Batman/DC Universe Discussion

[Aldus Vertten]

Goyer's been on my crap list since "Batman Begins" when in an obvious attempt to rip off QT does the whole who-you-are-is-the-hero-your-real-face-is-your-disguise meme. To make it worse the line is given to Katie Holmes in comparison David Carradine in "Kill Bill."

When I heard the line in the theater I muttered a little too loud "WTF"... it ruined the duration of the movie for me.

Goyer's attempt to establish that Batman and Superman are cut from the same cloth is a gross mistake.

That theme has been used a lot in the comics actually, not something QT made. I remember the Bruce Wayne Fugitive saga, for starters, but im quite sure it's not the only instance. AS a matter of fact, usually they used it as a reason to doubt about bats sanity...

[ThunderMonkey]

That theme has been used a lot in the comics actually, not something QT made. I remember the Bruce Wayne Fugitive saga, for starters, but im quite sure it's not the only instance. AS a matter of fact, usually they used it as a reason to doubt about bats sanity...

Really? I haven't read Bats in a long while.

If that's the case, then I may have to revamp my previous thought and look that up.

[Krensky]

That theme has been used a lot in the comics actually, not something QT made. I remember the Bruce Wayne Fugitive saga, for starters, but im quite sure it's not the only instance. AS a matter of fact, usually they used it as a reason to doubt about bats sanity...

Really? I haven't read Bats in a long while.

If that's the case, then I may have to revamp my previous thought and look that up.

It was part of the DCAU Batman too. Showed up a number of times in different shows. I also seem to recall that Bruce Wayne as Batman's mask more or less started with Kane and Finger.

[Aldus Vertten]

The Bruce Wayne Murderer /fugitive sagas where mostly about that. i didn't read it in full, but Bruce wayne was accused of a crime and instead of trying to prove his innocence, he used it as a way to finally get ridden of the "bruce Wayne" persona, not useful anymore... I remember Nightwing, robin and the rest of the gang being worried about that...

By the way, check this video scene from Push, in myspace...

PAT's EDIT: Fixed your link, which was pretty sweet BTW.

[Mister Andersen]

The Bruce/Batman balance and the degree of dickery he displays to the rest of the Batfamily has been a constant narrative cycle in the batbooks for the last 20 years at the very least. Batman is a dick to his family and friends -> situations arise because of that -> Bruce resolves to be a nicer guy -> new writer comes in -> Batman is a dick to his family and friends...

At one point, just prior to the mess of the Wargames crossover, he reached such a nadir of basic sane human decency in his never ending war that Tim Drake (Robin III) quit for a number of reasons, including getting away from Batman's frankly creepy and abusive behaviour "training". Batman's response was to behave as a complete and utter cunt by resorting to psychwar in hiring Tim's girlfriend  Steph as Robin IV in order to make Tim jealous. This young woman who essentially heroworships Batman is then set up, by her hero, to fail, being given a bare minimum of training necessary then callously fired when that training proved insufficient and she was forced to resort to the unsuccessful use of deadly force to save Batman's life.

Shortly thereafter Steph, in an attempt to regain her mentor's approval initiates a sequence of events where she's basically tortured almost to death with an electric drill and then denied life-saving medical treatment by Gotham's answer to Mother Teresa in order to teach Batman a lesson; for years afterwards he refuses to give her a display case as he had given Jason Todd. The fact that only recently this was retconned to Steph's death being faked to give her time to recover in a new life in Africa as a medical aid worker and the lack of memorial case was because Batman didn't quite believe she was dead but still let Tim go on thinking she was, in no way excuses the complete and utter jerkitude at any point.

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At this point, Darkseid's dusting him with the old Omega Beams is probably the best thing to happen to the character. When Bruce eventually returns, it'll hopefully be as something approaching a decent human being

[dpmcalister]

The Bruce/Batman balance and the degree of dickery he displays to the rest of the Batfamily has been a constant narrative cycle in the batbooks for the last 20 years at the very least. Batman is a dick to his family and friends -> situations arise because of that -> Bruce resolves to be a nicer guy -> new writer comes in -> Batman is a dick to his family and friends...

