Batman Legends of the Dark Knight #122, and Shadow of the Bat #90

[ozaline]

During No Man's Land Batman notices that the neon lights are still on in Chinatown, and attracting people to their sex trade even with the rest of Gotham bereft of power. He finds Lynx the only surviving member of the Ghost Dragons gang wiped out by a coalition of gangs and shows her the reason why...













Eventually she picks the wrong man's pocket which leads to her current circumstances.















Lynx insists that they go back for the Girl but Batman tells her that's not feasible and so she gives him instructions to take her to her doctor.






When they return they find Jade Faced Wu dead, pushed from the building, and signs that the slaves revolted. They also see some of those slaves acting as pallbearers for a tiny casket.

Lynx is told that Mei was inspired by her, and instituted the revolt pushing Wu out the window, but that she was killed. Before she died she asked her Grandpa if she was as brave as the one-eyed warrior, but didn't get to hear his reply that Mei was without equal.



Larry Hama often says that when he explains why he doesn't call himself an artist.

Comments

[alicemacher]

Leaving aside the massive violation of basic human rights, making people pedal all day doesn't seem like a particularly efficient way to generate power.

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"Fist" and "serendipity" are two words I wouldn't have expected to find in the same phrase. I wonder if the gang name sounds better in the original Chinese?

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I like Batman's speech at the end. I don't necessarily agree with everything in it, but it's...very Batman.

[acyl]

Well, maybe the Chinese name could be Yuanfenquan, or Yuanfen Tianquan, something like that?

In Chinese it's fairly routine to smash an abstract philosophical concept together with 'fist'...because, well, for example, we normally call 'Tai Chi' is really an abbreviation of 'Taijiquan'. 'Quan' means fist, but in the sense of a martial arts technique or discipline. 'Tai Chi' refers to...eh, wholeness, unity, ying-and-yang-together, stuff like that.

Long and dramatic English versions of Chinese names actually tend to be a translation artifact, of course. It's a common pitfall for English-speaking authors to come up with some long string that doesn't actually make sense in Mandarin. But this is Larry Hama, so he knows that. I'd assume he had something like what I suggested in mind.

But, yeah, I really REALLY like that Batman bit at the end. Very Batman. Perfect mix of humility, nobility, and self-righteous goddamn Batman.

Hmmm...

[chortles81]

Long and dramatic English versions of Chinese names actually tend to be a translation artifact, of course. It's a common pitfall for English-speaking authors to come up with some long string that doesn't actually make sense in Mandarin. But this is Larry Hama, so he knows that. I'd assume he had something like what I suggested in mind.Wasn't this one of the things that helped the Great Ten stand out, that DC went the semi-literal translation route with their superhero names?

[lonewolf23k]

Thing is, in a situation like No Man's Land, you don't even NEED the slavery aspect. Just make it part of public service to all survivors that ask to join your community.

"If you don't have any seriously useful talent like farming skills or medical knowledge and such, you have to pull a minimum of 2 hours on the bikes for daily meals. If you volonteer to do longer periods, you get privileges like a pick from the luxury items. And before you ask, we ALL pull our own weight here. I do four hour bike shifts myself."

[ozaline]

if they were using the power to make people comfortable sure, but they were using it to power the neon lights of China town to advertise their sex trade (didn't have space to include that part).

[janegray]

Lynx is told that Mei was inspired by her, and instituted the revolt pushing Wu out the window, but that she was killed.

At least her death wasn't put to a vote.

[q99]

It is interesting to see Batman, with a bit of help, unable to take on arbitrary numbers of normal criminals.

In No Man's Land, Batman needed a lot of help and even then some time, because the foes were often too much to take down quickly.

[kalanyr]

There were very specific editorial directives for No Man's Land I think. They wanted to make it very desperation and survival filled.

But they left themselves an out for why Batman isn't always threatened by a bunch of street gang mooks by limiting access to food, water and sleep so they could handwave it as fatigue.

[q99]

And he did have some nice moments.

All-in-all, I rather liked the approach.

[ozaline]

And to be fair while Batman was looking for a tactical edge he's not the one who needed a Doctor... there's also a part where a mook punches Batman in the back of his head and hurts his hand on the head armor.

[lego_joker]

I have to say, reading this story is kind of surreal. Hama stapling a tragic backstory and moral dimension onto Lynx arguably undercuts everything about Chuck Dixon's version, but on the other hand Dixon looks up to Hama (especially his GI Joe work) and literally owes his start in the comics biz to him...

I really should've asked him about this story back when he was still interacting with his fans on his message board...

[laughing_tree]

Why'd he stop?

[lego_joker]

I wasn't there. It seems like he relaunched the whole site, so now the site itself is a blog-type thing and the message board is an entirely separate entity (and it's *really* old fashioned, to boot).

Maybe his workload is just getting to be too much these days.

[starwolf_oakley]

Usually in a superhero comics, the superhero says something like "Cops and firefighters are heroes." But given most cops and firefighters left Gotham City for NML...

[tcampbell1000]

I'd like to like this more, but it's hard to get past the way it's written in service to the speeches. Batman dithers and watches an old man horrifically beaten below him, ostensibly because "there's too many of them and we need a plan," but he never actually makes one. This is really so Lynx can tell us her entire life story when all Batman needed out of her is "Yes, I'll help you."

Then at the end, Batman gives her his "A hero is" speech, which seems to be advising her on how to behave, but immediately undercuts it by saying, "Well, history decides who the real heroes are." If you don't know who the heroes are then why the heck did you just give us six balloons about what makes one?

[ozaline]

The "hero is an appellation," thing is something that Larry seems to fervently believe, he also often says that "artist," is an appellation too. I don't think he's trying to tell her not to do good, just that hero is something to aspire to, and it's up for others to judge if you hit the mark or not.

As for Lynx's backstory and Batman's need to plan... well they get ambushed; yes in the space of the story it serves the purpose you said, but Batman would have made a plan had they not been caught off guard.

And at the risk of sounding fangirlish... I don't think Hama ever writes "in service to the speeches," he famously says you should be able to understand a comic without reading a single word in it, and get most of what's going on, and always approaches everything from the images first. You could understand everything that happened in Lynx's backstory if there was not a word of narration... Obviously he still speechifies from time to time, but I personally like them, and think the rest of the book is a solid adventure.