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.

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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.”

My Favorite Batman

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We started our exploration here of all things Batmanish with a simple statement of purpose: There is no “definitive” Batman. It follows, then, that all Batmen are worth our time, whether wacky or gritty or remarkably sane. 

That doesn’t mean I don’t have a favorite Batman, or several; for the longest time, one stood pretty clearly in the lead, and that’s Frank Miller’s Batman, as depicted in The Dark Knight Returns. Easy answer, but I gotta keep it real. 

That’s from a character perspective. Based on visuals alone? Jim Aparo, followed closely by Norm Breyfogle. 

After I finally got off my duff and read the legendary Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers run of Batman, it dawned on me that maybe the EngleRogers (does that work, like a “Brangelina” kinda thing? Maybe yes?) version of the Caped Crusader is now my favorite. 

Because frankly, Batman’s been depressing as hell for a really long time, and EngleRogers’ Batman is actually (gasp) FUN.

***

We all know why Batman is. One minute, he’s an eight-year-old skipping out of a screening of The Mark of Zorro; the next, he’s kneeling in a pool of his parents’ blood, which usually also contains bits of pearl necklace and movie theater popcorn. 

It’s an incredibly simple, elegant origin. It’s lasted for the better part of seventy years with nary a tweak. It doesn’t just work; it RESONATES. You may or may not be the vengeful type, but you can at least understand the cataclysmic event and its emotional fallout. You yourself may not choose to become a Creature of the Night in response to your own parents’ murders, but you can sorta see where Bruce is coming from. 

The problem with that origin is that sometime round about the emergence of Mr. Miller’s vision of the character, the origin stopped being an inciting moment and became far more. Because it’s an easily-drawn line connecting lil’ Brucie in that alley and Big Bruce dressing up in a bat costume, that line has become everything the character is. The death of his parents grew to be far more than just Batman’s origin; it became the totality of his being.

Which is what led us to Bat-Dick, the popular online term for the asshole Batman who prowled the streets of Gotham for decades, since the immense commercial and critical success of Miller’s Year One and Dark Knight Returns. 

There’s something about those two stories standing as they do at the dawn and the twilight of Batman’s career that underscores the origin-as-essence phenomenon; later creators must have looked at these two towering tales and realized, subconsciously or otherwise, that Miller had already done the heavy lifting for them. Whatever happened to Batman in their stories, it was simple enough to plug it into the template, since the template was not just easy and well-defined, but literally spanned Batman’s entire life as a character, as defined by Miller. 

So: Miller draws the pearls and the popcorn; a parade of talented creators fall in line; we get thousands of pages of angry, vengeful Batman, some of which is good stuff, but all of which is frankly a fucking downer.

(Of course, as I do a bit of internet research for my next trick, I discover a far more talented writer has already done an incredible piece on EngleRogers’ Batman. Apologies in advance to Peter Sanderson if I eventually follow along the path he carefully cleared through the jungle of Batman, and we’ll get back to his essay in a moment.)

What struck me most about the EngleRogers Detective Comics run is that their Batman is not a character defined by vengeance. The death of his parents is what drove him to become Batman, but it is not what drives him to continue being Batman. 

What keeps him going is a sense of justice, and frankly, a sense of adventure–you get the sense that the EngleRogers Batman enjoys what he does, and that he’s not undertaking some solemn, lonely vocation that would handily destroy most men, and quickly. 

If you stop for a second to think, it almost seems essential that Bruce Wayne actually likes being Batman. Far be it from me to require “realism” in my funny books, but it is far easier to understand a Batman who is incited by vengeance and driven by justice, than it is to imagine a character for whom vengeance is the only motivation.

Human beings aren’t built for single-minded pursuits, and those who pursue them tend to be quickly destroyed by their own obsessions. A Batman who does what he does solely to exorcise an endlessly-replenished well of rage is a Batman who is probably gonna let his feelings get the better of him, and get sloppy as a result.  Again, in comics “anything is possible,” but the Batman-as-rage-monster characterization makes the character harder to empathize with, and harder to support.

There’s lots more to love about EngleRogers’ Batman; his relationships with Dick Grayson, Silver St. Cloud, and Alfred all seem much more healthy and grounded, and the guy’s actually able to deal with police and citizens without terrifying everyone who bumps into him. But it all stems from the central conceit of Batman as dark, heroic adventurer, NOT Batman as brooding, vengeful sociopath. 

In interviews just prior to launching his run on Batman, writer Grant Morrison referenced the “Neal Adams hairy-chested love god” version of the character, and that quote certainly stuck in my mind. On reflection, I think Morrison actually aimed for more of an EngleRogers conception of Bruce Wayne, one able to absorb all of the various aspects of the character without becoming too beholden to any of them. Bruce Wayne had an actual healthy romance again (at least, until she went and got evil on him), he had more fully developed relationships with his supporting cast, and he dealt with a wider range of threats than the vicious street scum he would regularly beat to within an inch of their lives as the Deep, Dark Knight.

