Some Thoughts on Batman #4

On the whole I have been enjoying the (ridiculously re-numbered) current Batman series.  

But it's occurred to me that perhaps the entire system for numbering comics should be rethought.  The "old" system, whereby one title would continue to advance numerically forever, was based on the idea that the LARGER the issue number, the more venerable and stable the title seemed; you were buying into a character with legs who wouldn't vanish after you've invested interest in them.  But then venerability became interpreted as stodginess and stagnation, and the default switched to re-starting the numbering on a title when it got a new creative team or the hero got a revised chest logo. That habit then necessitated categorizing titles into "volumes", a designation that exists ONLY in online cataloging and is marked nowhere on the comics themselves.  This benefits no one and confuses many.  Why not simply label each issue of a comic with its YEAR and a sequence within that year (#1-12)?  "Batman 2025 #4" is pretty easy to understand and is a unique identifier.  That said...

I have some issues with the current issue.  They aren't really BIG issues, but, somehow, that is what makes them more irksome.  They are minor issues that seem as though they could have been avoided and they mar what is otherwise an interestingly written (and VERY well drawn) run on the Caped Crusader's adventures.  

The issue introduces a new Gotham villain ("The Minotaur"), who is (another) baddie whose shtick is "But THIS time, I will ORGANIZE ALL of Gotham City's crime!"  It is BY NO MEANS an original schtick but it's not unwelcome or unworkable (obviously, since it's a repeated one).  And the Minotaur seems acceptably colorful.

He wears a bull-mask and has seven fingers on his right hand.

The bull-mask and matching suit is all quite sensible (as far as villains go), but ... seven fingers?  I can't think of anything that would make someone EASIER to identify than having seven fingers (given its rarity).  His hook is having made seven crime organizations interdependent. Fortunately for his theming, Gotham has EXACTLY the right number of crime organizations.  

Magic seven? Did Geoff Johns secretly write this?

Once again, the Penguin, a character with a rich 84-year-and-counting history as one of Batman's top five villains (and one who has had his OWN TELEVISION SERIES), is cast as Just Another Crime Lord (albeit one more recognizable and colorful than the others).  I'm done ranting about what an inappropriate waste that is; after all, whether I like it or not, this fact may be part of exactly WHY the Penguin is still around.  It's not a flaw, it's a feature; the Penguin can be SCALED to fit the situation.

The Penguin can fight Firestorm to a standstill, shoulder to shoulder with FREAKING VALIDUS.

Next week, he can get the snot beat out of him by Harvey Bullock.

He can also just BUY a super-robot to kick Superman's patootie in front of all his super friends.

Penguin aside, there are five other crime lords who are distinguished by name, location, style, and speciality. While I might not agree on the specifics of these choices, I appreciate that in one issue Matt Fraction has done more to give us a picture of Gotham and its crime environment than all of Batman's Bronze Age stories combined.  Matt Fraction, gods bless him, does NOT do "decompressed" story-telling.

But it's the sloppiness that Fraction needlessly introduces that irritates me.

Um.... that's not something you can guarantee, Minotaur.
What it is, the Amway of Crime?

You clearly don't know what "internecine" means.  
My version of the Penguin would shoot you for that alone

How miraculously tidy that the losses were distributed exactly evenly among all the crime groups. What are the odds?  The simple insertion of "an average of ... per" would have solved this.

How?  That seems to be the hard part in Gotham.  It's simply stated as a throwaway.
How exactly did you 'bring to heel' a panoply of costumed crazies, off-panel?

That's Lonnie "Anarchy" Machin. You remember him; his schtick was being a TEEN GENIUS. He wants "whatchallit State's Evidence".  I should think a criminal teen genius would not need to "whatchacall" that concept.

Really, now.  This is the name of your Italian crime lord?  What is this, Dick Tracy?  If "Roy G. Bivolo" is supposed to be amusing, don't expect me to take "Lupo Capitolina" seriously.

I love the touch that, while regular crime lords have people they care about, but the only thing The Penguin cares about is a pet penguin. HOWEVER.

The tallest real world penguin is 39 inches tall.  This monster towers over these seated humans, who are A MINIMUM of 48", seated.  If you are going to depict a penguin, don't be so lazy you don't check the internet to see how tall they are. There is no excuse for that.

NO ONE RUNS ON A TREADMILL IN CROCS.
Certainly not a genius like Dr. Zeller.  
Don't use shorthand like "Crocs means she's practical and not girly!" without thinking it through.

Is this sloppiness the fault of Matt Fraction? His artist? Their editor?  I don't know, but it's silly and it's distracting from the good work they are doing.  Get an editor, people.

