1. “Golden Dawn: Part 3” in “Batman: The Dark Knight” # 3, script and pencils by David Finch, edited by Mike Marts, Janielle Asselin, Rickey Purdin and Katie Kubert.
Nobody smiles in Batman: The Dark Knight # 3. In twenty pages of story, there’s not a single unqualified smile. There is however, something of a sneer on the face of “Forbes” at 6:4, or at least, I think it’s a sneer. It’s hard to tell, given that the expression on the character’s face is so contradictory. Is that a frown of concern? Are those compassionate or judgmental eyes? Is that a sneer, a smile, a tic, or a sign of a man whose tongue is trying to shift spinach from between the teeth just to the right of his lips? I honesty couldn’t say, but we’ll give Mr Finch the benefit of the doubt and assume that there’s some specific emotion on show in that key panel. Showing faith in the writer-artist of this tale in truth is all we can do, given that neither script nor art tells those of us who’re new to the comic who this Forbes is beyond the fact that he’s “gunning for” Jim Gordon’s job. As with so many others in the cast of this comic, the reader's left pretty much on their own to believe whatever they choose to.
Elsewhere in the The Golden Dawn: Part Three, we’re given a malicious grin on the Penquin’s face at 8.2, as he gloats over the coming assassination of Batman and a supporting character who well may be Killer Croc. (Again, there’s no help forthcoming as to who the big green guy with the teeth is in the book’s fourth scene. He’s not a million miles away in appearance from the other big green guy in the book’s first scene, for example, so again, the storytelling's all very democratic and interactive.) Finally, where these hints of something other than misery and anger are concerned, there’s a double-page spread of a demon displaying a Joker-esque beamer of a great grin at 3:19/20. It’s a thoroughly unpleasant expression, of course, as it should be, given that the character, unnamed as we must by now surely expect, is demanding that the Penguin “open the Gates Of Hell” for him. Altogether, therefore, the most microscopic traces of happiness and humour in Batman: Dark Knight # 3 are limited to three panels displaying one possible sneer and two evil grimaces. Everything else is unremitting despair, testosterone-driven fury, and a dubiously unmoved beauty in the face of extreme jeopardy. Neither script nor art, it has to be assumed, has been produced by craftsmen who consider that emotion, let alone the warmer and more inspiring qualities of feeling, have any part to play in their narrative at all. This is a book, I assure you, which makes the “grim’n’gritty” tradition of the post-Dark Knight Returns era seem as happy-go-lucky as a Busby Berkeley dance routine.
However, the lack of emotional variety in The Golden Dawn: Part Three doesn’t mean that there isn’t at least one radical departure on show where the Batman’s feelings are concerned. For in an unexpected nod to a rarely described emotional drive in the superhero narrative, Mr Finch has decided that the Batman should be portrayed as a voyeur, as a man so very attracted to a half-naked, dehydrated, and tortured young woman lying unconscious before him that he declares to himself that;
“She’s so beautiful, it takes my breath away. I have to force myself not to stare.”
I’m sure that we’d all agree that this is a completely new way of portraying the Dark Knight. Traditionally, we’ve all become used to complacently seeing him as a protagonist whose overwhelming purpose is to protect those in jeopardy. Now at last we can see something more of his true, and obviously far more nuanced, if despicable, character. Because where we’ve previously expected the Batman to (1) perceive a victim to be in trouble before (2) committing himself with an astonishing focus to the vital matter of saving them, here we’re shown that his lascivious thoughts towards youthful and dead-to-the-world victims can almost overwhelm his heroic purpose. (A man who can debate with himself about not looking at the alluring beauty of a barely-partially clothed female casualty is a man who isn’t entirely, shall we say, focused on the saving of her.) It’s a revelation, to realise that the Batman might struggle to restrain his libido and his gaze at a moment when an unconscious and seriously abused young woman is relying on him to save her. Indeed, I would have thought that a Batman who has to “force” himself not to “stare” cannot possibly be one who’s centred on the job as we’d expect of the character, which of course means that, in addition to being a man turned on by torture-porn, this Batman isn’t the Batman at all. That the sight of all that flesh and all that teasing and torn clothing and those little delicate wounds should so disconcert and attract him is certainly an illuminating break with both the past and conventional morality. Whether this is Mr Wayne or Mr Grayson in the costume, the whole scene stands as a game-changing as well as a stomach-turning example of characterisation. Why, the net must have broken with the weight of debate and disgust where this comic and this scene are concerned.