Then there’s the issue of Morrison’s run as all-encompassing clearinghouse for ALL of Batman’s history–he’s said that he’s taking the approach that every adventure we’ve seen Batman have since 1939 actually happened to this guy over the span of twelve-odd years. That again has echoes of EngleRogers, as Sanderson astutely points out in his essay linked above:

All of this reflects a different mindset than that which prevails in comics today. Englehart believed in drawing from and incorporating the classic stories of the past, presumably not just because they provided him such rich material, but also out of respect for the writers, artists and editors who created those stories. Englehart was presenting his stories as the latest in a long and honorable tradition. How different this is from the current fashion in comics, whereby classic stories are regarded as dated antiques to be superseded by new versions by whoever the current hotshots are considered to be.

Englehart’s approach was more of a pick and choose strategy, closer to what Geoff Johns has done with heroes like Green Lantern and now Superman; Morrison’s actually dragging it ALL in to see what that does to Bruce Wayne. But the principle’s similar.

Morrison took Batman on quite a freaky psychological journey, and I enjoyed his Batman more than any I’ve read in years. It’s because Morrison’s conception of the Dark Knight owes quite a bit to the EngleRogers version of the character. It’s a Batman you WANT to read about, that you want to cheer for, and that you want to see happy. 

That’s right–a balanced, HAPPY Batman. Shocking, but as Englehart and Rogers demonstrated, quite possible, and quite entertaining.

Batman: Reptilian #1

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“What we’re talking about here is a billionaire aristocrat who beats up poor people, as well as the mentally ill. I don’t know what that has to do with a code of honor, but it certainly appeals to my sense of humour…”

I love Batman as much as at least one of my three kids (which one changes daily), but it’s also important to keep an open mind about the character. As I’ve said since the start, there is no such thing as a “definitive” Batman. 

So reading that quote from Garth Ennis, writer of Batman: Reptilian, got me more than a little excited. Ennis’ superhero-adjacent books (Hitman, The Boys) have specialized in lampooning the entire concept of caped crusaders, run through with a biting edge of satirical commentary and the occasional lapse into genuine affection for the characters. For Ennis, the mere idea of superheroes is insane; most of the people who do it are also insane; and any sensible person who wants to save the world has the good sense not to tart up in a crazy costume to do it (to paint with a broad brush!). 

With Batman: Reptilian #1, Ennis is definitely laying the groundwork for a fully satirical take on Batman, one that feeds off the most extreme expressions of his modern depiction in comics, but keeps him just grounded enough for the story to carry a hint of danger. It stops just short of being an outright lampoon, although Liam Sharp’s artwork creates an exaggerated atmosphere; Ennis and Sharp both seem to want the violence to land, to be just “real” enough to matter, in order to make Batman’s reflection in the funhouse mirror all the more biting. 

Someone is attacking Batman’s rogues in Reptilian, in grotesque acts of violence that Batman doesn’t seem to realize are a logical extension of the violence he himself has brought upon the criminal world. A short prologue depicts Batman crippling an acquitted but guilty rapist on the steps of the courthouse in broad daylight, a moment that sets the tone for Batman’s character in the book–deluded enough to think his borderline psychotic attacks are always commensurate with the crime he is trying to prevent.

That undercurrent has been in the Batman books for a few decades at least, but Ennis is pulling it out from beneath the character’s inciting trauma and examining it in dim, cold daylight.

Ennis meant for this script to be drawn by Steve Dillon, his co-conspirator on Preacher, Hellblazer and The Punisher, before the artist’s untimely death in 2016. It’s bittersweet to imagine the pages done by Dillon, but this also feels so completely within Sharp’s wheelhouse that it takes on its own full identity. It reminded me of Dave McKean on the Arkham Asylum graphic novel; impressionistic but tactile, splotches of color and light pulling focus from within a turgid morass. 

That’s somewhat appropriate, because as Ennis himself reveals, “Perhaps the best way for regular Batman readers to think of the book is this: Imagine that the last thirty or so years’ worth of Batman comics never existed. Because as far as I can recall, that’s how long it’s been since I actually read a Batman comic from start to finish…Just think Dark Knight, Year One, Killing Joke and not an awful lot more. Think the late ‘80s to the early ‘90s. That’s really when Liam and I hail from.”

With Reptilian, Ennis is taking that incarnation of Batman and deflating his outsized Dark Knight status, using his own tone and universe as weapons against him. Considering how twisted and poisonous that take on Batman became almost immediately upon release, it’s a thrashing long overdue. 

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.