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hello Barbelith.
I have been asked to write a chapter on "The Best Batman Story Ever", for a book called Beautiful Objects in Popular Culture (forthcoming Blackwell 2005).
The very idea of picking the "best" Batman is a nightmare, but needs must, and I picked, and I have explained my reasoning.
I hope it is OK to post my chapter here. On a selfless level, I thought some of you might be interested in it and fancy reading it -- and on a slightly more selfish level, I would value feedback. The chapter is written from a fan perspective, and it seems fitting to ask for fan comments. Of course, you might not agree with my opinions, but more importantly to me, I might have made some factual errors that others would pick up.
If you feel like reading and commenting, I will, with with your permission, use feedback from this forum to redraft or add to the piece. I am very happy to give credit in the chapter to anyone whose comments I use -- your real name or screen name, whichever you like.
Thanks for your time.
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The Best Batman Story: The Dark Knight Returns
You have… a relationship with a man, an older man, for around three years. You get used to people asking how he’s doing when they meet you; you’re treated as a couple, your names joined in friends’ minds. It ends amicably, affectionately. No big split, just a drifting, a sense that this period of your life is now over. You take his pictures off your wall, file the souvenirs away. People ask you about him as if you should know; you tell them that was years ago. Gossip about him filters through to you from time to time: he’s revamped his image; he’s been seen with a new partner or an old flame. You wish him well.
And then someone asks you to name the best time. To pick out one adventure, one great day, one moment.
Batman, to me, is more than a character from comics, films and television: Batman is a phase of my life, from 1996 to 1999, when I holed up in Cardiff – in an apartment tiny as a monk’s cell, the shower in a cupboard next to the kitchen sink and the bathroom a dank cubicle – and plastered images of my chosen icon across the walls, loading the shelves with graphic novels. Even now, five years and five books later, I still carry the label the tabloids gave me when they discovered my PhD research, one day in Spring 99: Doctor Batman.
Batman, to me, is a photo-album of moments; a montage compiled of snatched clips from sixty years; a flick-book of images, each with its own charm, each tugging with it a rush of memories. The “Negative Batman”, reverse-processed and fleeing the light, from an annual in the 1970s; the Adam West Batman, always heroic rather than ridiculous when I watched him as a child; the Denny O’Neill “Shaman” Batman, which gave me fever dreams during a week of flu; the stark, ludicrously brutal Batman of the first, late-30s episodes, dealing out death and rough justice; the thin-lipped, scar-hardened Batman of Grant Morrison’s Justice League comics, which I followed religiously every month; the stylised Expressionist Batman of the animated TV series, swooping across the city with more grace than any human actor could hope for.
To pick just one is to betray all the others, but if it must be done then I have my criterion for choosing: it is simple and subjective, and it would make for a chapter of one hundred words, so what follows are the harder, more objective reasons – not my soft, personal reading, which barely deserves to be called “reason” – why Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, published in four parts during 1986 and reprinted as a graphic novel, should be in the running for the most important single Batman story since his first appearance in the issue of Detective Comics dated May 1939.
Note that with this colder, rational approach, this just-the-facts-ma’am survey, I even resist using the word “best”: a logical pinpoint skids away from any attempt to settle on an individual, ultimate episode from the history of a character who has now featured in at least one comic – and often half a dozen – every month for sixty-five years, and the theories of interpretation I still abide by remind me that there can be no absolute concept of “best text”. There are as many best Batman stories as there are Batman fans. Mine will just be one love letter among millions.
If you ask me personally, all I can give you is my favourite: my best, which isn’t the same as the best. That can come later. What follows, instead, are the facts and the framework: not my reasons, though they might be someone else’s, why The Dark Knight Returns is the best Batman story ever.
While Dark Knight was received as groundbreaking at the time of its original four-part publication and book-length reissue, its impact caused further-reaching, delayed tremors that did more than shake down the concept of Batman and his immediate mythos. Even at the time of writing, almost twenty years later, Miller’s creation of an alternate future for Batman is reverberating through the DC Universe, shaping the timelines, the origins, the rules and possibilities for every other character in the company’s fictional world of demigods and titans.
