Batman #29: The Dark Knight Rises Again and Meets Gotham City

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

      Retelling old tales means, up to a point, updating myths. Making them make sense in the present. But it does not mean they stopped making sense in the first place. New generations deserve to know their heroes' origin stories. In them we find elements that bring us closer to the hero, fictional paths that coincide with real life, and personal parallels that speak to the similarities between us and the men and women whose feats we read about. Joseph Campbell, in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, says, “the effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world.” Following Campbell’s words, a hero’s birth can be argued as the beginning of life, provided we acknowledge that a hero’s origin is not necessarily expected to begin at the actual biological birth of the character. Instead it most often comes out of a traumatic event that obliterates what the character previously believed was the absolute definition of life. Trauma in the world of the comic book separates the normal from the spectacular. But it also establishes that the spectacular has a price. So, from the ashes of the previous life the hero is expected to rise like a phoenix, carrying the original trauma and converting it into the new origin, the thing that gives the hero’s life purpose.

     Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman run seems to have a deep understanding of what it means to carry trauma as a symbol close to the hero’s chest. In Batman #29 Snyder brings the second part of the Zero Year storyline, Dark City, to a close. After Snyder retells the origin of the Joker and Gotham blacks out after the Riddler turns the city into an actual riddle, Batman must face the possibility his humanity can truly interfere with his success as a superhero. And a superhero he is, although readers often forget the man behind the mask is no more super than the people he has sworn to protect.

     What is interesting with Batman #29 is that Batman is improvising. The road Snyder’s Dark Knight traverses is paved with mistakes. And those mistakes are never made by Bruce Wayne, the all too human alter ego of the Batman. Snyder goes lengths to show that the hero’s failures and mistakes belong entirely to the costume and not the man beneath it. As the Riddler plans to cripple Gotham and let an impending hurricane flood the city with no functioning security measures due to the blackout, Batman is seen catching up rather than meeting his opponent on an equal state of affairs.

     Zero Year, DC Comic’s reinterpretation of Batman’s origin, is framed up to this point as a set of circumstances that force a young Bruce Wayne to choose between two identities. One supposes a very limited approach to crime fighting (meaning staying as Bruce Wayne), and the other entails becoming an eternal symbol that haunts Gotham into submission and forces it to embrace order (becoming Batman). Now, what will shape this new identity is how Batman/Bruce Wayne relates to Gotham City. DC’s current run keeps Batman’s official origin mostly intact. Martha and Thomas Wayne are murdered in Crime Alley after a mugging gone wrong leaves Bruce a rich orphan. Crime Alley is the “birth place” of the Batman, the place the new life begins and where its traumas make Bruce become a Bat. In this new life Gotham City is Batman’s new father, creating the hero it needed out of the violence the city itself enabled.

 
     Snyder’s Gotham is a dangerous victim as opposed to being another criminal keeping its citizens under the influence of its vices. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) falls towards the latter. More directly resembling New York (Twin Towers included), Miller’s Gotham is an accomplice to crime. It reminds an old Bruce Wayne that it needs Batman’s supervision or it will relapse into chaos (which is what happens in the book). Miller’s Batman accepts his responsibility as a psychological necessity that feeds both him and the city. Gotham’s rain, Miller’s Batman says, “is a baptism.” And with it he is born again.

     On the other hand, Snyder’s Batman becomes the city’s savior. He still cannot claim Gotham as his, a thing Miller’s Batman does, but saving it means it will be in his debt. Snyder’s Gotham delves into crime just enough to create the hero it needs and not the other way around. Saving the city, then, becomes a rite of passage that turns Batman into Gotham’s sole keeper. Accepting responsibility for it is one of the ways Snyder’s Batman will soon possess Gotham the same way Superman possesses Metropolis. When the Riddler succeeds at exploding Gotham’s retaining walls, for example, and the ocean’s water floods the city in the middle of a hurricane Batman lays the blame on himself. He let the bomb’s signal jammer get lost in a fight against another villain called Doctor Death. He was too late to solve the riddle. But most importantly, he failed to live up to the symbol, to the bat. Being Batman meant Gotham City would be safe. Failing keeps Batman further away from his connection to Gotham. While destroying the machinery that boosts the explosives’ signal Batman says, “I should’ve listened, Gordon! I should’ve taken the call! There’d be no death! There’d be none of this! It’s my fault Gordon! I saw it wrong! You hear me!”

     In the frenzy of Gotham’s imminent destruction it is important that Batman accept the consequences of his initial failures. They are not final yet. For when he saves Gotham, and Gotham will be saved, his failures will become that which brings Batman and the City closer to each other, creating a sense of dependency that both defines and gives each a sense of belonging. In the end, Gotham will be Batman just as Batman will be Gotham. Gotham created the Batman so it could survive. Batman, when he earns the city, will reshape it in his image so that his new reality, the beginning of the new life, can find everlasting purpose, a justification for continued existence. One cannot exist without the other now. And Batman knows that his life ends when Gotham falls.

