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On September 17th, DC “celebrated” what they called “Batman Day”. I do not deploy scare quotes lightly, so let me get this out of the way: Batman is boring. Batman qua Batman as a hero, as a story and as the center of a narrative framework, all of those choices are pretty terrible. The typical Batman story arc goes something like:
- Batman is the best at everything. But Gotham, his city, is full of terrible.
- Batman broods over his city. The city is full of terrible but Batman is a paragon of brooding justice.
- An enemy of justice is scheming at something. Batman detects the scheme, because he is the World’s Greatest Among Many Other Things Detective and intervenes.
- Batman is a paragon of brooding justice.
- Batman’s attempt to intervene fails! Batman may not be the best at everything!
- Batman broods and/or has a bunch of feelings and/or upgrades one of his widgets.
- Batman intervenes again, and Batman emerges triumphant! The right kind of punching and/or widgeting makes him the best at everything again.
- Order is restored to Gotham.
- Batman is a paragon of brooding justice.
If you’re interested in telling interesting stories Batman is far and away the least interesting thing in Gotham. So I took that opportunity to talk about the Batman story I’d write given the chance..
The root inspiration of all this is a bout of protracted synesthesia brought on by discovering this take on Batman from Aaron Diaz, creator of Dresden Codak, at about the same time as I first heard Shriekback’s “Amaryllis In The Sprawl”.
The central thesis is this: if you really want a Gritty, Realistic Batman For The Modern Age, then Gotham isn’t an amped-up New York. It’s an amped-up New Orleans, or some sort of New-Orleans/Baltimore mashup. A city that’s full of life, history, culture, corruption and, thanks to relentlessly-cut tax rates, failing social and physical infrastructure. A New-Orleans/Baltimore metropolis in a coastal version of Brownback’s Kansas, a Gotham where garbage isn’t being collected and basic fire & police services are by and large not happening because tax rates and tax enforcement has been cut to the bone and the city can’t afford to pay its employees.
Bruce Wayne, wealthy philanthropist and Gotham native, is here to help. But this is Bruce Wayne via late-stage Howard Hughes; incredibly rich, isolated, bipolar and delusional, a razor-sharp business mind offset by a crank’s self-inflicted beliefs about nutrition and psychology. In any other circumstances he’d be the harmless crackpot city officials kept at arm’s length if they couldn’t get him committed. But these aren’t any other circumstances: Wayne is far more than just generous, but he wants to burn this candle at both ends by helping the city through the Wayne Foundation by day and in his own very special, very extralegal way, fighting crime dressed in a cowl by night.
And he’s so rich that despite his insistence on dressing up his 55-year-old self in a bat costume and beating people up at night, the city needs that money so badly that to keep his daytime philanthropy flowing, a carefully selected group of city employees stage another episode of “Batman, crime fighter”, a gripping Potemkin-noir pageant with a happy ending and a costumed Wayne in the lead role.
Robin – a former Arkham psych-ward nurse, a gifted young woman and close-combat prodigy in Wayne’s eyes – is a part of the show, conscripted by Mayor Cobblepot to keep an eye on Wayne and keep him out of real trouble. Trained up by retired SAS Sgt. Alfred Pennyworth behind Wayne’s back, in long-shuttered facilities beneath Wayne Manor that Wayne knows nothing about, she is ostensibly Batman’s sidekick in his fight against crime. But her real job is to protect Wayne on those rare occasions that he runs into real criminals and tries to intervene. She’s got a long, silenced rifle under that cloak with a strange, wide-mouthed second barrel and a collection of exotic munitions that she uses like a surgical instrument, not only to protect Wayne but more importantly to keep him convinced his fists & gadgets work at all.
She and Harley Quinn, another ex-Arkham staffer trained by Alfred, spend most of their days planning strategy. They have the same job; Quinn is the sidekick, shepherd and bodyguard of the former chief medical officer of Arkham. Quinn’s charge is also in his twilight years, succumbing to a manic psychosis accelerated by desperate self-administration of experimental and off-label therapies that aren’t slowing the degeneration of his condition, but sure are making him unpredictable. But he was brilliant once, also a philanthropist – the medical patents he owns are worth millions, bequeathed to Gotham and the patients of Arkham, provided the city care for him in his decline. Sometimes he’s still lucid, and seems like the brilliant, compassionate doctor everyone remembers. And other times – mostly at night – he’s somebody else entirely, somebody with grievance and a dark sense of humor.
So Gotham – this weird, mercenary, vicious, beautiful, collapsing Gotham – becomes the backdrop for this nightly pageant of two damaged, failing old men’s game of cat and mouse and the real story we’re following is Robin, Quinn, Alfred and the weird desperation of a city so strapped it has to let them play it out, night after dark, miserable night.