In the light of this fiercely, shall we say, individual take on the Batman, certain events earlier on in the story take on a different light to that which they first seemed to carry. For example, faced for the first time with the panel in which the Batman initially encounters Dawn in her prison, the reader can miss the fact that something very odd is going on in Mr Finch's storytelling. There Dawn is, posed suggestively – because torture and vulnerability matched with semi-nudity and unconsciousness is always a good idea – and it's not so immediately obvious how strange it is that the first thing the Batman thinks is;
“Her chest is still moving. She’s alive, but barely.”
Oddly enough, Dawn’s strangely untroubled and almost strangely restful pose means that her chest is facing away from The Batman at this moment. Indeed, most of us would consider that it's her back that's facing him, meaning that he can’t actually see what most of us would call her chest at all. I wonder why he mentioned her chest then? Did the Dark Knight Detective actually mean that
the movement of her rib-cage or her back or her shoulders indicated that she was still alive? What a strange mistake for a man with such a steel-trap of a mind to make. Perhaps in medical parlance the "chest" is a term which includes the "back", for the Batman is a more learned man than I am. Perhaps he was already becoming rather hot under the cowl about Dawn and her seductive unconsciousness and his thoughts just started to wander. It's just one in a sequence of scenes where there's a great deal that's confusing and yet telling in Mr Finch's story and art, and that's especially true where Dawn and her miraculously beauteous appearance is concerned. She's a victim, as we say, of torture, a woman dehydrated almost to the point of death, and yet she's strangely exquisite and almost entirely unmarked. It's as if torture has just made her all the more lovely, all the more Bat-beguiling. Neither blistered nor burned, neither sweaty or apparently suffering from the slightest loss of moisture, she awakens, as you can see above, in a state we might imagine a model would from a little forty-winks under the shade of a parasol on a beautiful tropical beach. (Those are remarkably lush lips for a woman on the point of death as a consequence of what the text seems to say is extreme heat.) Perhaps that's why the Batman can hardly bring himself not to stare at this poor victim of savage abuse, for she doesn't look like she's been hurt in the slightest. Surely that's alright then? Could it be that this Batman is just a common-or-garden voyeur rather than a man who finds himself almost impossibly attracted to a woman who's just been tortured in her skimpies to the point of death?
What a shame that he wasn't simply motivated by empathy and the most absolute of duties to help her, as seventy years of the character might lead us to expect. What a shame that the simple obligation to save her, to care for a fellow human being rather than struggle not to peak at her body while she's unconscious and close to death, wasn't the only thing on this Batman's mind.
What are the other emotions, beyond the lust of poor tempted Batman, displayed by the other joyless characters in The Dark Knight # 3? How well does Mr Finch acquit himself when discussing human beings away from the torture-porn scene? Well, his character's feelings run the gauntlet all the way from A to B, as Ms Parker might have said, from terror to rage, from despair to contempt, from fury to humiliation. There’s only two even vaguely positive expressions of humanity in the whole book. Firstly, there’s Alfred’s guarded and hardly too-friendly conversation with a girl trapped in the Batmobile. (I have no idea who she is or what she was doing there.) Then there’s the scene of Gordon and Bullock sitting together in a diner bemoaning Forbes, whoever he is, and what he’s doing, whatever that is. It's heartening to note that Gordon does call Bullock “buddy” here, which is nice in a "I-can't-say-I-love-you" way, but then he also declares that “… I’m tired … Forbes wants it so bad. He can have it.” Now, I can’t be sure, but it seems that Gordon is declaring that fighting the mysterious and yet apparently malevolent Forbes has become so difficult that he’s about to give in. This would be, I presume, the Jim Gordon who’s pretty much always stood with the people of Gotham no matter how appalling the trouble it's caused him. I must have missed a profound shift in that character from fundamentally decent to wearily self-interested, just as I have of course missed the transformation of Batman from all-round mensch to something else entirely.
“She’s so beautiful, it takes my breath away. I have to force myself not to stare.”
