Why Scott Snyder's Batman #5 is the Scariest Comic of 2012

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.

This Week's Haul - 1/12/12 (Part 2)

Part 2! Check out part 1 (and an in depth look at the current philosophical paradigm of the X-Men) here.

***********SPOILER WARNINGS***********

X-Factor #230

I've been reading X-Factor consistently since it relaunched 80 issues and five specials ago (there was a renumbering in there too). It has been my most consistent purchase over the last several years and there are two major reasons for that. The first is writer Peter David, and the second are the incredible characters he has helped to shepherd and develop. Somewhat of a rarity in modern comics, David has been the only writer for all 80+ issues of the revival and this has allowed the title to develop a consistent feel and narrative, even amidst the revolving door of artistic talent that has drawn the book. While the high concept of the series has waxed and waned over the years (and it's a high concept which I love - Jamie Madrox and company running a mutant detective agency for the Marvel Universe with a slightly noirish tint) what has stayed steady is the incredible characterization and growth of an ensemble cast that has managed to turn perennial C or D-listers into absolute FAVORITE characters of mine. I never thought I would tell you that Rictor or Shatterstar would be some of my favorite characters in comics, but hey - they're awesome. While some story arcs are better than others, and I hold that the best arcs are the ones that really live in and embrace the core high concept, what ties the series together are the relationships at play - and those relationships keep me coming back issue after issue.

This particular installment has an unusual goal in that while it's the second part of a story, it's also clearly branded as a jumping on point for new readers as part of the line wide Regenesis banner. I think it succeeds pretty well given that you're jumping into the deep end of the pool no matter which issue of X-Factor you get. David is juggling multiple plot lines, some as old as several years ago, and he has consistently proven that they will all eventually build into each other and pay off for the longtime reader - but you're pretty much starting in the middle of something no matter what. This is also a book with a core ensemble of twelve characters (two new additions this issue!), another core character on hiatus but coming back this year, recurring guest stars, and a remit to interact with the Marvel Universe at large. It's a crowded book, and yet everyone gets a chance to shine and express themselves.

It's not a perfect issue - some of the humor felt off this time around, a bit too forced, or maybe the timing between writer and artist was off. When X-Factor is on it is laugh out loud funny, and this issue was more a knowing nod going "ah, I see what you were going for there." But there is some nice stuff, particularly between Layla Miller and Wolverine as they stand over the body of the presumed dead Madrox. Wolfsbane's reaction to Wolverine showing up was also a nice nod (given the last time they worked together she was driven into blood lust and made to eat her own father), and Logan's relationship with Rahne provides one of the clearest examples as to why he's decided that children as soldiers is a TERRIBLE idea and to open a school instead. I'm actually hoping Logan brings Rahne up to Scott as it serves a pretty poignant example of the cost.

In many ways X-Factor has been the X-group operating most closely within the ideals of Xavier's dream of actual integration ever, certainly more than the X-Men themselves, by deciding to set up shop in NYC and earn a living through their powers by offering a service to humans and mutants alike. Given that half the X-Men just basically took a hike from Utopia due to Scott's isolationist tendencies, it's nice to see Madrox's crew get the credit for walking the walk well before anyone else decided to. Madrox has been telling Scott where to stick it for awhile now. Too bad he's only vindicated once he's dead.

Next Up - 2 weird Spider-Man anthologies.

This Week's Haul - 1/12/12

One of the things I love most about shopping at Big Planet Comics in College Park is that right in the front of the store they have the 'give away shelves' - restocked pretty consistently week to week with books culled from the back issue bins and donated collections. Any book on those two shelves are free to take away with you, and I have used that opportunity to add greatly to my back issue collection. It adds a better value to my trip, as I may be paying full price for my new issues but overall I'm still getting a great deal on what ends up in my bag. It also means that in my weekly reviews from the store I'll have an interesting collection of the books I'm reading now (mainly X-Men related with some New 52 thrown in), but also some curious selections from the back catalogue. Case in point today - two over sized Spider-Man anthologies I had never even heard of.

So lets take a look at this week's haul.

***** SPOILER WARNING***********

Wolverine and the X-Men #4

Okay, if you're not reading Wolverine and the X-Men and Uncanny X-Force then I can't promise that's your first problem, but it's definitely your current problem. Because these are phenomenal books and both are important to this issue, which sees writer Jason Aaron succeed in a tremendously difficult arena - the creation of an enjoyable self contained issue that also pushes the main plots forward while adding in subplots from an entirely different series. He does this all while deftly juggling an ensemble cast in the double digits and giving everyone a moment in the spotlight. It's fun, funny, quirky, and hits just the right notes of playing to the shared universe of these stories without feeling beholden to it. Given, I'm reading both books, and this is a compelling next step for a trio of characters that seem to be moving from X-Force to WatXM. This series has been a home run so far, and I truly recommend it.

