Gotham High

[cyberghostface]

"I always remember this quote from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, where he’s talking about the killers and he says something like, 'We came from the same place, but I walked out the front door and he walked out the back door.' There’s this feeling that they’re the same person, just with different circumstances. I wanted to put that in the Batman-Joker dynamic: They’re almost the same person, but Bruce has all this privilege and Jack has nothing. What does that do to who they become? And then there’s a girl in the middle — the hottest girl to ever walk the halls of high school [laughs] — and what does she want? It came out of trying to figure out all their desires. What does Jack bring to Selina that’s different from what Bruce brings to Selina? Ultimately you don’t know who she’s going to pick. You root for both of them, and there’s a surprise in the end." -- Melissa de la Cruz

"There’s so much of that Instagram culture and social media culture with teens today, so I tried to interject that into the style and look of the characters, specifically with the Joker character. He was the hardest character to visualize and design because he’s not your average villain. He’s almost not a villain at all, in a way. He goes back and forth where you sympathize with him sometimes and sometimes you see him as a villain. So I wanted to give him a look that played off both sides of his personality... In a weird way, the Joker character is the most like me." -- Thomas Pitilli

Comments

[silverhammerman]

I'll give it this, this is a pretty good approximation of something like Pretty Little Liars or Riverdale, self-aware teen soap operas. I don't find the writing to be particularly good, indeed that "twist" the first quote mentions is telegraphed so obviously to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the characters (which is surely the intended audience) that it really doesn't count as a twist. Which brings me back to the question (a moot one, and one which marks me as not the intended audience) of what the point of this being a Batman-adjacent thing is. The framework and mythology of Batman contributes nothing to this story, and in fact only serves to undercut the intrigue.

Anyway, it's not for me, and while I find it utterly baffling, I wish DC all the best with these weird YA books. This was probably their strangest crack at things yet. I still maintain though that 1) that leather overcoat is not cool. No one in 2020 would think it was cool. You get a kid showing up to high school in that outfit and he's just booked himself a one-way ticket to Getting Roasted Island. And 2) it's still bullshit to base a Batman-Joker-Catwoman love triangle around Catwoman, rather than Batman.

[nyadnar17]

"it's still bullshit to base a Batman-Joker-Catwoman love triangle around Catwoman, rather than Batman."

All I can think about now is how interesting that high school drama would be.

[lucean]

I mean, it's not bad and I understand the reason for making Selena the biggest mastermind of them all here, but it still feels really weird. Just in what makes this a Batman story, although I guess that is always up for interpretation, although as I write this I do think he should have been a more active character here.

The biggest issue I have is that I do think there is a magnificent YA story there with Bruce as they've already established several times that Bruce did go to school before he disappeared. So giving us that glimpse in Bruce's last effor to be that normal kid before it all goes away has so much potential. And to be honest, that is kind of what they tried here, but ultimately crammed so many Bat-characters there while making it all abotu Selena in the end that it doesn't really land.

[bravest_spinja]

This 1000% feels not even so much like AU as its own story with slight parallels, like Mad Max/Conan or they way Die Hard movies are retrofitted from spec scripts, etc. Like this could take place in the actual DC Universe alongside canon characters and it would barely require a silver age level of winking.

To be honest, Batman is one of the superhero properties least-suited for an AU version of itself. The genre is usually fairly open to "teenifying" because superpowers makes for a great puberty metaphor, and it takes the edge off of child endangerment. Plus, you can justify that extraterrestrial and supernatural entities aren't particularly concerned with what the ID says. And "everyone went to high school together" is a little easier to swallow if a powerful psychic is outright searching for global incidents to recruit students. Hell, you can make a great "Invaders" YA story, as war forces us all to grow up fast, Namor is a brash young prince, and the android Human Torch was like, what, three anyways?

Batman is ostensibly a more "real world" setting--a lot of characters aren't even "them" without the costume of gadget or whatever. Some of them are even relatively weak. And then you have them interacting with characters that actually are mutated or have powers and it's really hard to keep things on an even keel. (Given my druthers, I'd cut down on powered Batman foes in regular continuity, but it seems especially egregious in a high school setting). You can only really do it if it's completely meant to be goofy, like Superhero Squad or Venture Brothers or something.

[leahandillyana]

Is this out yet?

[cyberghostface]

Came out last month.

[every_spiegel]

This was just mostly boring, bland, and dumb. And I am a sucker for High School AUs, actually, and I've read much better fanfiction of this kind. A disappointment.