a more favorable view of “Prey” in this review from 2015.

Next: This is your Batman on drugs. Any questions?

Prestige, Baby: Batman/Judge Dredd

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My first “prestige format” comic book was, naturally, The Dark Knight Returns. That was the first prestige release ever, and the format only increased in popularity throughout the late eighties and nineties, driven by the overall spike in the comics market and by intense interest in specific characters. 

I have to imagine that prestige books were an easy way for publishers to clean up; maybe they cost a bit more to publish, but you still got to pay for maybe 48 pages of story (or less!) and mark it up to five or six bucks a pop. 

This “golden age” of prestige one-shots was a fertile time for our favorite Caped Crusader as well, arriving during Batman’s first great run of megapopular movies. Again, the opportunity was too great for DC to pass up. In this occasional series, we’ll take a look at some of the many, MANY prestige format one-shots published during this era. 

O, dystopia! 

It provides the location for so much speculative fiction, as well as an easy out for writers who are too lazy to do anything more creative with their ideas. Even the most trite, unoriginal plots gain a little gristle when dropped into a hopeless future. 

Which is not to say that Judge Dredd is a trite or unoriginal character. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that his emergence in the pages of 2000AD in 1977 helped establish the popularity of bleak dystopia in comics. From that fertile ground grew some of Alan Moore’s biggest hits of the 1980s and even the seminal Frank Miller joint The Dark Knight Returns. Perhaps it’s a jagged, dotted line between the two, but you can definitely see the connection. 

All of that precedent makes the (inevitable?) meeting of Batman and Judge Dredd in Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgment on Gotham a bit of an anticlimax. With the success of the character’s dark and satirical stories, Judge Dredd helped begat the late 80s bleakness across the Batman line; the Bat-mania from 1989’s Tim Burton film demanded a glut of Bat-product to fill the Bat-shelves; by 1991 it was still going strong, inviting this one-shot by Alan Grant, John Wagner, and Simon Bisley. When Batman ends up in Mega-City One through some technobabble Macguffin, it’s like he’s visiting home. 

So much of reading and writing about old comics is just examining these strange things as artifacts of their time and their cultural moment. This book would not exist if Batman comics weren’t in such huge demand in 1991, buoyed by the general rise in sales thanks to the dawn of the speculator boom. There’s also the sense in which the book’s tone is itself attempting to react against the push toward more graphic and “adult” storytelling in funnybooks. This was before the mature readers label existed, and so it’s jarring to flip through the book and see some of Judge Death’s incredibly gruesome murders, or the full page set in Judge Anderson’s apartment where she answers the phone in the middle of the night and climbs out of bed, wearing naught but a G-string and apparently oiled as though she were prepared to race off to an emergency weightlifter competition at any moment. 

This is a very 90s comic in its way, but featuring a character who inspired much of the tone of 90s comics, written by guys who themselves invented a lot of the tricks in 90s comics back when they were really daring in the late seventies and early eighties. If their attempts at gross out humor or “butt” puns fall a bit flat, it’s hard to blame them; that material killed before everybody and their brother swiped it. 

Storywise, it’s hard to fault Grant and Wagner, since their plot echoes the comfortable beats of just about every cross-universe superhero team-up. There’s a misunderstanding, a battle between the heroes, an unlikely alliance between signature villains, and then a climax in which both heroes save the day and say goodbye, but not before they realize that HEY, maybe they weren’t so different after all. They’re both workhorse legends in British comics, and Grant has the added benefit of approaching the book in the midst of his own time on both Detective Comics and Batman, along with artist Norm Breyfogle. They both “get” Dredd and Batman. 

The star of this book, and the reason to give it at least a flip-through twenty-five years later, is Simon Bisley’s artwork. Bisley also came up through the ranks at 2000AD before making his way to the states and finding success as one of the signature artists on Lobo, a character who also owes much of who he is to the Dredd aesthetic and tone. 

Bisley takes full advantage of this stand-alone prestige release to create a stand-alone visual universe that plays to his strengths, bright grotesque figures rising up out of a dark miasma. His character designs are outsized and impressionistic, with flashes of extravagant detail that push the look toward an almost abstract feeling at times. It’s virtuoso work, and even when the book’s plotting falls into comfortable storytelling grooves, the visuals carve into unexpected territory. 

