BATMAN: YEAR ONE

BATMAN: YEAR ONE

After writing of my love for DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN yesterday, it’s important to ‘finish the story.’

Now, for obvious reasons, the two story arcs will never be packaged together. They will never co-exist in that sense. It’s a shame because they truly are companion pieces; Crime driven re-inventions of comic book vigilantes, by the same creative team.
Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli were the creators behind both projects, Millers scripting and Mazzucchelli’s art. They brought the New York of Daredevil and the Gotham of Batman kicking and screaming into the 1980's.

Much gets written about Frank Miller. For two decades it was cliché to worship at his feet, now its becoming cliché to criticise him. Both of these fads come from a grain of truth though; Miller was on a hot streak back then, reinventing and re-energising everything he touched. Since then he has become a parody of himself. Still the best at what he does, but no longer in touch with what it was he did. It’s probably much the same trap that Bob Dylan finds himself in. When you have been so superhumanly good in the past, everything you do will feel trivial.

I never liked Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. It’s the holy bible of comic books, and to not like it is to be the guy who says, “The Beatles are overrated,” It’s going to get you outcast. I stand by it though. As a story, it’s sloppy and overblown. It’s full of the same overblown writing that Miller has become lampooned for these days, and too much of it is reactionary. Things happen in this story that are simply a reaction to the preceding fifty years of history, they don’t happen as an extension of the plot or the characters, they happen merely to get a reaction, to make a point.

Sure, a good writer takes his character in new directions. The most realistic approach is that all characters will act out of character during a crisis. But there is a line not to cross, if you push a character to far in the wrong direction, you lose the essence of what made the guy tick in the first place. Batman is not going to use a gun. He’s just not. Think about it.

Anyway, enough of DKR. The payoff is that I absolutely love BATMAN: YEAR ONE. It’s strong, it’s epic without sacrificing character, it just feels…true. If DKR was the Batman of BLADE RUNNER, BYO was the Batman of THE FRNCH CONNECTION. Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham after a decade of travelling the world. He’s been training, a driven missionary, an angry young man. He knows what he wants to do, but not how.

At the same time, Jim Gordon arrives in Gotham. More than anything, this is his story. He’s a man who’s been beaten down; he’s weary deep in his soul. He hates himself, and his wife isn’t crazy about him either. He’s done something wrong in his career. It’s never explained or expanded upon but we learn that he got caught doing something in Chicago. Something that caused his career to be tainted, and his stock to plummet. He gets transferred to Gotham because the corrupt powers that be –and in Gotham that was everyone- assumed that he would be compliant. Hire a corrupt cop to come and look the other way. The trouble is, Gordon has something left in him, some part of himself somewhere, that wants to be able to look in the mirror and not hate what he see’s. He’s going to earn his redemption and be the one honest man, even if it kills him.

If some of this sounds familiar, you’ve been paying attention at the cinema. Much of the inspiration behind Chris Nolan’s Batman series lies in BYO. In fact, on of my few criticisms of the BATMAN BEGINS was that it missed one of Jim Gordon’s defining moments. I wont give away any spoilers but for those who’ve read it, think of the moment he decides to level the field by giving someone a baseball bat.

The art still stands up. Sometimes, you’ll flick through a comic that’s twenty (oh my god) years old, and the art will look dated and silly. Flicking through my hardback edition right now, the art is stunning. His Gotham is what would happen if you took the art of Edward Hopper and made it live rough for a few years, kicked it around a few times and gave it a drinking habit. It’s probably the best thing Mazzucchelli ever achieved, and maybe it’s not a coincidence that he vanished from superhero comics soon after completing it. Sometimes you’ve done everything you need to do, and you have to step back. In fact, almost every character design in here is still the default image in my head.
I’ve followed a number of great Batman artists over the past two –almost three-decades.
Breyfogle.
Nolan.
Bolland.
But when I think of Batman, or of Gordon, It’s as they were in the pages of this story.

But then, these were the stories meant for me, I suppose. There is a Batman out there for just about everyone, a take that will appeal to you whatever your tastes are. But for me, as with BORN AGAIN, this is the work that was meant for me. It’s urban; it’s grounded and realistic. The dialogue is tight, the humour is dry. The characters are flawed. There is cynicism and politics in just the right shades of subtle. And the backdrops look real and lived in.

In short, these two stories, the two bookends on Miller & Mazzucchelli’s finest work, are exactly what I mean when I use the term noir.

If you’re a crime fiction fan looking for a way into reading comics, you’re living in a golden age. There are so many writers and artists out there now who are working to get you product that you’ll like. Brubaker and Phillips to mention just two. But if you want to go back to a different age, to pull out the real gems that helped inspire the great modern writers, you need to pick up BATMAN: YEAR ONE and DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN.

I'll be returning next week to round up my comics spree with a look at GOTHAM CENTRAL, but for now a HOLD STEADY lyric that has been running through my head as i wrote these last two entries;

I was half dead. Then i got born again. I got lost in all the lights but it was ok in the end. And when we hit the twin cities, i didn't know that much about it. I knew mary tyler moore and i knew profane existence. I was keyed up. Keys jangled in the stalls. They counted money in the motels, they mostly sold it in the malls. And the carpet at the thunderbird has a burn for every cowboy that got fenced in.