One Undone

Now that our long national nightmare is over and Chip Zdarsky is no longer writing Batman, I thought I'd check back in again on the title, now that Matt Fraction, a writer I have good impressions of, is writing it.

I have read that his team's immediate intent to do to "one and dones" (or,  as we used to call them, "stories") rather than The Next Arc That Will Push Batman To His Limits And Change Him Forever And Everything You Think You Know About Him And Gotham City.  Of that, I certainly wholeheartedly approve and this first issues is exactly that. Bully.

However, I am less approving of the execution of the idea.

Some of the problem lies with the stupid situations bequeathed by Zdarsky: Alfred is still dead, Jim Gordon has been busted to beat cop, and Vandal Savage has taken over both Bruce Wayne's and Jim Gordon's lives because he's now living in Wayne Manor and serving as Gotham City's Police commissioner.  These developments that feel like lunchtime schoolyard improvisations ("Yeah, well, now MY villain is the police commissioner, so there!") and wouldn't pass the Laugh Test on the Batman '66 television show.

It's substantially LESS credible than the Commissioner Nora Clavicle story, which really says a lot.

It has zero basis in Vandal Savage as a character.  Granted,  he's always been a sonic screwdriver; not a 'real character' with his own motivations (there is no way you don't get over your emotional need to Rule The World after 50,000 years), but a simple plot device to create very specific challenges. 

You know how you can tell Frankenstein's Monster isn't a "real" person?  Because you can see the stitches. So, too, Zdarsky's use of Savage is so transparently ad hoc as to be uncanny (in the bad way).  "I want ONE villain who can cause BOTH Batman and Jim Gordon to suffer peripety. Can't be a bat-villain; can't be too strongly associated with another hero's rogues gallery; needs to be one of those powerful, generic, schemers. Ah! Vandal Savage! No one will get upset about misusing Vandal Savage because no one cares about him!"

You'd think DC might have jumped at the change to retcon away Zdarky's silliness with renumbering of Batman at #1; alas.  I wouldn't expect Fraction himself to reboot all this nonsense away overnight, and I think it likely he has plans to undo it all at some point. Meanwhile...

Fraction's commitment to one-and-done seems to have boxed him into an unfortunate need to have Batman undergo a character arc within one issue.  To do so, however, has him mischaracterizing Batman on each end of the story.

Batman starts as a cynical ****, which is absurd considering how many criminal reformations he has personally bankrolled.

Apparently Batman is one of those absolutists who never recovered from reading Aristotle.

By the end, he's unmasked and is chilling with a newly neotonized Killer Croc.  
Am I the only person who misses when "Killer Croc" was just a gangster with a skin condition?  

Anyway, these extremes of characterization are, well, too extreme.  Batman as Bipolarman has already worn out its welcome.

Speaking of Batman being crazy, he seems to have created an AI version of Alfred who follows him around acting as a virtual sounding board that only he can see and hear.

Except for butterflies, 'cuz they're magical.

No, AI-fred. You asked Batman a literal question ("where are we going") and he replied not with a literal answer ("to the vivarium") but with a figurative one ("playing a hunch").  That's the exact opposite of being "literal", which, I suppose is also exactly the kind of mistake you'd expect an AI to make (but certainly not an accomplished writer like Matt Fraction!).

This is too ludicrous for Fraction to have introduced without comment, so I can only assume that it's a Zdarskyism.  It sure is wacky, but I guess it gives Batman someone to talk to without Robin by his side.

An AI assistant for Batman;
what could possibly go wrong?

Fraction is committed to helping us understand what Batman is doing and how.

TOO committed.

The story is littered with these tech-splanation boxes that remind me of "The Batwave" from "The Batman" cartoon.

 I never DID figure out what the Batwave was.

To me, they seem more interruptive than helpful.  But maybe because I'm such a studied expert on Batman Stuff, that when I see Batman issue commands into a communicator and then the Batmobile obeys the commands, I am brilliant enough to deduce that he's using a voice-command connection to control the Batmobile.

Or maybe I just have four Brother AIs in my house.

It doesn't help that Fraction uses these to explain obvious tech we've seen before while ignoring the techn-ephant in the living room:

"Please state the nature of the butlering emergency..."

I will forgive Fraction's heavy-handed use of THE BUTTERFLY as a metaphor for change, because comics, after all, are not generally a subtle medium.  What I will not forgive however is the lazy use of television news to delivery exposition:

Looks like someone never recovered from reading Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns.

Well, as long as the overt Millerisms end there it should--

Balls nasty. Licken Chegs in danger.

