Category Archives: 1980s

Alan Moore’s (Other) Batman Stories

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Alan Moore has written a few Batman stories…none of which are really about Batman. He’s written stories in which Batman appears. 

His most famous (and notorious) Batman story, The Killing Joke, is really a Joker story. Batman’s a supporting character at best. Moore also deployed Batman to great effect in stories from both Swamp Thing and his famous Superman annual, “For the Man Who Has Everything.”

But Moore has two other Batman stories, one of which has never even been printed here in the United States, and isn’t comics at all. “The Gun” appeared in a 1985 UK Batman annual. It’s a prose short story by Moore with spot illustrations by Gary Leach, who draws a pretty sinister Batman. The titular weapon is (SPOILER) the gun that shot young Bruce Wayne’s parents, and it’s being utilized by Johnny Speculux, a graffiti-tagging thug with the most 80s British nickname in the history of the planet.

It’s one of those things where the weapon carries all this anger and rage which it then somehow mystically ejaculates through a variety of emissaries, including Joe Chill, before meeting its own demise eventually along with Mr. Speculux. Batman’s hardly in it, and when he is, it’s not a very distinct or inspired Batman. He has a nice short moment with a little girl who saw her own parents murdered by Speculux at an only-in-Gotham art exhibit of gigantic home furnishings (nice Dick Sprang homage there). 

Like Moore’s Star Wars stories for the UK Empire Strikes Back magazine, “The Gun” is clever and short. It’s a blunt instrument of a story, like something you’d read in 2000AD or even the EC books. It’s even got a “creepy” twist ending that brings the central theme of revenge back to its logical starting point, with Bruce Wayne as just another casualty caught in the crossfire. I very much liked this bit about Batman:

“He was staring at Johnny Speculux, and there was something familiar in his eyes…They had all of the seething, emotional intensity of a child’s eyes, but they were set into an adult’s face and the effect was terrifying.”

There’s something about little Bruce Wayne’s eyes living on in the visage of Batman; it’s a unique evocation of a theme that has since become trite, which is that Batman is little more than the seething wound left open by the death of Thomas and Martha. Back then, it wasn’t quite as overdone, and drawing our attention to Batman’s eyes puts us squarely in Johnny Speculux’s shoes, because while we don’t know that much about Johnny, we know everything about Batman’s vengeance, and we know it is a terrifying thing, even through the eyes of a child. 

Moore’s other significant Batman story is from Batman Annual 11, “Mortal Clay,” with art by George Freeman. This one is a Clayface tale focused on the third villain to claim the title, Preston Payne. It’s a full-length comics story, not a four-page prose story, so Moore stretches out a bit and offers a glimpse inside the mind of a man obsessed with a mannequin. His “lover” is “Helene,” and the entire story is told from his point of view, so it becomes a series of cuckoldings in which a security guard and Batman both become “the other man” in his twisted brain.

Payne’s interior monologue is what provides the thruline for “Mortal Clay,” and there’s moments where Moore definitely lets the character ramble on, but it’s still a compelling narrative technique, especially since the comics format is so uniquely suited to utilizing voiceover and image to comment on each other. 

All you really need to know to get that he’s crazy is that Preston Payne is in love with a mannequin. Seeing it laid out as above, with “…and neither of us said a word” as counterpoint to the dead chilling face of “Helena,” is Moore mining the potential of comics for its full potential. 

So much of what I love about Moore comes down to his exceptional ability to pull off moments just like that one. He is a supreme master of comics as a unique storytelling vehicle–part prose, part image, part something else entirely. Whether it’s a minor moment of Clayface hugging a mannequin or the virtuoso construction of Watchmen’s fifth issue, where Moore and Gibbons together build a “Fearful Symmetry” into the DNA of the page layouts themselves, Moore is so completely comfortable with the multiple levels on which sequential art can operate that his stories always redeem multiple readings. Even when he’s just telling a Batman story that’s not much about Batman for a random annual, meant to do little more than pile onto the limitless and ever-growing mountain of ongoing superhero fiction. 

Batman himself doesn’t appear significantly until the final sequence of “Mortal Clay,” when he shows up to capture Clayface and is mistaken for the latest lover to steal the heart of “Helena.” Clayface and Batman fight, until Clayface collapses in a distressed heap before his mannequin, and Batman…offers his hand to the villain. 

We then learn that while Clayface has been restored to Arkham Asylum, thanks to Batman’s intervention, he’s been allowed to live in relative happiness with “Helena.” It’s a side of the Caped Crusader we don’t see very often these days, but it’s welcome when it does appear; Batman has pity and mercy for many of his sickest adversaries.

These handful of stories don’t give us a great idea of Moore’s vision for Batman, except that Batman functions solely as a supporting or inciting character in each tale. That’s a decision by itself, and it suggests Batman as a figure of menace and mystery. Even as Moore wrote his Batman stories decades ago, the Caped Crusader’s interior life was becoming somewhat over examined. Placing Batman as a secondary character in his own story allows Moore to focus on Batman’s milieu and examine the character as reflected through others. 