At one point, just prior to the mess of the Wargames crossover, he reached such a nadir of basic sane human decency in his never ending war that Tim Drake (Robin III) quit for a number of reasons, including getting away from Batman's frankly creepy and abusive behaviour "training". Batman's response was to behave as a complete and utter cunt by resorting to psychwar in hiring Tim's girlfriend  Steph as Robin IV in order to make Tim jealous. This young woman who essentially heroworships Batman is then set up, by her hero, to fail, being given a bare minimum of training necessary then callously fired when that training proved insufficient and she was forced to resort to the unsuccessful use of deadly force to save Batman's life.

Shortly thereafter Steph, in an attempt to regain her mentor's approval initiates a sequence of events where she's basically tortured almost to death with an electric drill and then denied life-saving medical treatment by Gotham's answer to Mother Teresa in order to teach Batman a lesson; for years afterwards he refuses to give her a display case as he had given Jason Todd. The fact that only recently this was retconned to Steph's death being faked to give her time to recover in a new life in Africa as a medical aid worker and the lack of memorial case was because Batman didn't quite believe she was dead but still let Tim go on thinking she was, in no way excuses the complete and utter jerkitude at any point.

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At this point, Darkseid's dusting him with the old Omega Beams is probably the best thing to happen to the character. When Bruce eventually returns, it'll hopefully be as something approaching a decent human being

WOW! I really need to start reading the comics again, that all sounds cool to me! (I haven't picked up a Batman comic since I joined the Royal Air Force in 1990!) I'm being serious here as well (in case you think I'm being sarcastic ). I've always loved the grittier Batman and the way you've put it makes him out to be really gritty. I don't mind that he's being a c**t - Bruce/Bats is totally f**ked up anyway... it makes sense for him to start taking it out on his extended "family".

[Number Three]

I've always loved the grittier Batman and the way you've put it makes him out to be really gritty. I don't mind that he's being a c**t - Bruce/Bats is totally f**ked up anyway... it makes sense for him to start taking it out on his extended "family".

Except that, has Bats gets more and more crazy and starts taking it out on more non-criminals, the audience looses sympathy with him at the same rate.  At some point, he's going to stop looking like someone inspired by his parents death to try to make the world a better place and starts looking like  obsessive-compulsive control freak with more money than morals.  At what point does the man creating a nano-virus to Borg unknowing civilians into his cyborg army stop being a 'good' guy?

EDIT:  Don't get me wrong, the philosophical question of which identify is the 'real' one for a superhero is great stock and trade for the genre, but the last decade of Batman writers has taken "Who is the real Bruce Wayne?" to it's illogical conclusion of "Batman is f#$%!ng crazy megalomaniac."  I'll stick to the Dini/Timm universe, where a right at Albuquerque made the answer the (slightly) more heroic "Batman has a death wish."

[Mister Andersen]

A good place to start is scans_daily on live journal and follow the Batman tag -- in particular the Rumble in Gotham posts. At the moment someone's recapping the massive Cataclysm crossover (see below).

The Batman events over the 90s start with Knightfall (Batman is outwitted and outmatched by new character Bane, who eventually snaps Batman's back like a twig in front of most of the GCPD) followed by Knight Quest (Bruce searches the world for a magical cure for his Christopher Reeve status while his annointed successor -- deprogrammed cult supersoldier Azrael -- proceeds to beat Bane and go insane   as a parable explaining why the whole 90s extreme!!!!! character trend didn't belong in the bat books) and Knight's End (Bruce retrains as Batman in order to take down AzBat).

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Bane has been one of the very few of the modern crop of Bat villains to take (his appearance in Batman & Robin as Ivy's dumb henchmen was a massive insult to the character), proving so popular as to be granted a rather neat transformative story arc. Currently one of the lead characters in Secret Six. Also, the events of this arc put a massive strain on the relationship between Batman and Gordon that took several years to fully heal. Between defeating AzBat and Bruce resuming the role, Dick takes over as Batman for a while as a way of correcting the need for someone other than him to succeed Bruce in order for he parable to be told.

