Unfortunately, Batman Works Best In A Pee Pee-Soaked Heck Hole

I've been reading two Batman books side-by-side, thinking about their respective dystopias. The series are vaguely connected even beyond their lead character because one of them is Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight, a comic most other Batmans and many unrelated superhero books take their biggest cues from. DC has been reprinting that series in facsimile editions. The other is Batman: Dark Patterns by Dan Watters and Hayden Sherman, and it's probably the best genre comic I've read in the past few years. It was collected in trade paperback form last month.

The easy criticism of Batman as a concept, the one that only applies if you haven't read any of the work, is that if Bruce Wayne really wanted to help the world, he’d put his money into charities and stop beating up Gotham’s criminal element. If you come to this realization on your own, it probably feels smart, in the same way a 12-year-old might think “hey, the opposite of 'pro’ is ‘con,’ so I guess the opposite of ‘progress’ is ‘congress.’” It’s one of those pseudo-clever bits of elevated thinking that lights a kid’s brain up like napalm. When a fellow student in my 9th grade science class used white-out to write “If the black box is indestructible, why don’t they make the whole plane out of that material?” across the front of her backpack, she was engaging in real “Why doesn’t Batman start a nonprofit?” smarm.

(I don't want anybody to infer from my mention of somebody else's dum dum moment that I'm saying I didn't have any of my own. It's just that I can't think of any of mine because I've repressed them all in shame. To make sure this doesn't come across like I'm above high school idiot wit, please know that when I was a sophomore, I owned a novelty shirt that said "Five out of four people have a a problem with fractions" and I wore it all the time. I am a cringe machine.)

It’s silly because Batman isn’t real. As obvious as that point is, it’s worth remembering all of the loose ends it ties up. It means that the people making Batman comics need to create adventure in some way, so they're writing a world that requires Batman. Bruce Wayne has unlimited funds (he, like Batman, is not real) and actually does pump a good chunk of his fortune into Gotham's rehabilitation initiatives and orphanages and so on in most comics. He's usually written to be the mythical good billionaire, who gives money to people who can solve regular problems in regular ways, and then he busts out the Bat gadgets when a crocodile man starts eating people in the sewers. The character’s already doing the thing from the "ah ha!" gotcha.

Even if he wasn't, though, it's the necessity of creating a story that makes sense for a personality like Batman that really matters. Batman the character existed and then later– sometimes decades later– details like Joker and Robin and the Batcave and existing in the same world as all the Justice League characters were colored in because they fixed story problems or they appealed to different audiences the publisher wanted to serve or a corporate merger took place. If the market seemed like it would have preferred a story where Batman was a licensed therapist who helped people with their issues through talk therapy, that's what DC Comics would publish. Or, more accurately, that's the kind of story Warner Bros. would put in their Batman movies, and then the comics would follow suit. I believe deeply in prison abolition and have professionally worked to get incarcerated peoples' voices and opinions back into a world that silences them, but I've never read a comic where Batman sends the Scarecrow to Arkham and thought "what the FUCK is this bullshit?" I've also never questioned Batman's no-killing code, even though the comics are set in a world where a character like Joker has a war criminal's body count. If your average Batman story took place in the real world, Batman would probably need to murder a villain who'd already killed a million people and planned to kill a million more. That doesn't change how against the death penalty I am in the real world.

As it is, thousands of creatives, from writers and artists to people who run focus groups on new action figure designs, have made this version of Batman we have now. It's one of the biggest media properties in the world and it's that way because he fights crime with punches and gadgets.

If that's currently the most popular conception of your most popular character– a grim, traumatized night stalking action detective– you need to create a world where that character makes sense. That world is, for better or worse, a frightened Republican's idea of a big city.

That doesn't mean a story that suits Batman needs to run conservative, but the urban shit hole Batman polices needs to be at least a little ridiculous. When people snark that Batman should give his fortune to charity, they're talking about a version of the character that would make sense in the real world. Batman is a man dressed as a bat. It's a hellish, heightened reality. A Boston Marathon bombing-level event happens in Gotham every few days, and it's almost always perpetrated by a person who already launched a Boston Marathon bombing-level event within the past few months. You justify Batman's vigilantism by turning every day of his life into a dozen consecutive Death Wish movies.

That's the book Watters and Sherman made. Dark Patterns is structured as four cases, each lasting three issues. The stories are all about neglected parts of Gotham and a form of extrajudicial law residents of those places have enacted to keep things in order. There's other connective tissue across the twelve issues (each story features a fire, each reveals some Gotham lore about bureaucratic malfeasance that left generational scars, etc.), so this isn't exactly following the Legends of the Dark Knight format, but it isn't far off. A quick summary, and I'll be spoiling things here:

1. Batman discovers Ace Chemicals dumped their waste outside Gotham, but then a planned community was built on that land. The toxic soil led to a suburb full of people who have no physical sensation. A weirdo covered in nails emerges and tries to take out the people responsible for covering up the chemical dumping.
2. In a very Raid: The Redemption inspired story, two police officers are held hostage in a low income apartment building that's been taken over by a gang. Batman goes in to rescue the cops and discovers the building's unique construction makes sounds echo around in a strange way, which has allowed the Ventriloquist to manipulate residents, turning every one of them into a hostage, a soldier or both.
3. A burned corpse is found in what's essentially a Hooverville in the middle of Gotham's Rookery neighborhood. Like the apartment building, the Rookery is avoided by police and has been forced to self-govern. Batman discovers the corpse had been dead for years and was planted to scare Rookery locals straight by making them believe the Red Hood Gang, a local mafia, had returned.
4. The scope zooms out to encompass all of Gotham as a maniac in a baby mask sets off a series of bombs meant to recreate a famous 1800s disaster (think the San Francisco Fire of 1851 or the Great Chicago Fire) that had devastated the city but was also the impetus for it being rebuilt better than it had been.