Of course, we could spend days dissecting the elements of Batman that inspired aspects of Rorschach from Watchmen… 

That’s the thing with Batman: Even if you’re Alan Moore, Batman’s never really far away.

Stop the Press! Who’s THAT?!

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Jerry Ordway’s brilliant cover for the Batman movie adaptation

Picture a Pre-Pubescent Mattie (PPM), acne sprouting up like weeds across the oily plain of his face, visiting his local comic book shop.

PPM’s eyes dart across the racks. His heart starts to race. His hand adjusts the Bat-signal trucker cap perched awkwardly atop his enormous head, back when those were worn only by actual truckers and the hopelessly unfashionable.

PPM picks up every Batman comic he can find; later that day he devours them voraciously, laying on his bed beneath his Batsignal poster, his Bartman poster, and the poster he took from an old comic book magazine of Adam West and Burt Ward in their Dynamic Duo garb from the sixties.

Yes, little Pre-Pubescent Mattie had Bat-fever.

I was OBSESSED with Batman in 1989. Totally out of my head. I still remember the exact date that Batman premiered in theaters: June 23, 1989. I remember it because throughout the last half of my seventh grade year, I lived for that date.

I. Absolutely. Could. Not. Wait. For. This. Movie.

And so the Tuesday after the film came out, my dad took an afternoon off from work and we went to see Batman at the once-beautiful River Oaks Theaters in Calumet City, IL.

My Trapper Keeper the next school year was covered in stickers from the “Batman” trading cards. My sister and I obsessively collected each and every one of the cards to form a complete set. In art class, I devised ways to incorporate the classic oval Bat-symbol into my projects. I took to decorating my Batsignal trucker hat with buttons from the comic book and sci-fi conventions I started to attend in high school. (My favorite? The “Kirk/Spock in ’92” button.)

Batman was not the first pop culture phenomenon to knock me over the head and take me captive. But it was the first time I fully chose of my own volition to embrace a big pop moment, to stand alongside the seething masses in our Bat-signal T-shirts jamming to “Batdance” on our Walkmen headphones. It was everywhere, and so was I, slurping it all up without hesitation and loving every second of it.

As a movie, it’s a simple story, and that’s one of the big reasons it works. Director Tim Burton and screenwriters Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren don’t clutter their film with extraneous villains who are more a lampoon than a serious threat; there’s no Ahnold muttering idiotic quips with his face painted blue, or Danny DeVito limping around with fins over his arms. (Though I do think Batman Returns is largely underrated…) It’s lean storytelling that focuses on what’s important, which is the duality of Bruce Wayne and the viciousness of the Joker.

The story isn’t what makes it so damn watchable; it’s more about a mood, a feeling, atmosphere. It’s a triumph of style over substance, which is something that can be said about many of Tim Burton’s films…and frankly, about many Batman stories over the years. The movie teeters at the edge of being aware of its own heightened artifice, tiptoeing just to the edge of showing off the wires that help Batman swing and the grotesque facial appliances that give the Joker his rictus grin.

Burton’s Gotham is a city on its last legs where only evil exists in primary colors. His Joker is a horrifying lampoon of a circus clown who gets off on combining pure naked bloodlust with his playful exterior. And his Batman is an unrelenting force of justice, consumed by revenge against an enemy he can never defeat. Production designer Anton Furst creates a twisted nightmare version of New York where every corner seems to end in a dark alley and criminals rule the streets.

There’s a distance to it all, a theatricality that seems rooted in the halting rhythms of comics, not as they were in 1989 but as they were at their birth in the 1930s. Images stand out beyond story…Michael Keaton stretching his batwings out over a couple of thugs, the Batmobile snaking its way down a leaf-covered forest road…they linger in the mind like or the iconic cover of Detective Comics 27, Bat-Man swinging down onto hapless criminals, justice raining down from on high.

This staged feeling, almost as though the characters themselves are performing and not just the actors, fits with the whole identity-as-mask theme that’s central to the film, and that’s always been a core part of Batman’s appeal. As his character has developed, so also has a simple question with no easy answer: Is Batman Bruce Wayne, or is Bruce Wayne Batman? Which is the reality, and which is the disguise? Burton dives more directly into these issues with his second Batman film but it’s there in the first film too, in the overall unreality Burton and his crew create–the heightened, yet darkened, sense of drama and action.

Looking back, there was something formative in my embrace of Batman. In the duality of Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego, I found a reflection of my own emerging personality complex—a rift torn inside myself, one side presenting a relatively happy and uncomplicated side to the world, and the other side suffering under crippling self-hatred. (Okay, so maybe that’s more Harvey Dent and Two-Face than Bruce Wayne and Batman, but work with me.)

In this story, just as in others I would soon discover, I found a sweeping and romantic expression of a character divided against himself, in an outright conflict with the world around him that only he really understood.

I was a Bat-fan before Tim Burton’s film…but in a way, my whole lifelong desperate romance with the minutiae and ephemera of pop culture started with the 1989 incarnation of Bat-mania, and the film that inspired it. Although it may not have cracked open my insides, it gave my self-loathing a mirror in which to peer.