The two dominant American comic book publishers, Marvel and DC, are both currently in the middle of an era of continuous “crossovers” –megastories involving an “epic” event in their respective comic universes, essentially stunts to attract and hold readership. At Marvel, the past five years have seen an unending series of such events starting with “House of M,” followed by “Civil War,” (wherein superheroes were pitted against each other in a dispute over government “registration” of powerful characters), then “Secret Invasion,” that saw the shape-shifting alien Skrulls infiltrate and then nearly conquer Earth. That was ended when, after Marvels heroes, seemingly defeated, were outgunned when supervillain Norman Osbourn, AKA the Green Goblin, fired the shot that ended the threat, allowing a segue into yet another mega-crossover, “Dark Reign,” wherein a grateful public, perceiving Osbourn as earth’s savior, has put him in charge of earth security and has his own international security force, H.A.M.M.E.R., at his disposal to persecute the good guys, including fugitive industrialist Tony Stark, Iron Man.
Things are hardly better at DC., after a months long “Batman, R.I. P.,” which saw the Dark Knight’s psyche shattered before his recovery and then apparent death, Bruce Wayne’s alter ego surfaces in the concurrent megaseries “Final Crisis,” breaking his most solemn rules, by picking up a gun to kill cosmic supervillain Darkseid. Darkseid zaps Batman with his most feared power, a death beam thought to be inescapable. Thought dead, Wayne’s consciousness has actually been sent far into the past at the dawn of mankind.
This left Gotham City without its Caped Crusader and the Batman family of titles is going through yet another mega-event, “Battle for the Cowl,” risking event fatigue for those fans who aren’t letting themselves being stimulated like a dead frog subjected to electric shocks. I have observed all this from afar since these kind of contrived events where, the company ballyhoo proclaimed, “nothing will ever be the same again!” are often desperate measures that rarely pay off in fresh storytelling.
I was quite frustrated with the poor hype-to-quality ratio of the DC’s treatment of its most profitable character until I realized that, for a character who appears in four or more regular titles a month along with constant new one-shots and graphic novels, the publisher risks story fatigue and massive overexposure as well as the creative exhaustion from Batman’s ubiquity. The corporations owning pop culture franchises thrive on the franchises that earn their owners great fortunes. Star Trek, Star Wars and the pantheon of comic book heroes must either limit their exposure to focus their creativity and maximize their appeal, or allow their lucrative properties to lie dormant for a season. This allowing the soil to lie fallow can permit fresh thinking and new talent can be brought to bear that extends the life of the franchise.
And that’s what sidelining Bruce Wayne allows DC to do–take this unique character offline and even put him literally in a cave while the Batman titles play around with a Bat-substitute for awhile until they have several volumes’ worth of trade paperbacks to market next year as a standalone epic. This is what happened in 1993′s “Knightfall/KnightsEnd” series that saw an exhausted and broken Batman sidelined while a violent substitute took his place until a healed and renewed Bruce Wayne returned–the status quo was shaken up for awhile and writers got to paint on a large canvas, but it always came down to one man, Bruce Wayne, as the Batman, warring on all criminals in Gotham City. In a few months or a year, we will see the one and only Batman return from a well-earned sabbatical, and maybe I’ll start reading his titles again then too.