The next event -- in scale something of a lull between what came before and what is to follow -- is Contagion and its followup Legacy, where Gotham (amongst other cities) is struck by a massively virulent disease. After saving the city, the BAt clan track down the culprit

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Ra's Al Ghul and his new associate -- the newly resurfaced Bane

Following that is Cataclysm, where Gotham's hit by this massive freak earthquake, and left utterly devastated. BGeing the forward thinker that he is, all Wayne buildings are quakeproof -- except for the manor, which collapses into the Batcave. Effectively a changing of the guard period as the then current writers were given a chance to wrap things up before they were all replaced with new blood.

This immediately segues into No Man's Land, where the sheer scale of devasation sees Gotham evacuated of all who are willing to leave then just fenced off from the rest of the country and declared to no longer be part of America (so imagine New Orleans after Katrina as the result of actual policy rather than simple ineptitude). Gotham basically breaks down into a massive turf war, with Gordon's cops as one of the gangs, with surprisingly a mysterious new Batgirl and a redeemed (but still mad) Two-Face stepping up as Gotham's protectors. Batman, realising that only Bruce Wayne can put things to rights is essentially exiled from his beloved city for a good half of the story line but eventually returns to spearhead the reclaiming of the Gotham.

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Stuff happens during this particular storyline that's still affecting the Batbooks today, like the introduction of the new Batgirll(s) -- namely Batgirl II shows up standing in for Batman who is outside the city when it's sealed off snd then when he reappears in a moment of true Batdickery is summarily replaced by the newly introduced Cassandra Cain -- hot asian assassin jailbait whose schtick is that she can't speak because she was raised by her assassin father David Cain only to be fluent in Body language -- as Batgirl III in a frankly squcktastic gimp costume. The other significant event is a brief Two-Face / Rene Montoya team up that eventually results in her getting outed (by him as part of a stalkerish attempt to make her love him), quitting the GCPD and becoming the new Question following the death of the original and as a result of that, she involuntarially ends up leading a murder cult. Batman's absense from the streets of isolated Gotham furthers the strain on his relationship with Gordon, who feels increasingly betrayed -- especially due to the murder of his wife at the hands of the Joker, the criminal responsible for his torture and the crippling of his daughter Barbara in the seminal Killing Joke graphic novel (the events of which eventually led to Barbara's reinvention as super-hacker Oracle.

Bruce Wayne: Murderer followed by Bruce Wayne: Fugitive (as mentioned earlier in the thread -- Bruce along with his new unwanted bodyguard Sasha Bordeaux are framed for the murder of long time casual girlfriend Vesper Fairchild; Sasha would go on to become a member and then leader of the US covert agency Checkmate).

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The murder was committed by Batgirl's father at the behest of then-President Lex Luthor who had wanted to basically buy out all of Gotham during No Man's Land untll Wayne stopped him and thus wanted revenge. Cain however, as had Sasha shortly before hand, discovered Wayne's alterego and staged the crime where the motive to those who knew Wayne-as-Batman would be him protecting his identity from being revealed by Vesper.

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The underlying theme of Batman being the true identity really split the fandom during this time, not least because only a year before Bruce Wayne had been the one responsible for restoring Gotham so Batman's decision to essentially kill off that part of his identity smacked of plot rather than character motivation. Bat/Cat OTPers also disliked Sasha's infatuation with Bruce, his training of her as part of the Batclan once she discovered his secret and his eventual realisation of love for her once she was taken to join Checkmate.

The next couple of years are quiet in the Batbooks, but feature the month-long Officer Down storyline where Gordon is shot and decides to retire. Also significant during this period is the relaunch of the Catwoman title responsible for the character's somewhat Emma Peelish looking new look (a vast improvement over her 90s purple body stocking) and return to more street-level escapades. During the run of her new series, Selina is eventually forced to murder Batvillain Black Mask in order to protect her family and friends, as well as past crimes against them. During the whole One Year Later plot forced on DC by the events of Infinite Crisis, Selina is replaced as Catwoman for a while by her friend Holly when she winds up pregnant with a baby girl -- named Helena as an attempt to invoke the pre-Crisis era as part of the mystery surrounding her parentage -- whom she is eventually forced to give up for adoption once her old enemies start targetting her child.