When it first appeared, Dark Knight stood outside the structures of comic book convention, its departure from the accepted structures of Batman’s continuity justified as a one-off experiment by an iconoclastic, star creator. In a retroactive shuffle typical of the superhero industry, though, Dark Knight was subsequently rebranded – much as Star Wars was titled Episode IV a year after its initial release – and imprinted with the logo “Elseworlds”. “In Elseworlds,” as the official back-cover blurb runs,
Heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places – some that have existed, or might have existed, and others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist. The result is stories that make characters who are familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow.
According to linear chronology, the first Elseworlds Batman tale was Augustyn and Mignola’s Gotham By Gaslight (1989) featuring a Victorian Dark Knight in a thick, clumsily bricolaged outfit dealing with the Ripper, followed by further exploratory departures such as Moench, Jones and Jones’ Batman and Dracula: Red Rain (1991), Chaykin, Moore and Chiarello’s Batman/Houdini: The Devil’s Workshop (1993) and Chaykin’s Dark Allegiances (1996), which could have been subtitled Batman/Hitler. With hindsight, however, it was Dark Knight that opened up the potential for what used to be called “Imaginary Stories”, paving the way for speculations outside rigid continuity.
Dark Knight’s lasting influence was, appropriately for a Batman comic, twofold, two-faced and entirely paradoxical. On the one hand, as I’ll detail below, it set the tone to grim, grainy, rainy and gritty, and convinced a host of subsequent writers and artists that the key to an “adult” comic was hard-hitting vigilantism with an edge of political commentary and an S&M twist to the superhero costumes. In this context, it was the prime text of the “post-Crisis” period: the Crisis on Infinite Earths maxi-series had forced DC’s universe into a slimmed-down, supposedly more manageable form, razing off worlds that didn’t fit and mercy-killing swathes of characters. It was a holocaust not just of geography but history, as origins were rebooted and the past wiped out. From this point onward, whole pockets of history were buried: and invariably, it was the more embarrassing, campy episodes that were repressed, never included when the origin was retold. Batman’s early days now officially involved pilgrimages to train with Asian martial artists and mystics, and trials by combat in Gotham’s red light district: there was no Ace the Bat-Hound, no science fiction alien adventures, no Rainbow Batman costumes in this history, and anyone clinging to that kind of nostalgia was suffering false memory syndrome. It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t an imaginary story. It never happened anymore.
Dark Knight, then, with its hard-assed man-mountain of a Batman, his costume armoured and his vehicle a military monster – the girl-Robin deadening those troublesome homoerotic associations that her persisted since the 1950s, and the Joker taking the mantle of sexual deviance away from the hero – suited the mood of tough, no bullshit gravity that had been imposed on a colourful but messy universe, a circus of pseudo-science and careless inconsistency. The compression of multiple universes into a single, serious earth was echoed by the insistence on the new term “graphic novel”, replacing the light and infantile “comic book”: one hefty hardback volume carrying far more weight than a dozen flimsy monthly titles, and earning superhero adventures a temporary place in mainstream bookstores as “post-literate” visual culture. Dark Knight embodied the genre’s tightening-up into a masculine, muscular form, perfect for the key market of heterosexual teenage boys and young men who wanted superheroes they could finally be proud to admire, comics they could read in public. It was a heavy-duty mother of a vehicle itself, crushing the old jokes about caped crusaders and Boy Wonders, powering through expectations and prejudices and planting a reinforced new Batman in the ruins, staring anyone down who dared mention Adam West.
