“He’s a Doctor?” and Other Three-Word Heartbreaks on this Day of the Batman

[Originally published on Comics Should be Good in 2015.]

For whatever reason, seeing that it is “Batman Day” made me think of Brian Azzarello. Maybe it’s that, this year, he’s co-written (or will have work he’s co-written released) four different projects featuring Batman. He’s written a surprising amount of comics featuring Batman from Broken City to Flashpoint: Batman: Knight of Vengeance to the Deathblow crossover to the Wednesday Comics story to First Wave to various shorts and guest appearances... I haven’t read every Azzarello Batman story (it’s pretty much a couple of shorts and that recent issue of Batman that he co-wrote that I didn’t know he co-wrote until the day after it came out), but I’ve read most of them and there are three that stand out to me today.

Azzarello has written numerous Batman comics that are straight up crime/superhero narratives. But, he’s also written a few that are downright cruel to the character, boiling him down to something almost pathetic, an emotionally and psychologically stunted child that we should pity rather than laud. I first noticed it in Broken City where Azzarello kept returning to that night when the Waynes were murdered, partly because a similar killing had happened, leaving another boy an orphan. In the final chapter of the story, Batman reflects on his parents and the day prior to their murder, of how precious his father’s time was, how rare it was for them to have a night together as a family, and of the final words Bruce spoke to his parents. To his credit, Azzarello never outright gives the three words that little Bruce screams in anger at his parents before running to his room in tears. But, it’s not hard to figure them out either. As an adult, Batman can’t even think the three words he said as a boy, that’s how much guilt and shame he carries around. But, Azzarello even goes a step further beyond that implication in Batman’s narration: “...SO HE WAS LEFT--ALONE-- / --WITH THE LAST WORDS HE SAID TO THEM. / MAYBE HE’LL SPEND HIS LIFE TRYING TO TAKE THOSE WORDS BACK... / ...OR MAYBE HE MEANT THEM.” It’s not that his final words to his parents were “I hate you,” it’s that he knows that, in that moment, he meant them. It’s the shame that he had those feelings that haunts him; even if he could take the words back, he could never take back the authenticity of his emotions in that moment of childish anger. And that he’s so haunted and driven by that shame is something that he recognises as sad, to a degree, going out of his way to try to help the orphaned boy in the story come to terms somehow with his parents’ deaths. There’s almost a moment of self-awareness where the character recognises that he shouldn’t be as fucked up over that as he is, that there was a failure to properly come to grips with his parents’ deaths and the final days he spent with them. There’s also the implication that he doesn’t fight crime to make sure no one loses loved ones like he did; he does it, so no one has to carry guilt like his. That’s an idea that deepens the character, makes him more sympathetic, and makes him more pitiable.

Knight of Vengeance is clever in how perfectly it inverts the Batman story, taking the orphan boy narrative and transforming it into a story about a couple whose child dies. Azzarello takes all of the internal emotions of that story and explodes them through the Batman mythos where the rage and pain at their child’s death pushes Thomas and Martha to extremes. They are both crazy and both walking embodiments of rage. Thomas takes his rage out on criminals, beginning with Joe Chill (who he opts to beat to death with his bare hands instead of giving him a drug overdose as planned); Martha takes her rage out on other parents by killing their kids. He hates the world that was responsible for his son’s death and seeks to eliminate that world completely; she hates everyone whose children didn’t get shot in an alley and seeks to bring them all down to her level, to know her rage and pain. I understand this story much better now than I did when it came out. But, the truly affecting part comes at the end where, Thomas (Batman) confronts Martha (the Joker) and poses the hypothetical raised by the Flash: the world they live in is wrong and there’s a chance to make it right. In the right world, their son lives and they die; does she think he should make that happen? She registers what he’s said and responds “PROMISE ME, THOMAS, YOU WILL.” The parents would, without hesitation, sacrifice their lives for that of their child. That is a key moment because of what comes next, where Martha asks about the Bruce of that world and Thomas says that “HE FOLLOWS IN HIS FATHER’S FOOTSTEPS.” She asks “HE’S A DOCTOR?” Thomas’s answer manages to drive a crazy woman made temporarily sane to such grief that she rushes to her death. She just made the decision to die so her son could live and learns that this second life she gives him is one spent as the Batman... and she reacts like he was shot again in Crime Alley.

In his Hellblazer run, Azzarello told a larger story that culminated in the final arc, “Ashes & Dust” where John Constantine finally gets revenge on the man who framed him for murder, S. W. Manor. Manor is a Bruce Wayne analogue that reads a bit like a big joke when you realise who he’s a stand-in for. Azzarello throws in lots of Batman references and it’s amusing (none more than the idea that Azzarello’s run culminates in Constantine/Batman slash fiction to a degree), but there’s also a moment of commentary on Batman that’s hard to ignore. Manor has spent much of his life trying to communicate with his dead parents and Constantine makes it happen. Manor tells a priest about the experience, hanging from his arms as Constantine whipped him to help create the state necessary to see and communicate with his parents. And it worked. “MY MOTHER AND FATHER. STANDING BEFORE THEIR ONLY SON. / GHOSTS. / I NEVER FELT SO ALIVE. / MY DEAR, SWEET MAN HAD GIVEN ME WHAT I WANTED MOST. / AND I WEPT. / AND HE LAUGHED. / LAUGHED AS THEY SPOKE. / IN WHISPERS OF CELLOPHANE AND TWINKLING ELECTRICITY, OF HOW THEY LOATHED THE MAN I’D BECOME. / HOW WRETCHED IT WAS TO SEE ME. / HOW WHAT AN UNFAIR WASTE OF LIFE I WAS. / HE LAUGHED. / AND HE WALKED AWAY, LEAVING ME THERE WITH MY PARENTS. / MY DEMONS.”