Bats and Legends: “Gothic”

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In college, I did a senior year thesis on Frank Miller, Klaus Janson & Lynn Varney’s The Dark Knight Returns, heavily inspired by Scott McCloud’s exceptional Understanding Comics. He explores a topic in that book that he calls “closure,” which is the reader’s effort to fill in the narrative or movement “blanks” between panels. It’s the imaginative leap that makes comics work. I wrote about a concept called “emphasis,” which is the creator’s choice of what to depict in any given panel–part illustration, part animation, part cinematography. 

While the choice of emphasis by an artist seems obvious when a panel simply conveys story information, it’s just as often used to set mood and meaning. That was the crux of my thesis–a close read of the sequence in Dark Knight where Bruce Wayne recalls the death of his parents. We see closeups of Martha Wayne’s pearl necklace caught by the arm of her attacker; as the attacker pulls his arm away, the necklace is pulled apart. We see the necklace stretch and the pearls separate in excruciating detail. More than just suspense, this sequence builds an excruciating tension because of Miller’s emphasis in key panels on the pearls versus any number of other images he could have used to convey the same information.

Action sequences are another place where emphasis plays a huge role–the choice of what positions to depict for the participants can help convey a sense of motion, or if they appear too posed, give the sequence a halting, motionless feeling.

Klaus Janson’s work on “Gothic” has me thinking about emphasis again, because as a penciler, he chooses some weird poses to capture in his art.

Batman_Legends_of_the_Dark_Knight_006_1990
This is Batman rousting a thug, pencils and inks by Janson.

In a sense, it’s similar to any number of familiar images of Batman–the dark knight falling from above with menace in his eyes, his arms outstretched, cape furling in the wind.

Except that’s not quite what we get here. There’s nothing that establishes Batman as being above the ground prior to this page, so it’s not clear of he’s dropping down from a height or maybe standing from a crouch. His arms aren’t outstretched, holding his inky black cape aloft; they’re in mid-motion, either extending the cape or bringing it in.

It’s a lived-in, real version of an image that’s existed before, and will exist countless times again. Janson’s own inks give the moment (and many others throughout the book) a kinetic charge, as close to a jump cut as you’ll see in comics.

But there is a firmness, a solidity in the image, and it’s in Batman’s face. That half-smile. It leaps out from the page. His full frame isn’t quite as menacing as his expression. And he dominates the rest of the page–not just because his reveal fills the top two-thirds but because he and his cape are in the foreground of almost every other panel.

It’s that preference for emphasizing unconventional moments and his disciplined control (or intentional lack thereof) of his line work that make Janson one of the all-time greats.

“Gothic” marked masturbatory shaman Grant Morrison’s first foray into Gotham City. In it, he shows a remarkable amount of restraint; his Batman is violent when necessary, thoughtful and careful otherwise. He can roust thugs on the streets one night and arrive in Vienna a few days later to visit a monastery in broad daylight. 

Unlike some of Morrison’s other Batman projects, in “Gothic” he’s building a veneer of normalcy around a supernatural villain, Mr. Whisper. He uses the trappings of a grounded Gotham and a shoe-leather crimefighter to contrast against the eerie strangeness of his antagonist, a former monk from 300 years ago who embraced sin and made a deal with the devil to live for centuries in exchange for his soul. 

Mr. Whisper has a whacked-out plan to use an architectural trick in Gotham Cathedral to unleash a new plague on the city. But he emerges in the story for very pedestrian reasons, at least in the Bat-verse–he’s tangled with Gotham mobsters in times past, and he returns to the city to gain some revenge. 

Morrison overreaches a bit by casting Mr. Whisper not only as an immortal sadist and a serial killer, but also somehow one of Bruce Wayne’s teachers at boarding school. But he does pick up a set of plotting threads that play off the Year One theme of Legends’ early storylines, one that we’ll see later writers pick up as well–mirroring Frank Miller’s original tale, Morrison parallels storylines set in Gotham’s criminal underworld, in the city’s police ranks, and in the adventures of Batman himself. At times, it’s clever to watch creators play with those threads and weave them together; in other storylines, as we’ll see, it’s a burden more than an aid. Morrison makes the most of it, and it gives him license to ease into Mr. Whisper’s supernatural origins after introducing him as a seemingly run-of-the-mill mob killer. 

Next: Moench/Gulacy/Austin on Prey

**A brief postscript–a far better critic than I has already tackled this story, and that’s comics blogger and all-around exceptional writer Tegan O’Neil. In fact, she toyed with doing her own story-by-story write-up of Legends of the Dark Knight in 2015. I’ll be linking to the pieces she completed as I finish my own write-ups, so by all means, visit her take to get a more Morrison-centric look at “Gothic.” And here’s her piece on the previous storyline, “Shaman.”