Ouch. Yeah, I don't know whether that's a knowing parody or an unknowing pastiche, but what I DO know is that I don't want to see any more of it. 

Miller did ONE thing that was wholly positive which everyone does and should imitate (even though almost no one remembers that Miller is the writer who did it):
MILLER made Alfred a dead-pan snarker, thus completely revitalizing the character.

So, there are definitely some hiccups in the #1 of this new "Batman" character. But I am still optimistic that Fraction will do the character more justice than his predecessor.  Am I wrong to think so...?

"May God bless and keep Dan DiDio..."

In Fiddler on the Roof, the rabbi is challenged to give a proper blessing for the czar of Russia (who was no friend of their Jewish community), to which the rabbi archly replied, "Of course: 'May god bless and keep the czar... far away from us!"

Well, likewise, may the gods bless and keep the czar of DC Comics, Dan DiDio, who has presided for 10 years over a vibrant period of the DCU.  And I mean that in the same way real estate ads describe dangerous and distressed neighborhoods as 'vibrant'.

Vibrant, like Hub City. And we all know the source of this rot.
We've known it for years yet we don't do anything about it.

Some of that vibrancy is inherent to our times; although the intellectual properties owned by the comic book industry are now powerful currency, that doesn't always help the bottom line of comic book publishers. Some of it, however, lies squarely at DiDio's feet.  Not only do many DC readers feel this way, it appears DC's masters did, too. DiDio was posting on DC's behalf and meeting with creators Friday morning and "no longer with DC" by Friday evening, which doesn't sound like a conscious uncoupling to me.

Pictured: conscious uncoupling.

A lot of great things happened at DC during DiDio's tenure, such as the amazing work on Hanna-Barbera properties like the Flintstones, Snagglepuss, and Scooby-Doo.  Dan DiDio could have stopped lots of creators from doing interesting, innovative, thoughtful, and entertaining work, but he didn't.  The pattern of his decisions suggest that he was very receptive to change and experimentation.

Which was, perhaps, the problem.

Our flaws are often merely the flipside of our virtues and I suspect that was the case with DiDio.  In the same way that DiDio didn't stop good things from happening, he didn't stop bad things from happening, either.  By bad things, I mean things like:

• the Destruction AND THEN Befoulment of Wally West (I don't even LIKE Wally West and I know how very wrong that all was);
• nerfed Bart Allen's unique personality, aging him up to become the Flash, and then vanishing him 12 months later;
• Tom King and his Crimes Against Batman (does anyone REALLY need ME to expound on this, when the entire internet has it covered?);
• the unpardonable MESS of "52" and "Countdown", which really just should have been renumbered as continuations of 1985's DC Challenge;
• preventing Batwoman's wedding because "heroes aren't supposed to be happy";
• driving out steady professional types like Greg Rucka, Len Wein, Mark Waid, and Geoff Johns (writers interested in what they can do for a character) and handing flagship characters to idiosyncratic 'auteurs' like Brian Michael Bendis, Grant Morrison, Tom King, and Scott Snyder (writers interested in what they can do to a character).

People have been describing this as 'the end of an era', which it is. But that isn't the "DiDio Era"; it's the "DiDio versus Johns Era". Like some sort of real-life Anti-Monitor and Monitor, DiDio and Johns have been waging a barely disguised universe-threatening battle over whether the DCU would be positive or negative.

And you know which one you'd swipe right on.

You can trace it through nearly everything that's happened in the last 10 years. The New 52 versus Rebirth.  Wally West the symbol of hopefulness versus Wally West PTSD-crippled mass murderer.  Dark Multiverse versus the Metaverse. Eventually, Johns, realizing that his power over DC's characters in mass media gave him greater influence than DiDio's power over them in comics, left DC Comics for DC Entertainment.  And without Johns to counterbalance DiDio's negativity, DC Comics became sour enough that readers finally started to spit it out rather than swallow it.

Dan DiDio doesn't seem like a bad person who wants bad things to happen to damaged heroes.  But he does seem like a dumb person who thinks that is what makes comics interesting.  Like many (so, so many) creators at DC, he's infected with Marvel-Envy, thinking that DC's characters need to be overwhelmed, unhappy and put-upon, damaged, distressed, disturbed, and alienated to be, ya know, COOL and popular like Marvel heroes.  Totally blind to the fact that historically, DC's characters were cool in a different way; they were cool precisely because, despite personal adversities, they were NOT any of those things.

DiDio's not bad. He's not even bad at his job, I think. He simply doesn't get DC.  Here are a few examples.