When Supermen Lament not Being Real: the demise of the superhero in the wake of 9/11

by: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

When the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, 2001, Superman was nowhere to be found. Spider Man’s senses failed to tingle, the Fantastic Four explored other dimensions, and Captain America was too invested, perhaps, in other threats more immediate and less secretive than the one that descended upon New York on that day. The Hulk had no other option than to get angry after the fact. The case could weigh more profoundly on Spider Man given his actual residency in the city, being that Superman lives in the fictional city of Metropolis (evident though it may be that said city was originally modeled after Manhattan in both scope and character to the point of it being labeled in the comics themselves as “The Big Apricot”). And yet, the fact still remained that neither one of them could even conceive such a likelihood so as to later explain the attack in fictional form.
 
     Writing for SF Weekly, Robert Wilonsky noted perceptively that, “In a post-Sept 11 world, even the phrase, ‘Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!’ sounds different; its awe has been replaced by shock and repulsion” (see Comic Book Nation by Bradford Wright). Comic books as an expression in escapism could no longer be recognized as such when the comic book world itself had to explain the absence of the Twin Towers and why their heroes were incapable of stopping the terrorist attacks when they had been able to fend off countless other threats more intense and dangerous in scope when contrasted with the reality of the the comic world. Battling Galactus, the giant world-eating alien, pales in comparison to two planes that should’ve been easily swatted from the sky by a single superhero, much less by a group of them such as the Avengers or the Justice League, each with their own god-like heroes any one of which could’ve single-handedly stopped the attacks. But that quite simply did not happen. 

      In their absence, the public chose to confide their expected heroics to real men and women who served as firemen, police officers, congressmen, senators, vice presidents and presidents. Men and women that actually existed. This still didn’t ease the pain of explaining the attacks within the logic of a superhero world. The immediate comic book response was Heroes by Marvel Comics. Published in December 2001, Heroes was particularly interesting in its effort to unite icons old and new—or rather, in its ambition to establish new icons while simultaneously reintroducing old ones, as writer Stefanie Diekmann states in the Guardian article “Hero and Superhero.” Many of Marvel's famous characters, such as Spider Man, the Silver Surfer and Captain America, were resurrected and represented alongside the ‘protagonists’ of 9/11: firemen, police officers and other rescue workers immortalized visually as covered in the black dust of the broken towers. 

      The front page of Heroes is subtitled: “The world's greatest superhero creators honor the world's greatest heroes.” The idea within the book is that fiction should bow to reality in the immediate aftermath of an event so catastrophic in proportions so as to actually establish an historic time-frame or era (remember, American life after the attacks is now considered as the post-9/11 era). DC Comics followed in releasing 9/11: The Worlds’s Finest Comics Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember with short stories and single page artwork by the industry’s top talents. The book’s cover sees an Alex Ross drawn Superman standing before a mural littered with policemen, firefighters, nurses, and rescue workers. Above and to the left of Superman is a small word balloon saying “Wow.” Again, fiction recognizing reality’s place in the aftermath, or not intentionally seeking a spotlight it can’t honestly and sincerely fill at the moment.

      This passing of the baton, if only for a moment, is interesting if not a bit deceptive. Superheroes do recognize true heroics in the men and women of 9/11, but they do so with an authority bestowed upon them by readers that accept their judgment as sound in recognizing heroics in other people. In other words, they seem to be grading the true protagonists of 9/11 by superhero standards, the same ones expected by comic book readers. If such is the case, the superhero’s lament is one of not being real enough to save the day. But their saving grace is being able to guide the coronation of everyday rescue workers, policemen, nurses, and firemen as real-life superheroes. 

      Perhaps one of the most striking expressions of the superhero’s lament is found in Amazing Spider Man #36, released October 31st, 2001. Within the opening pages of the comic book we see Spider Man almost lost in the color of fire and explosions of the collapsed towers saying, ever so subtly in tone, “God.” His only expression amidst the unknowable in a single word, collecting public sentiment and becoming one with New York in a day where all shared the same feeling, calling to the same being. “God.” The pages pass and we come to New Yorkers fleeing from the destruction, looking at Spider Man, and asking: “Where were you? How could you let this happen?” Spider Man’s only response, in the form of narration and not dialogue, is: “How do you say we didn’t know? We couldn’t know. We couldn’t imagine.” The lament of the superhero, best expressed in this Spider Man issue, rests on 9/11 laying bare the limits of fiction in its wake. When the unimaginable happens, one cannot expect the imagined to act on our behalf. In the wake of 9/11 it was up to superheroes to recognize heroics in the men and women of the real world. It wasn’t up to superheroes, at that moment, to save the day but to comfort loss and let real men and women don the capes of heroes, if only for a short while.