On the other, Dark Knight was inherently playful, striking out from the accepted codes and breaking away from established conventions – a female Robin, a new Commissioner, a tank-like Batmobile, the death of the Joker and the end of the Batman – and as such, it planted generic seeds that flowered in the alt-historical Elseworld experiments and continued growing under the surface, blooming suddenly again in the mid-1990s. Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s four-part Elseworlds series Kingdom Come (?1995?) gave Batman another possible future, its vision of a snowy-haired, cynical technocrat distinct from Dark Knight but indebted to it for the very concept of alternative timelines where iconic, never-changing characters are allowed to age, growing weaker but wiser.
In 1998 Waid and a team of artists revisited this future in an experiment more ambitious than any previous Elseworlds: The Kingdom broke the rules further by meshing with mainstream continuity and bringing the alternate timeline into contact with the official “present-day”, culminating in the revelation of Hypertime, a temporal theory that explained how all the Elseworld universes could co-exist along parallel, possible strands. For the first time, the playful experiments were permitted within the official mythos, albeit through a science fiction get-out clause that only allowed restricted travel between temporal flows, on special occasions. Even more importantly, the double-page spread that introduced Hypertime, with glimpsed scenes from possible alternatives, included tantalising flashes from comics that had been officially ruled out of continuity since the Crisis: old, illogical versions of characters, silly pets, giants and doppelgangers, whimsical misfits like the 5th dimensional sprite Bat-Mite. Among the half-forgotten faces was Superman’s dog, Krypto, guaranteeing that Ace the Bat-Hound must, by rights, be back in permitted continuity too.
The Dark Knight’s bold carving of a possible future for the character outside the normal boundaries of monthly comic-books had, ironically given its reception as a tough and uncompromising revision of a camp hero, ultimately led to an upheaval of the rules laid down in 1986 and a re-opening of the gloriously untidy treasure-chest that Crisis had intended to bury.
The success of Dark Knight – its unprecedented sales beyond the traditional comics-buying market, and its grabbing of headlines in daily newspapers and hip magazines - had dramatic repercussions for the comic book industry. Once more, contemporary trends in superhero comics can be identified as further ripples from that 1986 shockwave, and again, the longer-term effects are in some ways surprising, revealing the complexity of Dark Knight beyond its initial impression of a macho jackboot on the mythos.
At the time, Dark Knight was often reviewed alongside Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen and Art Spiegelman’s Maus as exemplars of the “graphic novel” phenomenon, and while the form failed to wedge itself firmly into mainstream popular culture – the traditional novel turned out not to be dead after all, and the comic book remained, by and large, in comic shops – this newfound kudos gave the industry an incredible ego-boost. The ephemeral medium of four-color funny-papers was treated to luxurious production values: glossy paper, painted art, hardback covers. Monthly titles that would have been remembered only in fans’ collections were dug out and reprinted in handsome volumes and “archive” editions. The entire career of Kingdom Come co-creator Alex Ross, whose shtick is photo-realistic, Norman Rockwell-style portraits of DC heroes, would have been very different without these changes in the basic production process, and the perception that comics could also sell as coffee-table editions.
While this pumped-up confidence led to pretentious, overwrought and overpriced follies like Morrison and McKean’s Arkham Asylum (1989) – illegible lettering, quotes from Lewis Carroll, textured endpapers but very little story beneath the impressionistic art – it also enabled the reprinting of innovative but relatively obscure work like Bryan Talbot’s Adventures of Luther Arkwright (1990), led to book-length celebrations of newspaper classics like Herriman’s Krazy Kat, helped find a market for indie, girl-friendly titles like the Hernandez Brothers’ Love and Rockets, and encouraged the publication of experimental “commix” such as Raw. Even in recent years, the fact that Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy On Earth (2001) was even reviewed in the Guardian, let alone that it won that newspaper’s First Book Award, is a subtle but significant after-effect of the mid-80s graphic novel hype.