To catch you up, the X-Men have split on philosophical differences, mainly relating to the treatment of mutant teenagers as part of the post-Decimation world (where the Scarlet Witch robbed just about all mutants with the exception of the 198 most famous ones of their mutant powers, leaving them an endangered species). Cyclops is leading a mutant nation on an island just off the coast of San Francisco, utilizing the relatively novel strategy of starting a new cold war with the rest of the world to ensure mutant safety, using themselves as the nukes. Scott is training the younger X-Men that stayed with him to be combat ready in a world that may strike at any moment. Conversely, Wolverine basically said enough is enough, and kids are kids, and went back to Westchester to reopen the old school and teach younger mutants rather than train them. Their school is insanely awesome. Effectively, Scott is now practicing the more pragmatic and isolationist ideas that Magneto used to champion, only without the killing innocent people part. Logan is championing a more pure version of Xavier's dream by not only re-opening the school, but incorporating more species than mutants into the student body - including aliens, clones, and living land masses at last count. It may seem surprising that Scott Summers, the former poster boy for the Xavier school, is the one living alone on an island with Magneto daring Iran not to blink, but it's actually a pretty natural extension of the characters after the last few years, not to mention a guy who was raised to be the leader of a covert para-military operation since he was 16. In many ways, Logan's new school is MUCH more representative of an actual school than ever before in X-Men history, except for the Morrison era, and so far he has a leg up on Xavier since no busses full kids have blown up yet (yup - totally happened).

What's pretty awesome about this set up is two fold. First, while characters like Magneto and Xavier are both still around and operating and significant supporting characters, they are no longer the figureheads for the core ideological discussion at the root of the X-Books. They have been supplanted by the next generation of mutant leaders and thinkers - a promise heralded all the way back in Grant Morrison's seminal New X-Men - Planet X arc, but with a potential only now just beginning to be realized. This allows the book to feel like it has actually evolved - a tremendous feat in a medium where Stan Lee once boldly (and apocryphally) announced in the 1970s that we 'no longer needed change, only the illusion of change,' and where nostalgia fueled reboots tend to wipe out years of development in favor of starting clean for a new generation.

The second exciting thing is what the nature of this schism allows us to have from a storytelling perspective. It took a long time and a lot of moving pieces to get us here, but we finally have both sides of the ideological divide represented equally and evenly and at a relatively equivalent morality. For a long time Xavier's methods were always the protagonists' methods, and so while Magneto might have made a good point or two, it was hard to ignore that he was doing so while leading 'The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants' or calling for the slaughter of most homo-sapiens. Now maybe you disagree with Scott's politics and worry he's riding way too close to the edge - a plot point in the book - but he's also been shown as a capable and competent wartime general who united and led his people to survival. This is no evil villain calling for the death of humans, this is Scott friggin Summers from 1963's X-Men #1 taking on the responsibility of a world leader. And it is EXACTLY what Magneto was trying to do with Avalon in the 90s, only on island by the bay instead of out in space. And the threat of a global EMP. It's fascinating to see that for all of Xavier's teaching Scott is basically following the Magneto path, down to Mags kneeling before him in a public show of fealty and is now acting as his concierge. Intentional or not, that is a rather damning commentary on either Xavier's dream, or his methods. I'm going to go with methods, as I've spent the better part of my life believing in the peaceful coexistence of races - but it is fascinating to see both sides fleshed without one being the ostensible villains.

Which leaves us with Wolverine, the man who is concurrently running a non-violent school for youths AND a black ops hit squad, as the moral figurehead of Xavier's dream. This duality is at the center of this particular issue as we see how the ramifications of X-Force's latest mission (which resulted in the death and rebirth of Archangel without any of his memories, and a young clone of Apocalypse named Evan who was raised in a virtual reality Smallville to really answer the nature vs. nurture question) will affect the school, and how Logan and his staff will navigate that. It's interesting to note that while Hank, Kitty, and Bobby (definitely the core moral center of the X-Men now) want NOTHING to do with X-Force, none of them are particularly surprised to hear Wolverine is doing that kind of stuff, because that's the way he's always been. If anything, this school is a MUCH bigger change for Wolvie - who used to take teenage girls under his wing by teaching them how to use swords and dodge bullets. Contrast that with the shock and horror everyone had when Cyclops was doing the same thing, and it's because Scott has changed, and I don't think it was apparent to anyone just how much he had until recently.

So this issue is a bit of an epilogue, a bit of a breather, and a TREMENDOUS amount of fun. It's the X-Men book I've wanted for a long time, and I've been a fan of some more recent runs (Fraction's, for all its flaws, in particular). The students are great, the teachers are great, the stakes are high, the high concepts are present and so are the small character moments, as well as the philosophical implications.

If you look at the X-Men as one giant, long form story told over generations this is an important series of moments.

To Be Continued