Batman Day - Batman: Year One

[alicemacher]

As much as I enjoy Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, I find his post-Crisis retelling and expansion of Batman's origin more down-to-earth and definitive. It manages to portray a corrupt municipal government and police force with a realism that still resonates all too well today, while showing that the Caped Crusader can be effective and heroic without an angry bat archetype in his head compelling his actions.

Comments

[cyberghostface]

It’s amazing how much Miller defined the mythos of Batman. Even the Joker film which went out of its way to ignore the comics still paid homage to Miller’s imagery of the pearls breaking.

[zachbeacon]

Yeah, in the past I've thought about how even people that don't read comics are vaguely aware of Stan Lee and just about every Alan Moore story of note has been adapted into (mostly terrible) screen versions but Frank Miller is really up there in terms of having his ideas seen by the mainstream too. Putting aside the stuff he created outright like Sin City, 300, and Big Gun & Rusty, it seems like no one can do a movie or show about Batman or Daredevil without drawing heavily from his work.

His only other real competition is Mark Millar and most of his creator owned work are just movie pitches at this point anyway. Granted he still had a fair amount of influence on the MCU and apparently had some involvement with the X-Movies.

[bravest_spinja]

For a while, I think Byrne left as huge an imprint on some classic characters--but various factors (Nostalgia, corporate stuff, and frankly, his own tendency to not play the Hollywood game) kept him from reaching Miller's relative level of mainstream fame.

[zachbeacon]

Yeah, he's had a pretty big impact on most modern interpretations of Superman and is a huge part of why people care about the X-Men in the first place.

If we're taking artists then I think Kirby is the obvious choice (if only for Captain America) but I'm just gonna throw out a dark horse pick...

Jim Steranko. His work in comics is pretty limited but he's responsible for a lot of the SHIELD stuff going on in the background of the MCU. Plus he did character designs for other movies and Indiana Jones is still a heck of a lot more culturally relevant than a lot of characters in superhero movies.

(I'm really going to miss his art on those Venture Bros DVD collections)

[silverhammerman]

One of the best scenes from a nearly unparalleled book. There's room for critique of certain elements, but even decades later, it's still hard to top Year One. It's to the point that when it came Scott Snyder's turn to try with Zero Year, he pointedly wrote a story that discourages comparison.

The art, the writing, the whole concept of Batman that it sets up still feels more cutting edge than half the stuff that came after it. I mean, even the relationship between Batman and the police feels more relevant today that most takes. The fact that we haven't had thirty years of Batman kicking cops through brick walls shows that people did not take the right lessons from this book.

One minor thing that fascinates me about Year One is that, as you note up top, this wasn't actually a prequel to TDKR, no matter what DC and even Miller have tried to do afterwards. TDKR is an ending for Pre-Crisis Batman, Year One was a new beginning for a new kind of Batman. I joke in the paragraph above about Batman fighting cops, but there's still something about Year One's take on the character that I think has never been fully realized by anyone after.

[leahandillyana]

The book didn’t go far enough. The story is about bad cops hunting Batman who at the same time befriends one good cop. What I feel Batman should be is him hunting cops as his main target and not bonding with Gordon, because all cops are bastards. No Barbara Batgirl either, and if Dick decides to be a cop anyways, make sure he doesn’t tattle and break ties with him.

[deh_tommy]

Let’s agree to disagree.

[servant_iskandar]

More to the point, this is a work that tries to enact some actual critical thinking rather than going for codified slogans (i.e. "all cops are bastards", above) in between the comic booky stuff.

So you have a criticism of police brutality, and Batman acting more like a freedom fighter / civil disobedience agent at various turns, in a way closer to the inspiration Bruce found in Zorro. You get the crowd (and the readers) cheering when Batman punches the cop who attempted to hurt the cat. The panels showing Loeb and his cronies show how removed the privileged people in Gotham are from the plight of their citizens, and so on...

But it also makes sense, IMHO, that Bruce says "I need Jim Gordon", that he works with Harvey in the shadows, and so on. This version of Batman wants to see change in the long run - he realizes that while he can make a difference, such change isn't something he can or even should bring about alone, that there's a community there waiting to be rebuilt.