Also during this time we get the JLA mini series Identity Crisis. It's baaaad. It involves rape, murder, fridging and insanity. The salient details is that years ago a villain learns a bunch of secret IDs and in order to safeguard their loved ones a majority of the JLA decide to have Zatanna mindwipe him. Batman -- of whom I once saw a ridiculously long list of people who know his -- in yet another stunning display of inexplicable Batdickery, for some reason violently objects to this (I guess because letting it go ahead  makes him look like a monumental jerk for not simply brain wiping the Joker into not murdering thousands of people?) so has his memory of the incident erased too. When he finds out what was done, he builds an AI satellite to track all super human activity on the planet. This sattelite is later subverted by Maxwell Lord and alternate reality Luthor to create the unwitting killer borgs mentioned by 3, culminating in the events of Infinite Crisis and yet another brutalisation of the Amazons and the character assassination of Wonder Woman (Max Lord, using a mind controlled Superman to murder Batman, tells Wonder Woman while bound by her lasso that the only to save Batman and stop Superman murdering countless more heroes is to kill Max himself. So she breaks his neck, saving the day. The AI however simply posts the image of her killing Lord all over the world and instead of supporting her to the world, Bruce and Clark bitch and moan at her in private for somehow betraying them. The clearly antagonistic world court treats her more fairly than her friends and publically exhonerates her.

Then we come to the anvilicious introduction of a new Batvillain named Hush. Though an attempt is made to to keep the character's true identity a mystery to be solved

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it's blindingly obvious that it is newly introduced childhood BFF Tommy Elliot, who atempted to murder his parents as a child but only got his dad, hated Bruce's dad for saving his horribly controlling mum and then hated Bruce for having both his parents die and inherit a fortune.

Aware of Bruce's dual identity, his plan is to replace Bruce after having self-administed plastic surgery to make him look like him. Is fleshed out somewhat more competently under the pen of Paul Dini during which time he literally steals Catwoman's heart to replace her own which earns him the sort of beat down the Joker has wet dreams about receiving, after which Selina from her hospital bed completely and utterly destroys his fortune. Most recenty seen last month, dead broke and scamming Wayne's companies for start up cash before running afoul of Catwoman; sadly his prominent advertising as part of the Battle for the Cowl event (see below) speaks to his continued survival.

I should also mention that Hush faked the resurrection of a now adult Jason Todd (Robin II). However as a result of Infinite Crisis and Superboy Prime *sigh* punching the walls of reality Jason Todd is currently spontaneously alive as an adult. And exceptionally pissed at Bruce for not killing the Joker for having murdered him.

Batman R.I.P marks drug-addled brit writer Grant Morrison's ascension to the Batbooks and metaploting overlordship at DC. Basically a bunch of rich neer do wells called The Black Hand decided to destroy Batman for kicks and giggles. Bruce falls almost instantaneously for international jet-setting african socialite Jezebel Jett, reveals his secret identity to her and is then driven insane and doped up on "weapons grade meth" before being dumped in an alley.

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As with Hush, Jezebel's sudden appearance combined with her ridiculous name makes it glaringly obvious she's part of the set up and was being strung along all the time by Batman, who it turns out had a back-up personality implanted back in the day against just such an event as this. The Hand pretty much seal there fate by thinking they can involve the Joker and he won't brutally murder them for trying to rob him of the right of killing Batman. Bruce himself is last seen on an exploding helicopter taking out the Hand's leader.