Dark Knight Returns helped to shape the physical form and appearance of comic books, but more directly it cast a shadow over the superhero genre, dominating the way costumed characters were represented: even when the trend for grim and gritty vigilantism abated, the new mood was itself a reaction to the post-Dark Knight tendency for hardboiled revisionism. In the new Batman’s wake, a series of DC’s key icons and second-string characters were given rewritten origins, many of them borrowing from both Watchmen – literary prose, epigrams, psychosexual complexity – and Dark Knight’s approach with its radical, often brutal spin on familiar visual tropes. Inevitably, few of the imitators matched the standard of either Miller or Moore – the most notorious example of mismanaged “maturity” and “dark revisionism” remains Mike Grell’s Green Arrow reboot, The Longbow Hunters (1987) which used the implied rape and graphically-depicted violation of his female partner, the Black Canary, to justify the hero’s gear-shift from crimefighting with trick arrows to sadistic, uncompromising vengeance.
However, the late-80s obsession with reinvented superheroes – which frequently meant digging up obscure, ridiculous or redundant characters – also led to some fascinating challenges and work of lasting value. Neil Gaiman followed his prestige three-part musing on the forgotten heroine Black Orchid (1988) with an experiment in horror fantasy, transforming Sandman (1989 onward) from a guy in a gas mask to a gothic personification of Dreaming and creating a minor cultural phenomenon, one of the biggest crossover successes of the 1990s. Grant Morrison transformed the freakish adventures of the Doom Patrol (1989 onward) into a heady, fragmentary trip, with episodes based on Smiths lyrics and Dadaist theory. Peter Milligan revived the minor character Shade: The Changing Man (1990 onward) and took him on a Lynchian road trip through the contemporary American nightmare.
These slightly skewed monthly titles – distinct in mood and tone from the mainstream DC Universe – earned a dedicated indie following and, in time, a separate corporate imprint, Vertigo, replacing their previous vague description of “dark fantasy”. This dark, charming little pocket of the DC mythos flourished during the 1990s and continues to house acclaimed, intelligent regular monthlies such as Milligan’s Human Target, Azzarello and Risso’s 100 Bullets and Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man.
While the Vertigo brand can be traced clearly back to Dark Knight’s adult-oriented revisionism, its development includes a further interesting twist. Just as Dark Knight’s bold experiment with a possible future can now be seen as a precursor of Elseworlds and, in turn, Hypertime’s continuity apertures, so Miller’s rewriting of Batman, despite its apparently thin-lipped heterosexuality, effectively enabled Vertigo as a space for creators like Morrison, Milligan and Gaiman to play with other superhero characters: and that play frequently embraced gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual identities.
This separate area within DC, with its “for mature readers” label on the cover of each title, became a space for surprisingly queer adventures and heroes, of whom Doom Patrol’s transvestite stretch of real estate, Danny-the-Street, was perhaps the most surreally flamboyant example. With hindsight, Miller’s apparently grimly straight Bat-mythos can be seen to involve a fair amount of cross-dressing and boundary-blurring itself: the Joker is a lipsticked Bowie lookalike with feminine manners but a bodybuilder’s physique, and even the Dark Knight, in one scene, disguises himself as a woman while wrestling a Nazi uber-wench called Bruno.
For better or worse, Dark Knight and the mainstream credibility it attracted also jumpstarted development on the Batman feature film, directed by Tim Burton and released in 1989. The movie was, like the graphic novel, touted as a “dark” corrective to the dayglo flamboyance of the Adam West TV series that remained the dominant popular image of Batman in the mid-1980s, and incorporated several of Miller’s revisionist tropes – the military edge to the costume, vehicle and utility belt, the modern gothic of the architecture, the terse growl of the protagonist – along with at least one shot inspired directly by the graphic novel, where Batman suspends a perp off the roof of a building. Trailers for Batman Begins (2005) suggest an even more immediate debt to Dark Knight Returns, with the Batmobile-tank and glimpses of the origin sequence apparently based on specific frames of Miller’s art.