Silverhammerman said it best when they wrote that in the course of thirty years, other writers should have looked at this part of Miller's contribution and done more, better with it, up to and including taking down abusive authority. While I would say both Rucka and Snyder have given some thought to the issue, it's certainly something that needs to be explored more and that would fit the mythos to a T.

One last thing: Miller was really firing on all cylinders here, and in my opinion this surpasses even TDKR. It may also be due to the story's brevity (also, David Mazzuchelli was a match made in heaven).

[bravest_spinja]

And even then it kind of plays up that Gordon is a flawed man--horrible husband and all that.

[servant_iskandar]

Just as we see Bruce deal with the results of his inexperience / recklessness at various moments (for one, it is Loeb who orders the bombing of the condemned building, but Batman admits having made a mess of things; how he picks himself up is one of the high moments of the story).
Both characters mature through the story, warts and flaws and all.

[tcampbell1000]

I never have and never will subscribe fully to the ACAB philosophy. I've known good cops. My neighborhood's cops seem good-- I won't say I know every one of their arrest records, but they do the right kind of community outreach and often help out my elderly neighbor. My HOA is run by a good ex-cop, who's been dedicating herself to feeding those who need it during the current difficulties.

I recognize that this makes me fortunate. I haven't missed the number of bastard-cop stories crossing the newsfeeds. But even if policing as a whole is in need of a new direction, sticking to "ACAB" implies that it's unimprovable, and those who advance the cause of completely replacing police with... some other thing were hard to take seriously even before the Seattle experiment.

THAT SAID.

The Batman mythos has only rarely addressed police corruption and almost never even acknowledged police racism. There's a welcome exception in Detective Comics #1027's "Rookie," which manages to be inspirational without minimizing the issues involved. But it's preceded by the wildly tone-deaf "Master Class," in which the Bat-family says that all corrupt cops die violently (so how big a problem can they be, really? It's sort of self-correcting!). Then they hunt down and capture Croc, the sole black Bat-villain, for the crime of accidentally scaring one such corrupt cop to death. (It's a little ambiguous whether Croc's actually going back to jail on the last page, but still, COME ON.)

Batman: Year One only allows police to be as bad as it does because it's setting up the need for someone like Jim Gordon and a set of heroic tests that Jim must pass. As soon as Jim's in charge, it's all too often implied, police corruption is essentially over. Maybe some uniformed weasel can get away with small-scale grift for a while, but only until Jim finds out.

I won't deny the difference one person with integrity can make: we've seen plenty of examples of the opposite phenomenon lately. But it's well past time we saw Gotham, symbol of American crime stories, run by a commissioner who reflects our current anxieties and/or a level of corruption that someone like Jim can't fix with a stern stare. Gillian Loeb got any kids?

[zachbeacon]

"ACAB" is an oversimplification because no one can be bothered with nuance anymore. While I'm sure some people believe it literally, my understanding is that it's mostly meant to describe an institution so curupt that good cops can't reform it. Having Gordon in charge doesn't* magically fix the famously curupt GCPD; even his loyalists (like Bullock) can be pretty dirty.

Also, depending on the incarnation, it's debatable just how much of a "good cop" Gordon is.

*Or maybe it does because Batman comics are a fantasy. After all, the Bat media that springs to mind when I think about dirty cops is Year One and Gotham Central and Gordon wasn't Commissioner in either.

In any case, I think this weekend really highlights why the rule of law shouldn't hinge on a single old person.

[janegray]

The reason ACAB is because good cops who attempt to do the right thing get fired or worse.

Let's imagine a scenario where the good cops you know witness one of their colleagues murder somebody ala Eric Garner.

Do you think they'll testify against that cop?

If so, do you think they'll be allowed to keep their job, instead of being fired or harassed into quitting?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdPsNGzWAAEJilB?format=jpg&name=medium

That said, other countries that have corrupt police forces still are nowhere near as bad as "they murdered a woman in her sleep after breaking into her home because they had the wrong address, charged the boyfriend for it, and no cops were even investigated until after months of nationwide protests." The USA has a special problem.

[tcampbell1000]

Yes, I do.