2. “3.10 To Thanagar” from “Batman: The Brave And The Bold” # 9 by Sholly Fisch, Rick Burnett and Dan Davis, edited by Jim Chadwick and Chynna Clugston Flores
If anyone reading this has visited this blog before, they’ll know that I’m no back-to-basics merchant, and that I’d never suggest a return to superhero books being only for children, being composed of only the least challenging and least complex of content. So if I say that I practically ran to the wonderfully sanguine and kinetic 3.10 To Thanagar after wading through Mr Finch’s Golden Dawn: Part 3, it’s not to suggest that the default setting of the superhero adventure ought to be one of innocent and cartoon good cheer. Having said that, if the choice is ever to be solely between the likes of Batman: The Dark Knight # 3 and Batman: The Brave And The Bold # 9, then the latter, as you’d surely expect, comes out ahead with 100% of my vote every time. (We’ll have no proportional representation here, no shared votes in this debate.) For one thing, “3.10 To Thanagar” presents us with a Batman who seems strangely untroubled by perversity and miserabilism, though it should be said that he doesn’t actually come face-to-face with any abused, helpless, objectivised women in this story. Perhaps we're on seeing him in The Brave And The Bold at his best, and it may be that his creators in BTBATB had best be careful about the kinds of temptations they place before him.
What becomes all the more obvious when reading through 3.10 to Thanagar after Golden Dawn: Part 3 is how much more fundamentally true to everyday life the supposedly children’s comic is. Mr Finch’s narrative is stewed in the most unimaginative distillation of Frank Millerisms, an example of superhero-grim as processed by a gifted but unempathetic artist who just can’t get the point or the aesthetic. But Batman: The Brave and the Bold presents a picture of human nature which explains just a little of how society actually does manage to survive rather than sink into a sewer of faux-noir. People do, after all, tend to manage to work together in groups of more than one or two bitter old policemen; that’s how we all get by. Given the choice between the extremes of an everyday world composed of nothing but misery and treachery and one characterised by positivity and decent-heartedness, I’ll always opt for the latter as just being that little bit more representative of the human condition. And here, in the Brave and The Bold, superheroes do work together in order to out-think their opponents, they do take pleasure in each other’s company and in learning from each other’s experience, and they do face danger with bravery and skill as well as a touch of trepidation. The sequence in which Batman and Hawkman discuss the crime-fighting traditions of their different worlds, for example, is almost shocking in the respect, faith and curiosity that the characters show each other. Why don’t we see the likes of such scenes elsewhere more often? Is it possible that consensus is as much a feature of our hero's lives as conflict is?
So although Batman; The Brave And The Bold certainly isn’t a comic which I’d push for as the default setting for the superhero book, it’s energetic and buoyant, well-written and wittily drawn. Perhaps the worst that might be said about "3.10 To Thanagar" in storytelling terms is that the first three pages, all of them splashes, are somewhat light on content, though certainly entertaining in themselves..
Compared to Batman: The Dark Knight"# 3, there undoubtedly is a far more heartening attitude displayed to women in BTBATB. At first, I will admit to being disappointed to see Hawkman and Batman traveling off into space and jeopardy while Hawkwoman stayed at home, sighing over the video-link and asking her man to “Just hurry back.” In all the good humour of the tale, I couldn’t help but cringe a touch at yet another comic where the boys go off to war and the ladies wait loyally at home for them. And yet, full marks to Fisch and Burchett, for although the “A” plot is all testosterone all of the time, the story ends on a full-page splash showing what Hawkwoman has been up to while her mate’s been off righting the universe. “It got a little lonely without you here – “ she tells the returning Hawkman, “ - - so I decided to go out with the girls.” Stereotype upon stereotype, you might think, but its all set-up for a nicely-weighed gag, and the gag’s very effectively played out. For "going out with the girls" in the Brave And Bold universe involves, we're then shown, not any regression to a patronising sexism, but to membership of a task-force of super-heroines beating up on huge numbers of nefarious super-villains.
Splendid. Such fun and competence only makes it all the more regrettable that the reader's shown not a single person of colour in the whole comic. For it is a pity that such an otherwise laudable tale didn't, for example, include an appearance by a superheroine such as Vixen or Dr Light in its final scene. It would've made such an joyful and energetic comic book all the more kind and welcoming.
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