By the time the fourth story began with issue 10, Dark Patterns had already reminded me of the Hannibal TV show, and the comparison was drilled in by Watters and Sherman turning Firefly into a new villain's Hannibal Lecter-y malevolent guidance counselor.

I loved most of Bryan Fuller's Hannibal, but the primary thing I can remember from its 2.5 great seasons now, ten years later (besides the clock) is how horrific it was. This was an NBC show that got gorier than anything I've seen on HBO. People were flayed and posed to look like "angels" and a barn was filled with corpses stitched together to look like a human eye. A woman discovered that this Hannibal guy might actually be a creep and the next time we saw her, she'd been vivisected and arranged into a half-dozen lab slides like she was an exhibit in a medical museum. I don't do well with super-realistic gore, but I've also watched enough horror movies that I can stomach anything in limited doses. Even then, Hannibal was a lot. I've seen all the splatter movies you have and the most violent thing I've ever watched on a screen is still this primetime network crime procedural. Hong Kong Category III films might be more nihilistic, but they aren't any more graphic than a standard Hannibal episode was.

But the violence made sense for Hannibal. Will Graham and his crew work in a version of Baltimore where most residents can be classified as a serial killer, a government agent and/or a serial killer's victim. As long as you don't mistake Hannibal for any kind of political or social analogue for the real world– as long as you aren't Antonin Scalia making decisions about torture's righteousness based on how you felt watching episodes of 24– I don't see any problem with taking in art that exaggerated as long as I'm not a child or some delusional, Dan Crenshaw-level dipshit whose sense of the world is based more on Tom Clancy books than on a basic idea of how real people are affected by real problems.

The Batman of Dark Patterns, like Hannibal's Will Graham, is not a conservative nut bag. Batman lives in Trump's conception of Chicago, but recognizes it got that way because slumlords prey on people who can't fight back and big companies like Ace Chemicals can pay their way around dumping ordinances. This Batman is an ideal of humanitarian detective work. If you wanted to take this world and tell a conservative story, it would be very easy. Chuck Dixon, probably the most prolific Batman writer of the 90s, is an idiot who did a whole lot of that before becoming so bad he was last seen writing a QAnon comic.

Dark Knight 1-4 (later collected as Dark Knight Returns) is a weirder case because Frank Miller is a weirder dude. Personally, Miller is all over the map politically, only really descending into Chuck Dixon-level conservative thought for about a decade following 9/11. His most outrageous work, also his most famous, is over-the-top hell world noir like Dark Knight or Sin City, where the politics are as scattered as a shotgun blast.

Dark Knight's strength is in the way Miller tells its story, filling pages with 16 panels where most comics, then and now, grid out between four and nine panels per page. Miller will draw a meeting between Two Face and some goons but all of the tiny little boxes depicting the discussion will focus on their poker game, or he'll check in with minor characters throughout the series without ever showing their faces, placing their dialogue boxes over extreme close-ups of neon signs. The story is not dense, but the style is.

This version of Batman has especially been criticized as a fascist character, though opinion remains split on whether Miller's doing that as satire or because he thinks it's rad to watch an old man rain rubber bullets on a street gang for fun. The book's actual tone is somewhere in the middle– Miller critiques the idea of superheroes pretty explicitly in his depictions of Superman and Green Arrow, and you could never give Dark Knight an honest reading and think Miller supports the Travis Bickle-like character who shoots up a porn theater, but from his Daredevil work on, Frank Miller has always been the angry, paranoid kid who moved to New York in 1976, at 19-years-old, and then proceeded to get mugged three or four times. He absolutely views cities as bureaucratic messes full of selfish criminals who can never be rehabilitated. It's just, you know, he also hates Reagan. Everybody's committing crimes, but it's because they get off on violence and not because capitalism has killed any chance for honest upward mobility or anything. This is not a Sidney Lumet movie where you get any real sense of why any of the criminals are doing what they're doing. There are pages where Batman breaks a thug's arm because Miller is showing how out of control everything in his version of Gotham is and there are pages where Batman breaks a thug's arm because isn't it cool to break a thug's arm?

But, again, it works. I've read this thing a half-dozen times since I was in middle school and it's provided the framework for approximately 0% of my moral core because I know we don't live in a pulp fever dream. On the spectrum of comics work I can take any sort of real lesson from, Dark Knight is way closer to the Baby Huey end than the Joe Sacco one. It's one of my favorite comics on any part of that spectrum, but it isn't changing the way I think.

That may be the real reason I think Batman works best as a character when the creative team goes out of their way to establish how hellish his city is: If they don't, they might be trying to teach me a lesson. They might be trying to show me that guns are bad– a point I already agree with– by having Batman beat the shit out of a bunch of people and then leave them for the police to send off to an asylum worse than most prison camps. When people try to turn Batman into The Wire (or even The Sopranos), you have to question why Bruce Wayne isn't giving it all to charity. When Batman's running through a city whose skyline is always in flames, everything makes sense, and the costume and villains and giant penny are justified because now I'm reading about a world where anything can be justified. You remove the craziness, you remove the necessity for a Batman character at all, and then Batman's left awkwardly standing around in an environment that cannot sanction his buffoonery.