Looking back at the end of Broken City, that flash of self-awareness and his attempt to help the orphaned boy... does he know? That’s the true ambiguity that intrigues me. Azzarello presents a clear interpretation of Batman that is kind of amazing that DC published and what I love is not just that idea that Bruce’s parents would absolutely give their lives for his and that they would quite possibly hate what he’s done with it, but that, on some level, he knows it.

Happy Batman Day.

The Black Glove is Bruce Wayne?

I don't know why, but I just realised that the Black Glove could be Bruce Wayne. And, no, this is not a case of me trying to one-up Tim with crazy guesses... I actually have some evidence. Kind of.

When I was a kid, I had this paperback-sized Batman book called The Untold Legend of the Batman and, in it (if I recall correctly), Batman is being hunted by a mysterious villain that is dressed in a Batman-like costume that his father wore to a Halloween party when Bruce was a kid. Except, it turns out to be Bruce Wayne in that costume, tearing apart the life of Batman. (Edit: Okay, the details were a little off. You can read a summary of the story through the Wikipedia link. I was close, but remembered some deails wrong. Not that it changes my overall point. I just wanted to point that out for clarity sake.)

In a way, Alfred is responsible for the Black Glove as the insistence that Batman rexplore his Bruce Wayne persona gives that persona strength, the desire to be his own man outside of the Batman. Who else could counter Batman move for move? Who else has the resources? Why is the emphasis on Batman?

Okay, this is a wild guess, but it just occurred to me and I thought I would share.

Wondercon presentations

Now that almost two months have passed, here’s a quick rundown of the presentations I saw at Wondercon:

Friday Feb 22—

Jeff Kahan was supposed to present on the first panel that day, but he didn’t make it. I wanted to get a copy of his book Caped Crusaders 101 but couldn’t, obviously, and that made me sad.

So David Baldizon presented the whole time on “Literacy and Social-Political Awareness” and talked about how he used comics to get his students thinking about concepts in new ways, concepts like Lois Lane as a feminist icon, the connections between Batman and Hamlet or Hulk and Jekyll/Hyde, Captain America as the Nazi ideal, or body images changing over the years as seen in representations of Superman. He brought two of his students to show off their own comics work and talked about how the students, when they were doing comics, were much more perfectionists than when they normally worked because they owned the ideas.

My presentation on “Showing Helder” started off the second panel, followed by Shawn O’Rourke’s presentation on Alan Moore and “Religious Pluralism in Promethea.” I hadn’t read Promethea so I didn’t get a ton out of his presentation unfortunately. He did discuss the concept of theosophy, all religious beings working together and being a part of the same pantheon, so I asked a question of him afterward in regards to that concept in Gaiman’s work, such as American Gods or Sandman: Season of Mists. Also he talked about Promethea’s use of another plane of existence called Immateria, which seemed to me to have a lot in common with the “Blazing World” of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But unfortunately he had not read THAT book, so he couldn’t comment on the similarities.

Saturday Feb 23—

The first panel of the day was all Douglas Wolk. And it was great. It was called The Sense-Shattering Novel of Ideas, and he was basically talking about how, because drawings are automatically the subjective interpretation of reality of the artist, they are naturally drawn to the type of metaphorical explorations that are rare in fiction these days. And then he just basically listed a whole bunch of metaphors that comics have dealt with, from their inception to the present day. And he talked about how, when the metaphor is non-existent, like with Hawkman, or way too obvious, like with Hawk and Dove, the characters tend to fail to catch on.

Some of the ideas he threw out included: how Spiderman’s earliest enemies all seemed to be old men, personifying the youth v. adulthood metaphor of the character; Iron Man being born out of Cold War fears, hence his Vietnam origins and his villains frequently being tied to foreign invaders; how the Flash’s rogues almost all rely on gadgetry, thus turning the book into an exploration of how science when used responsibly (by Barry Allen) can be used for good but also how it can be corrupted in the hands of others. He talked about Green Lantern, how as a galactic police officer he imposes his will on others constantly, and how he checks in with his morality via his oath regularly to avoid straying from the path he has established in his mind as right. And his weakness, yellow, is the color of fear, fear that his will might lead him astray (as we’ve seen with Parallax and the Sinestro Corps recently). He loved House of M for turning the identity metaphor of the mutant inside out, and he loved World War Hulk as a metaphor for post-9/11 blowback. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what he talked about in this truly interesting lecture.

The second panel had a cancellation so the entire hour and a half was taken up by Travis Langley, who spoke on the psychology of Batman. I have to say though that I found a lot of his insights rather elementary. At one point he claimed that such analyses into Batman’s psyche were lacking, and I wanted to shout out, “What about Batman Unmasked? What about The Many Faces of The Batman? Did you actually DO any research before you came here?” He also stole one of his images from my Long Halloween website, which I found kind of funny.

And the last panel I attended that day was called Teaching Comics, and it was a panel discussion that featured among others Stephen Cary, author of Going Graphic, and Gene Luen Yang, author of American-Born Chinese. It was a really insightful discussion and it was great to hear from other people who also use comics in the classroom… But I failed to take any notes during the presentation, so I simply cannot provide any kind of comments about this panel.