I’m going to talk in detail about this month’s issue of Batman, and about Scott Snyder’s ongoing run on the title, so before reading this you may want to catch up on Batman #1-5 to stay spoiler-free. Scratch that, you’ll definitely want to. Go ahead, the internet’s not going anywhere. Come borrow my copies if you like.
Okay, ready?
Scott Snyder1 has been absolutely killing the execution on Batman since taking over the title with DC’s “New 52” relaunch back in September. Without messing around with the uber-prepared, hypercompetent philanthropist billionaire ninja vigilante we all know and love, Snyder has made Batman’s world feel new and exciting- and increasingly spooky- by filling his continuing story arc with clever gizmos, Wayne family history, and details about the infrastructure of Gotham City that are as fun as they are frightening. I’m not kidding; Snyder is filling a superhero comic with architecture and city planning and it is riveting2. Most importantly, he’s doing the part of the job that must be the most difficult when writing Batman, which is challenging him. Batman, let’s remember, has been uppercutting crime and outsmarting his opponents since 19393. He has also beat up Superman a few times. Batman #1 opens with Bruce plowing through half a dozen of his most dangerous enemies while locked in Arkham Asylum with them, a feat that took gamers nationwide multiple sleepless weekends to accomplish and which takes Scott Snyder’s Batman a total of seven pages in the very first issue of his new comic book.
So how do you challenge this guy?
Snyder’s done it by introducing the Court of Owls, a secret society of that Bruce has long dismissed as a local legend, a nursery rhyme used to scare Gothamite children when the homicidal clown and the burlap guy with the fear gas aren’t scary enough. It’s starting to look like the Court of Owls is real and has been in Gotham for decades, influencing the Waynes and other families, building secret lairs into the architecture of skyscrapers and secretly dispatching enemies with an unkillable assassin called the Talon. The evidence is piling up too high for Bruce to ignore, no matter how much he wants to. Towards the end of Batman #4, he goes into the sewers of Gotham City, looking for the Court.
How's that working out for you, Bruce?
Oh. Oh, God. Not so well, then.
That’s not the scariest thing about Batman #5, though. Neither is the immense maze underneath Gotham where the Court traps Bruce for more than a week. Nor are the hallucinations where Bruce’s hands turn into talons beneath his gloves and owls crawl out of the mouths of his dead parents. Nor is the room lined with “Before” and “After” photos of other victims who aged and lost their minds while trapped in the maze. Nor is the way the artwork turns sideways and then upside down as the story progresses, so that you, the reader, start to feel disoriented and crazed. These are all scary, but they’re not the clincher.
The scariest thing is that Batman panics.
He moves blindly through the Court’s maze, keeping to the shadows out of instinct but otherwise unable to get his bearings. We don’t see him doing any detective work to find his way out, or trying elementary maze stuff like always keeping to the left. Granted, we first see Bruce in the maze after he’s been there a week, which means he’s probably tried all that and given up. His thoughts are all over the place; at one point he’s hiding from the Court and later he tells himself he’s chasing after them, but this is all vague and unfocused, something he tells himself to keep himself moving. The Court guides him through the maze by switching lights on and off, illuminating some rooms and herding him out of others. He uppercuts cameras and wooden owl figureheads, which helps no one. He stumbles across clues, like an entire Gotham City in miniature with the names of the Gordons and the Cobblepots chiseled on the walls, and a room full of coffins that may hold the bodies of generations of Talons, but he does a really un-Batman thing here and tries not to think about the clues that could help him solve the case. His inner mantra is him saying "Not listening" over and over and he's screaming it out loud when the Talon gets the drop on him. There's a great page-by-page analysis of Bruce's breakdown here.
For purposes of comparison, let me point out that Batman #2 opened with Bruce Wayne, in his civilian persona, being thrown through one of the windows of Wayne Tower, with three throwing knives sticking out of him and the Talon diving after him Point Break style to finish the job. Bruce not only survived this encounter, he kept his head enough to continue narrating fun facts about Wayne Tower and its relationship to Gotham’s tourism industry while catching hold of a gargoyle and watching the Talon plunge to his apparent death.
Dude is hard to rattle.
Going back further in Batman’s history4, let me point out that in Grant Morrison’s run alone Bruce has been memory wiped, buried alive, kidnapped by a space dictator who was also a god of cosmic evil, memory wiped again and sent back in time to fight cavemen and pirates with a Lovecraftian leech monster chasing him across multiple eras. Never, during any of that, did he panic or give up.
If anything gives Batman an edge over the rest of the DC Universe and makes people buy “What Would Batman Do?” T-shirts, it’s not that he’s a master martial artist (paging Black Canary and Bronze Tiger) or a billionaire with an ever-growing arsenal of crimefighting gadgets (hi, Green Arrow), or even that he’s a detective (yo, Elongated Man). Batman’s real superpower is that he’s always prepared, he always has a plan, and he is never, ever in over his head. The minute Batman stops outthinking his opponents, he ceases to be Batman and becomes a self-financed Delta Force commando with a pointy bucket on his head.
Which is why it’s so scary to see him lose it down there, in the maze. It’s like when you were a child and for the very first time you saw your dad get lost and upset on a family car trip and all your illusions of security were shattered as you realized this towering man did not have all the answers. That’s a life-changing kind of fear that Snyder has tapped into, and even Batman's triumphant return next month won't be able to chase it away.
Right, helicopter thugs?
Well, maybe it will.
1 Penciller Greg Capullo and inker Jonathan Glapion have also been killing it, drawing a sprawling, built-up Gotham city with plenty of room for creepy things to hide in it and a Batman who looks like a 21st century ninja gladiator and who has this wonderfully unnerving little smile right before he does something like ramp jump a motorcycle into a helicopter. I’m not going to write as much about their contributions here since I can discuss story far better than I can discuss art. Assume the art is uniformly top-shelf.
2 Here’s an example. In Batman #3, Bruce goes down to the train tunnels beneath Wayne Tower to shake down toughs for information. He tells us that there are five separate train tunnels that converge beneath the tower, and that each one is controlled by a separate gang. He narrates all this while fighting a Ukranian gang with iron masks soldered onto their jaws, and then defeats them all by magnetizing a passing train, which then drags the entire gang down the tunnel by their masks. This all happens in four pages and is relentlessly awesome.
3 Even though DC officially restarted continuity with the “New 52” relaunch back in September, I’m going to ignore that and talk about Batman as a character with continuous history. It’s pretty easy to do with this title, which keeps most of the elements of Batman’s recent history from the last few years of comics, including his extended family of Robins and ex-Robins, one of whom is his son, Damian, whom Bruce fathered with Talia al Ghul and who was raised by an elite order of international assassins. I would never in a million years want to lose that part of Batman’s family tree and I’m glad DC didn’t either.
4 Again, ignoring that all this happened before the continuity reset. Trust me, if the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh survived Crisis on Infinite Earths, stuff we like from before The New 52 will survive The New 52. It is going to be okay.
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