He wanted to KILL Nightwing / Dick Grayson. Who thinks that way? Is there a more beloved character in DC comics?  Who even comes up with the IDEA of killing the Sensational Character Find of 1940, let alone pushes it so hard that Geoff Johns simply flat-out REFUSED to do it?   

Do NOT mess with Dick Grayson,
'cuz he'll make it look like an accident.

He wanted the Spectre to kill Shazam because Shazam "doesn't fit in with the rest of the DCU".  Is Shazam a unique and unusual property? Yes. But if you can't even imagine that he can be made to work in the DCU somehow then your view of the DCU is too narrow for you to be in charge of it. 

Well, Dan, Billy's still working within DC.
And you're not.

He gave the Phantom Stranger an origin. As Judas the Discipline. I can think of nothing that so clearly shows how deeply someone doesn't understand the DCU as that.  He managed to besmirch the Phantom Stranger, Western Civilization most awesome character, as a damaged, tortured, fuck-up tied to a particular religious system.  That's a tragic level of stupidity, right there.   

Dan DiDio not pictured.

At the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con, DiDio showed how little he gets readers:

“We do these Facsimile Editions where we reprint older issues of comics including all the old ads and stuff…and in some cases these are selling more than the new comics with these characters. People are more interested in buying the stories from 30 or 40 years ago than the contemporary stories, and that’s a failure on us. We should be focused on moving things forward, always pushing the boundaries and finding new stories to tell. That’s how we’ll survive and grow this industry.”

DiDio assumes that people fall back to reading older stories because the new ones aren't "moving things forward, pushing boundaries, and finding new stories to tell."  What he really means is that people are reading old comics because we aren't forcing them to forget about continuity and the history of who the characters are and what they are like.  The perceived antidote is to wrest by force the idea of what those characters are from the dead claws of nostalgia.

You're too late, Dan; it's been done.

But the way to get people to focus on the tree's seasonal blossoms isn't by tearing up the roots.  People don't read comics starring characters who've been around for 80 years because they are aching to move things forward and push boundaries.  Nor do they read them simply out of nostalgia.  They want to read stories that depict familiar characters in familiar ways but in a new story or a new situation.  The value of character familiarity and consistency is that, for both the creator and the reader, the focus can be on the story and its plot.

Which often require a LOT of focus.

It seems like the modern assumption for why a comic book isn't more popular is that something is wrong with the character, so the character must be changed.  Does it ever occur to anyone that maybe your stories just suck?

Truth hurts.

Two of my favorite series this year have been Sholly Fisch's Scooby-Doo Team-Ups and Matt Fraction's Jimmy Olsen.  That's certainly not because Scooby-Doo or Jimmy Olsen are favorite characters of mine.  It's because those (really good) writers took those characters at their ridiculous face value and wrote stories that, rather than try to change the characters, actually take full advantage of who and what those characters are.  I wish more modern writers would give that a try and stop wasting everyone's time trying to put Their Stamp on the characters.

Sassy Sombrero Superman never really got the chance he deserved, though.

If you want to write comics where you can do anything you want with the characters, then create those characters.  But iconic, flagship characters are worth more than any individual creator; Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman are known much more broadly than anyone who writes or draws them. They always have been and always will be.  So preserving and cultivating the character should be the priority, rather than indulging the writer. Heck, you could probably pick one and switch it to on-spec writing. "Hey, everyone; submit us a story for Heroperson that colors between the lines of their existing world."  You would get 12 interesting stories a year, from different perspectives, memorably unique, none of which had to be part of an 'arc' or 'change the character forever', and it would probably show more continuity that DC can manage with its golden stable of auteurs.   The reason that doesn't happen is that DC is convinced the creator fame is what lures readers to buy comics. Well, I guarantee you anyone reading Superman or Legion now is doing so despite Bendis not because of him.

Although he was great in Human Centipede 2.

Not understanding such principles is at the core of DiDio's failure. DiDio's leadership at DC often went awry because it didn't combat these negative and chaotic tendencies.  I am no fan of Marvel's Stan Lee, god knows, but I like that Lee wasn't hampered by being a fan of comics; he simply published them.  He was enough of a realist to know that, in his own words, "comics survive not on change but on the illusion of change", something that DiDio wasn't woke enough to understand.

If I like Stan Lee more than I like thee, then,
it's fair to say I don't like thee very much.

I am told that Dan DiDio loved comics; but loving something doesn't mean you know how to do it well. Now that he's no longer in charge, a new era can begin.

My question is: will this new era (with or without the new '5G' timeline) be a repudiation or a repetition of DiDio's mistakes...?