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Naturally a lot of people loathed the story. The reveal that Batman had known about Jezebel the whole time didn't stop their relationship up to that point being utterly painful, the claims it would be a defining story were felt by many to have been false (though it is pretty much the ultimate expression of the prepared for anything "Bat God" version of the character that Bruce has to be in order to hang with the JLA), the ending was very Reichenbach Falls, but the worst part was the (re)introduction of Batman's son Damien (from the out of continuity graphic novel Son of the Demon, sired by Talia's heavily implied rape of Bruce at some point in the past and introduced as a completely objectionable sociopathic pubescent brat. Some people have inferred that the cents of this plot line that Batman experiences are actually fake and instead are part of what follows...

Then we have Final Crisis (if only) which is basically Morrison's "Wouldn't it be cool if Evil wins!" Magnum Opus in which, after having murdered every single one of Kirby's New Gods because DC didn't know what to do with the characters he has Darkseid pull a Xanatos Gambit that eventually sees Darkseid and his peeps, hanging on Earth in stolen human hosts, unleash the Anti-Life Equation via the internet and, well, win. Naturally Superman is off in some parallell dimension or such picking up the gizmo that will save the day. Wonder Woman -- just as naturally, because despite being billed as a member of the Big Three virtually no one at DC has any respect for her at all -- is either mindfragged or outright possessed into becoming one of Darkseid's minions off-screen. Batman, though... Darkseid has for some time held a kidnapped Batman in order to use him as the Jango Fett for his new army except Batman's so hardcore he defeats the dreamscape machine he's stuck in, killing all the clones connected to it he was meant to be imprinting his badassitude on, then kills Darkseid moments before Darkseid hits him with the old Omega beams.

Which brings us to Battle of the Cowl set to take place in the wake of Final Crisis in which prety much every major Bat family member -- including Hush and Damien, the latter is implied via promo art to become Robin for at least some amount of time -- in a battle over the legacy and the mantle of the Bat.

[Krensky]

Yeah. I hate4 to sound hypocritical, what with my earlier comments about DC/Marvel should just let characters and stories end and come up with new stuff...

But I meant they should do it right.

Honestly, the crap like that, the civil war in Marvell, etc is why I don't read comics anymore.

Loved the DCAU, including Batman Beyond. Well, maybe not Static Shock so much.

[Number Three]

While an excellent summary, I think we officially need a thread split.

Also, an excellent summary of why my friends and i coined the term "Jason Lutes is God."

[Crafty_Pat]

While an excellent summary, I think we officially need a thread split.

Done and done.

[Number Three]

Honestly, the crap like that, the civil war in Marvell, etc is why I don't read comics anymore.

You see, that's the attitude I can't understand.  "Comics" are so much more than superheroes.  It's just a medium.  DC's saving grace is that they've done as much to prove that as anyone.  Forget Moore's early works, they published the trifecta of mainstream Not Superhero comics - Sandman, Preacher, and Transmetropolitan.  Jason Lutes may work at a glacier's pace, but Berlin is fantastic.  Madman and Mage are just far enough afield of men-in-tights to feel different.  I'm not even going to get into all the sappy and/or pretentious stuff you'll probably hate (Love & Rockets).  Or manga, where a lot of stuff we would like probably doesn't make it over here.  My Shatterpunk game* will owe as more to Ghost in the Shell than Cyberpunk 2020, and any Fantasycraft game I run is gonna require me to cut a royalty check to Jeff Smith.


*(Assuming I can find enough players that can stand the genre, and even then I dread that they won't grok it like I do)

[Mister Andersen]

Well that's part of the problem -- to the average person, comics and superheroes are essentially the same thing because that's essentially what the mainstream industry in America publishes to the exclusion of most else for newstand distribution. The only non-Supers book I've ever seen in that market with any sort of regularity are comedy books -- mostly The Simpsons -- and occasionally some of the Dark Horse Star Wars books. Thanks to the depredations of mid 20th Century censorship, the horror and pulp comics that used to be the industry's mainstay are long gone, and the war comics boom was mostly a WWII propaganda phenomena that was quickly killed off.

It's only when you go to a specialty comics store that you realise the true diversity of the medium -- mostly because comic shops are the only place to easily access the indy publishers, which frankly includes the mature-readers targeted Vertigo books -- and even then superheroics still massively predominates (not surprising given it's essentially physically idealised people nude bouncing around the pages (largely) without the actual nudity to get in the way of things.