It’s worth noting that, in this respect too, Dark Knight’s legacy involved an unexpected twist into the camp playfulness it had – or so it seemed – been explicitly intended to stamp out. Just as the homoerotic potential of Batman and Robin’s relationship, brought to light by Dr Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and strenuously repressed in the comic books that followed the mid-50s clampdown, had nudged back to the surface in the 1960s TV Batman’s knowing double-meanings, so Tim Burton’s relatively dark, angst-ridden and lonely vigilante gave way to Joel Schumacher’s two feature-length pantomimes, Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997), complete with meaningful glances between a dynamic duo in sculpted codpieces.
On a fundamental level, it may be the case that Batman, particularly when teamed with Robin, contains inherently camp and homoerotic aspects that simply cannot be permanently denied and will always edge back into the mythos; more specifically, as I suggested above and will stress again below, Miller’s Dark Knight may be more playful, less containing, more embracing of Batman’s mythos in all its facets – not just the grim brutality, but the flamboyance, the grotesques, the masquerade, the queerness – than was perceived at the time of its publication.
In authorial terms, Miller’s approach to both writing and art in Dark Knight can be traced back to his work on the Marvel comic Daredevil (1980 onwards) – where he began to introduce first-person, Chandleresque captions in place of the more conventional third-person voice-over narration, and rely on sequences of wordless visuals like a film storyboard. Dark Knight’s hard-nosed breakdown of fight scenes into wincing technical detail – a short-circuited nerve, a severed muscle, a broken nose-bridge – is rehearsed in Daredevil’s duels. Miller’s science-fiction samurai epic, Ronin (1983), brought a Japanese sensibility to his work, with even bolder use of silent panels, often building up in a sequence of rhythmic smaller frames to a huge splash page. The layout patterns of Dark Knight are all here, with an increasingly stylised use of heavy black inks: the fascination with samurai and ninja would emerge in Elektra: Assassin (1986) and the starkly contrasting lights and darks subsequently lent themselves to the expressionist modern noir of Sin City (1992).
The impact of Miller’s mid-80s techniques on superhero storytelling was both obvious and subtle, ranging from blatant lifts to unconscious influence. Miller’s frame-by-frame depiction of the Wayne parents’ murder underlies countless subsequent glimpses of the origin sequence, including those in Gotham By Gaslight and Arkham Asylum. His use of cinematic, storyboard-style pacing, and his device of dramatically foregrounding sound effects as integral to the image, were both played up further in the jazzy graphics of Howard Chaykin’s late-80s revisionism such as The Shadow (1987) and Blackhawk (1987), while the high-contrast noir of Gotham’s streetlife clearly shapes Risso’s work in the more recent 100 Bullets. The shift from third-person narrative captions to fragmented stream-of-consciousness, revealing Batman’s internal thought process, became the standard convention: see, for instance, Loeb and Lee’s best-selling, year-long saga Hush (2003).
Miller’s borrowing of manga’s dynamism, with its kinetic blurs around speeding objects, gave Anglo-American superhero art a jab in the arm; its after-effects can be detected in the graphics of Steve Yeowell’s Zenith (1988-1993) and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority (1999). More specifically, Dark Knight’s use of TV screens as miniature panels, and the spectacular breaking of this steady rhythm with heroic splash pages, are borrowed in what seems deliberate homage by one of 2004’s most critically-acclaimed titles, Morrison and Quitely’s We3.
So, Dark Knight helped shape the space/time boundaries of the DC Universe; it helped change the shape, form and readership of comic books. It cast a long shadow over the portrayal not just of Batman but of superheroes in general during subsequent decades; it helped clear the way for the still-vibrant imprint of Vertigo, and made a space for creators like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison to experiment with their own costumed characters. It prompted a four-feature film franchise and, in Batman Begins, inspired a fifth. Finally, it also changed the way comic book stories are told. These are the reasons I’d give if asked why The Dark Knight Returns was the most important, the most influential Batman story since 1939: I’d draw on ideas of institution, genre, author, form.