Am I absolutely, completely sure? No. Do I think it would be easy? No. But there are limits to the blue line, and this force seems motivated primarily by fostering the long-term health and strength of the community. "Cops that attempt to do the right thing get fired or worse" is another generalization: it happens, and happens far too often, but it's not an immutable law of physics.

The problem is that when policing is bad, it's horrid, and under an administration interested primarily in "toughness" and thinly-veiled classist and racist violence, there's no way the bad won't get worse.

I'm not that interested in measuring the collective American police force against others: I know it wouldn't score too well, and I'd rather measure against what I know it can be. But I used to review some applications for asylum, and so I'm pretty confident that our police are not the worst. What makes the US relatively unique is severe police corruption and actual reporting on its consequences, which does give me some hope that we can do something about it. But that'll take a combo of internal and external forces.

[leahandillyana]

Not even American police, police period. In my country, during events like pride marches or pro aborbortion events, the police presence is what protects the people in them from being lynched. Doesn’t change that institutions like politics, army, corporations are fascist in nature. They cannot be changed from the inside, you need to destroy them and build something else in their place. Good cops can be part of the new thing.

[silverhammerman]

It's certainly no ACAB story, for sure. It's caught up in the whole One Good Cop dream and the GCPD's flaws are largely due to corruption rather than foundational issues. That said, Year One was written decades ago and still manages to do more with Batman as an enemy of a broken status quo than almost any subsequent story, so I give it a lot of credit for that.

In terms of fitting Batman into an ACAB worldview, I think it would actually be pretty easy to just have Gordon resign after Batman first appears. He could take Batman as a sign that helping people is possible outside of the flawed criminal justice system and become a community organizer, still functioning mostly the same as he always has. I doubt it'll ever happen, but over the past year I've definitely wondered if it's due.

[zachbeacon]

I've never been a big fan of the Court of Owls retcon for a bunch of reasons. One of them is that their centuries of existence mean that EVERY institution in Gotham is beyond redemption. A handful of "good cops" and vigilantes aren't going to actually do much more than mask the problem.

[mazway_75]

I loved "Gotham" when Bullock remarks "a secret group running Gotham? Someone should tell them they're doing a horrible job."

[zachbeacon]

Bullock was one of the better things about that weird-ass show.

(Gordon, not so much. I think the actor thought he was in a different show. Granted, there was a lot of that going around.)

Still shady as hell though. Internal Affairs was totally correct in thinking these two needed to be looked into.

[silverhammerman]

I haven't revisited the storyline since it came out, but the Court of Owls are just the supervillainous embodiment of systemic inequality, even moreso than the Black Glove is, right? I think that in some ways that makes it easier to "fix" Gotham, since it's a matter of the city being actively sabotaged by a group of rich, masked weirdos rather than just the way that structural forces work. Batman can fight a conspiracy much more easily than he can fight a global economic system and ideology. In that way I'd say that Court of Owls actually fits more easily into the traditional Batman mythos than a full-on ACAB philosophy would.

[zachbeacon]

I guess its a matter of perspective. I also see them as a cartoonish exaggeration of the kind of people destroying lives in the real world but I just see that as another reason they're never going away. On the rare occasion that one of those people sees any consequences to their crimes in the real world they don't get to escape from jail just because someone made a movie about them and DC Comics thinks it would be good cross promotion to have the criminal running around free again.

As an aside, the second thing I hate about the CoO is that the "World's Greatest Detective" didn't notice a giant conspiracy in his own backyard.

The third thing is that their importance is boosted by making them retroactively responsible for most of the bad things in the hero's live but that's a problem I have generally with most "mastermind" villains.

[servant_iskandar]

Truth to be told, it is a supposedly deeply hidden conspiracy (or at least it used to be) and Batman's had his hands full with said backyard which is already rife with schemers and plotters: take Cobblepot, Eddie, Strange and of course Ra's and Bane when they're written well, or the actually clever Joker capers.

Also, "new writer, my status quo", we know how this kind of thing goes alas. Sometimes we get neat things, sometimes not so much.

[tcampbell1000]

I don't know what you mea--

"I killed Krypton! A slowly building environmental issue the populace ignored? What are you even talking about? It was all me! Just stabbed it in the planetary core and babaBOOM!"