And honestly I wouldn't touch most manga because while there are some great dynamic story telling techniques, the art is all too often hideously alien -- sure superheroines might have perfectly spherical breasts the size of their head, but they have faces the dimensions of which are obviously humanly normal, unlike far far too much manga where the women have the absurd breasts AND faces that look they belong to the evolutionary ancestors of the grey aliens. You'll notice that those manga-based animes that have really hit it off here have had phenomenal story telling AND recognisably western-styled art, though the current generation who have been raised with anime are far more accepting of it because it's been made normal to them.

[Krensky]

You'll notice that those manga-based animes that have really hit it off here have had phenomenal story telling AND recognisably western-styled art, though the current generation who have been raised with anime are far more accepting of it because it's been made normal to them.

Really?  What series are you thinking of.

Gigantor, Speed Racer, Star Blazers, Ghost in the Shell, Sailor Moon, Harlock, Dragonball Z, Dragonball, Naruto, Bleach... None of these look like western illustration of their time.

[Mister Andersen]

DB(Z) and Sailor Moon typifies the Big Eyes Small Mouth art that turns a lot of people off from manga -- and you'll notice that they're pitched at a very young audience for whom that physiogonomy is closer to the other bizare inhuman and childish faces they're exposed to (big eyes area signpost of infancy, and seeing that on !youngsters trips a squick factor in many people).

Now look at Robotech or Battle of the Planets or Star Blazers or GitS or even Death Note, all targetted at older audiences from teens to adults. Those all display the typical japanese fetish for larger than usual eyes but even so the proportions of the faces are much closer to classic real-life ones.

At the moment, manga -- noticeably including "local" stuff produced in the west with an eye towards western artistic and narrative sensibilities -- is a large growth market within the comics marketplace. A generation ago it would never have happened, but the fact key anime imports like Star Blazers, Akira and Robotech broke into the western market that generation ago paved the way for manga to follow in their footsteps. Thus primed, the fact that manga comes in digests that are comparatively better value for money on a page-to-page basis is a big advantage for it.

There's also the factor that the Japanese never really got stuck in the rut of Western culture's belief that comics are essentially juvenile and male-orientated; a lot of western manga readers are women looking for the relationships and storylines aimed at them that western comics don't possess -- DC for example have just canned their second (or third?) imprint aimed at female comics buyers, and the big 2 seem incapable of grasping that the lack of any sort of major female creative input in their core circles of Silver-age obsessed old-boys is just going to keep driving the female audience they want away.

Let's look at Marvel for a good example: the One More Day/Brand New Day storyline in Spiderman, hailed essentially universally as one of the worst creative decisions Marvel have ever made. Basically, Marvel Editor in chief Joe Quesada by his own admission hates the fact that Peter and M-J are married. Not because he thinks Peter should be with someone else but because he misses the Silver Age and thinks the fact that Peter's married means readers are incapable of identifying with him as an everyman hero.

Take a moment to consider that most comics buyers these days aren't kids, they're young adults, many of whom are in long term relationships or married, even some with children. Consider also that Marvel have unsuccessfully tried to can the spin-off title Spidergirl -- about Peter & MJ's daughter May -- a number of times, a title that would appear to have one of the company's higher female audience ratios. And consider that Peter has one of the few happy relationships going in comicdom at the moment, which somethin that tends to attract female readers.

Naturally the marriage can't end normally, because divorce would just further distance the character from Quesada's creepy fantasies the audience. No. He forces a plotline on the then writer of the book -- who subsequently disowned any creative involvement -- that has Spiderman sell his marriage to the Devil in order to save Aunt May from a gunshot wound that miraculously no one else in the entirity of the Marvel Universe could fix.

Because, obviously, selling out to the Devil is something that everyone can identify with and find admirable and aspire towards unlike developing and maintaining a commited loving relationship.

It's like the Dark Age of the 90s all over again.