The Culture Beat

Batman is still dead.

Actually, Batman is still swinging through Gotham City; it’s Bruce Wayne who’s still deceased, as I discussed a while back. After the “Battle for the Cowl” event, to no one’s surprise, former Robin Dick Grayson took his mentor’s place with a new Robin, 11-year old Damian Wayne, (Bruce’s son by archvillain Ra’s Al Ghul’s daughter Talia).

The best rendering of this new Dynamic Duo is in the new title, Batman and Robin, written by brainy scribe Grant Morrison with art by the incredible Frank Quitely. I had planned to avoid such stunt-driven crossover events as I waited for Bruce Wayne’s inevitable return after DC had squeezed all the story potential out of the new setup. But I gave Batman and Robin a try and actually came away impressed.

Quitely draws like no other artist, with both realistic detail and the ability to capture action, two qualities that rarely go together. And so far, Dick Grayson, predictably struggling to walk in Batman’s boots, and to handle the angry and arrogant Damian, is turning out to be an interesting central character. Dick was always the bright contrast to Batman’s darkness so having this character become the Dark Knight, if handled as well as the first two issues have done, holds intriguing possibilities.

But DC has other plans for Bruce Wayne and many other characters who have died over the last few years. Blackest Night, a long-announced crossover centering on Green Lantern Hal Jordan has finally arrived and it’s all about death. The name comes from the famous Green Lantern oath spoken when Jordan re-charges his power ring:

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship evil’s might,
Beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!

The Black Lanterns are those dead who have been unnaturally returned to life to attack the living and they appear to include many dead heroes including Jon Jonzz, the Martian Manhunter, killed during the Final Crisis crossover, and Bruce Wayne, judging by the cover of the latest Green Lantern issue with Black Lantern-in-Chief, the Black Hand. It sounds like this major event will allow DC to have it’s own league of the undead to exploit the current zombie fad. Since we’ve known about the Blackest Night crossover for at least two years, it appears that DC editors have been killing off characters to serve as recruits in the new Black Lantern Corps. What their state, living or dead, will be when Blackest Night ends is of course unknown, except nothing is as certain in the superhero genre than death and rebirth (see the currently resurrected Flash, Barry Allen and of course, Hal Jordan himself was resuscitated several years ago after being dead since the 90s.

The current resurrection at Marvel centers of course on Captain America. Three years ago we saw the Star Spangled Avenger, Steve Rogers, shot down on the steps of the courthouse he was entering in handcuffs to face trial for resisting a federal superhero registration act. His original sidekick, Bucky, now grown, eventually took the Captain America role in a new costume and readers responded positively to writer Ed Brubaker’s fresh approach as he explored the new Cap’s attempt to live up to his mentor’s legacy. Whether this inspired DC’s current Dick Grayson Batman role-playing is debatable but they sure sound similar. I always wanted Steve Rogers to return–Marvel could no more get rid of the original Cap than DC could dispose of Clark Kent’s Superman. But given the vitality of the new Cap stories, I didn’t expect the announcement that Cap 1.0 was coming back this soon. But with Captain America #600 and the new miniseries Reborn, that is the big news. It seems that Steve Rogers is unstuck in time, that his apparent assassination was part of a nefarious plot to control him until his consciousness slipped off into the timestream and he keeps popping up at various points in his history (borrowing heavily from the classic Lost episode, “The Constant”).

Like Superman, Captain America is a prime superhero, born at the beginning of the genre and freighted with profound moral symbolism. Superman and Captain America usually function as their respective universes’ moral compasses and thus it is not easy to place them in dramatically interesting conflicts, since they are so tried and true-hearted. After Marvel brought the WWII- era character out of suspended animation in the 1960s, the company always sought to have the flag-wrapped hero serve as a reflection of America’s ups and downs. After Vietnam and Watergate left the country deeply dispirited, Rogers even gave up his patriotic identity to become Nomad, to reflect the country’s wandering from its values. In the days after 9/11, writers tried to make Cap face the USA’s alleged blame for provoking terrorists but the character never works as mouthpiece for such editorializing. Ed Brubaker brought Cap’s stories back to the superhero world that, like the James Bond films, used current events as background material for heroic tales. Thus it will be interesting to see where born-again Cap goes from here in the age of Obama with hope for change butting up against the realities of a dangerous world.

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.