"I'm the one who made Wally West kill all those people and cover it up! And I'm also responsible for a whole MESS of other things Flashes did that someone might consider out of character! Don't bother trying to fathom them as complex people, they would all be freakin' ANGELS ON EARTH if it weren't for me telling them to do everything wrong!"

"I kept the Justice League 'ineffectual' for years, during that comedy period that sold really well at the time but now fans are embarrassed by!"

"I... am the reason comics aren't fun anymore. My name is Dr. Manhattan/Perpetua/Someone Who Isn't Geoff Johns, and the move to 'grim and gritty' was all my doing. Somehow. Unless you like that, in which case NEVER MIND."

[zachbeacon]

Yep, I hate nearly everything they've done with Norman Osborn since his resurrection twenty years ago for this reason. For a while there, if Peter stubbed his toe, Norman would somehow be secretly responsible for it.

Edit: Or, just to tie it back to Batman; I like the continuities where Joe Chill exists as just some crook who accidentally created Batman and then eventually dies.

If the Waynes were killed by some unknown person and Batman fights crime to stop/find them then Batman’s story is about revenge. Contrary to what a certain Hollywood director thinks, Batman isn’t about revenge.

If the Waynes were killed by some guy and Batman continues to Batman even after he’s died by the hands of other criminals then it was never about revenge. Its about protecting the next eight-year-old from the same fate.

If a secret cabal put out a hit on the Waynes and now they’re suddenly major villains then it becomes about revenge again.

PS: Good lord that Krypton retcon is stupid. Speaking as someone living in a doomed world where leaders won’t listen to scientists, that story should have been left as is and used as a cautionary tale.

[silverhammerman]

I hadn't been thinking about the Court of Owls as a perennial threat, since they're relatively new and haven't really caught on in a big way, but it is in the nature of supervillains to just pop back up again and again. That could get particularly annoying with villains who are analogous to real world criminals who face frustratingly few consequences. That could maybe be offset a bit by the fact that since they're a cabal a few Owls can get locked up for real each time, but in the long run even that's going to get tiresome.

The whole Court reveal was made very awkward by the Batman titles having such a weird, wishy-washy half-reboot with the New 52. It just seemed totally implausible that Morrison's Batgod wouldn't have caught on before, but I guess that's the nature of the beast with these long-running characters.

The retcons didn't end up being too bad for Batman himself in the long run, since Lincoln March's backstory was left fairly ambiguous, the Court was largely ignored by the rest of the DCU, and Snyder himself didn't go back to the well very much. It's weird that the Court retcons had their longest lasting effects on Nightwing, with that "gray son of Gotham" nonsense.

[zachbeacon]

You just reminded me of another thing I dislike about the CoO.

Dick Grayson is one of my favorite DC characters and I check out every time they do a Talon story. Between that and all this "Ric" nonsense, I'm kinda getting starved for good Nightwing content these days.


Doubling back to my "so much for 'World's Greatest Detective' " complaint; the retcon doesn't JUST damage Batman. It also means supposedly great investigators like Tim Drake, the Gordons, a Question, Jason Bard, ect were oblivious to it too.


I am a bit curious if the Penguin ever found out there's a bunch of bird-themed elites that snubbed him though. That would have made for an entertaining tantrum.

[starwolf_oakley]

"Helping people as a community organizer" is Leslie Thompkins deal.

[silverhammerman]

True, though Thompkins has never been as major a character as Gordon. There's lots of stuff that could be tried, characters rearranged or skewed, I'm just thinking out load with the idea.

[delanna]

I think what really makes Year One work is that it's actually a Gordon story. The ability to showcase Batman as an emerging force in Gotham while also focusing on the way he affects Gordon's life makes for great storytelling.

[mazway_75]

And then in his story, Kevin Smith makes this whole thing a joke of Bamtan confessing to some crime-fighter he's known for ten minutes how "I peed during that."

Have I mentioned how I hate Smith's take on things?

[dan_ingram]

What, you didn't need to learn how many times Silver St. Cloud climaxed when having sex with Batman? Prude.

[tripodeca113]

One of the great moments in Batman history.