But if asked why Dark Knight is my best, I’d use a different criterion; one I think, from my experience on comic book discussion boards, I share with other fans. The best Batman story is the story with the best moments of Batman: the best memories of any single Batman story. The images that lodge in your mind, familiar now as family photographs. The lines of dialogue or narration that stick to your memory, triggered like touchstones. I can recite them now without looking, just as I can see the pictures. Cold poetry. A wolf howls. I know how he feels. Bitter lyricism. I watch them kick him around for a while. I’ve had worse times. The laconic growl. Lucky old man… This would be a fine death… welcome to hell. Lines that echo in your own life at unexpected moments, twenty years after first reading.
And the visuals, still breathtakingly vivid: the panels that come alive into a moving sequence in your head, a short film clip. The revelation when you realise the blackness in front of your eyes was fingers, and that they’re sliding away to reveal a stomach-clenching drop from the top of a skyscraper. The joyous leap of a fifty-year old man built like a brick outhouse with a chirpy, red-haired kid at his side, both soaring across the city in defiance of gravity, age, sense. The physical affection finally allowed them, this new Batman and Robin; permitted now, perversely – as man and little girl, rather than man and teenage boy – to embrace and cling to each other, needing each other. Good soldier. Good soldier. The growing trust and playfulness between them. Batman in the back of the copter, trying to command the voice-recognition. Boosters. Boosters. What… Robin coolly giving the reprogrammed software her own, hipper shorthand: Peel. And the rockets fire, taking them back to the cave. I’m not fired? she checks. Batman narrows his eyes, with a smile so rare you’d kill to earn it. You’re not fired.
This story alone is a miniature history in itself, containing other stories within it: taking us from Bruce’s childhood to middle age, giving his career a fitting end and setting a template for all origin stories to follow. It predicts, with uncanny prescience, the death of Robin in 1989 and reflects with canny self-awareness the transformation from the 1970s Batman, still in cyan blue with a yellow target on his chest, to the darker, harder figure who would dominate the 1990s. The Dark Knight Returns is the best Batman story because it is about so many of the Batman stories that went before – the grim loner of 1939, the introduction of the canary-costumed sidekick in 1940, the political propaganda of the 1940s, the street-level detection of the 70s; even, in the huge, iconic splash pages and massive sound effects, the Pop Art aesthetic of the 1960s – and, fittingly in a fictional universe where time is repeatedly reshuffled, history unwritten and reworked, lifetimes looped and origins contained in endings, it also contains, in some form or another, many of the Batman stories that came after.
The Batman comes in many guises. This man – built like a cityblock, but with the cracks showing; cold, violent but also brutally loving – is the one I’d cling to.
Works Cited
In previous work, I have explicitly located myself on the boundary between fandom and academia, an approach that in theory at least combines personal passion with the objective analysis of scholarship. The two fields are not as clearly separate as sometimes imagined, and they muddy a great deal in the middle, but nevertheless they are considered to have distinct qualities and weaknesses.
In this chapter, by contrast, I let myself cross that line and write primarily from the position of a Batman fan, albeit a Batman fan who did a PhD about him. In practice, what this means is that I haven’t followed the academic practice of quotations and footnotes. Almost all of the above was written entirely from memory: as a fan, I found I knew it all, and could tell it as readily as I’d recount family history.
However, apart from the primary texts referred to, I owe a debt of thanks to the following secondary works, some of which I looked at during the writing and some of which have, I know, lodged in my memory and shaped my perceptions of Batman. Certain of my observations above are borrowed from these authors, but I hope they will take it as a tribute that their work is forever in my head.
Mark Cotta Vaz, Tales of the Dark Knight, London: Futura (1989)
Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs, The Comic Book Heroes, California: Prima (1997)
Geoff Klock, How To Read Superhero Comics and Why, London: Continuum (2002)
Andy Medhurst, “Batman, Deviance and Camp” in Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, The Many Lives of the Batman, London: Routledge (1991)
This chapter is respectfully dedicated to Will Eisner, who passed on while I was writing it. |
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