Review: Batman #38

We are now four issues into the Endgame arc, and Scott Snyder continues to do a fantastic job. This review is going to be relatively short, since there is only so much I can say about the issue without giving the kind of spoilers that would defeat the whole purpose of a positive review. As with my review of the latest The Flash episode yesterday, I will add a spoilerific section at the bottom for the benefit of anyone who has read the issue and wants to talk about that.

Suffice it to say, there is some very clever stuff going on here. Almost too clever, as is more or less de rigeur for Scott Snyder Batman stories of late. As with its immediate predecessors, the issue occasionally risks getting bogged down in complex, plot-hole-filling explanations of why exactly we are going to the next place we are going to, or why precisely this chemical will have the effect that it does. I very much appreciate the research that must have gone into these passages, but it does sometimes threaten to bring the whole enterprise to a grinding halt.

That, however, is a minor quibble, and there is much to love about this latest issue of the arc. In fact, I think it is the best issue of the arc since its first one. That first issue, if you will recall, was terrific in the way that it brought the rest of the DC Universe crashing into the insular world of Batman in the most violent way possible, but all of the issues of the arc since have brought back the insularity to enhance the claustrophobia factor. Happily, Scott Snyder finds a way to expand the scope of his story without sacrificing the closed-in feel that has made the arc so scary so far. This will be discussed in more detail below in the spoiler section.

The issue also ends with what might be the best end-of-installment cliffhanger that Snyder has yet written for Batman. Even if I had no other reason to return, that ending would have me coming back for the next issue.

Spoilers--
The idea of tying the rest of the DCU to the story by giving an in-narrative explanation of the immortality of various unkillable characters is absolutely brilliant for the reasons cited above, and the idea that the Joker is one of those infected immortals ties back to the opening narration of the Death of the Family arc, where Batman has to talk himself into remembering that the Joker is a mere man after all. And that final page...Oh, wow, that final page. It conveys how desperate Batman is, suggests several possible ways forward for the installments to follow, and leaves enough mystery to make the reader want to come back. This is a callback done right, a cliffhanger done right, and an issue of a superhero comic done right. Full marks!

On Superheroes

I have heard a variety of arguments to the effect that this new crop of superhero movies are all the same. Obviously there are similarities in tone between, say, Spider-man and the X-men, or between Spider-man and Iron man, or between X-men and the Avengers, or between Thor and Green Lantern. There is undeniably some truth to this, and your toleration for those common elements is going to vary depending on how much you just like the genre. But it’s also dangerous to generalize - after all, there’s very little connecting “The Dark Knight” and “The Avengers” aside from some superficial similarities between Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark.

But a closer examination of even those two characters reveal that sure, they’re both billionaires, but their relationship with their respective moonlight roles reveals that equating the two is like saying the lead characters of Lincoln and There Will Be Blood are the same because they both have prominent facial hair and are played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Iron Man doesn’t have a dual identity - he is just Tony Stark, all the suit does is make him harder to punch when he annoys you.

Batman, on the other hand, is more complicated. I’ve already written a bit about this, but Bruce Wayne really no longer exists - he is an act designed to draw attention away from his vigilante activities by night. All that’s left of him is the specter called the Batman.

As for the tone of the Marvel movies, yeah...they do get a little samey after a while, but while the combination of spectacle, snark, and strong characterization isn’t exactly original anymore, it’s a formula that works and that produces pretty entertaining movies. Certainly I prefer it to, say, the MIchael Bay formula of massive spectacle with bugger all else going for it, or the Fantastic Four movie’s approach of awkwardly trying to be a more whimsical X-men without really understanding what makes the characters special in their own right. So yes, you have Iron Man 2 desperately trying to be Iron Man 1 and failing, but then you have Iron Man 3 trying to be Lethal Weapon and mostly succeeding.

That segues awkwardly but not illogically into something else I wanted to organize my thoughts on: super-hero methods. I think the preferences in any given time period in superhero storytelling as regards this feature will tend to reflect the dominant fears of the time. During periods of high street crime, I imagine you’ll be more likely to see heroes like Spider-Man and Batman taking down muggers and convenience store robbers. In times of war, you’ll be more likely to see heroes like Iron Man and Captain America taking on conflicts that threaten the globe. In times where we fear things like terrorism, like now, we’ll be more likely to see stories about heroes taking on large, cosmic, and largely unknowable evils, favoring heroes like Green Lantern and Thor. The Avengers movie managed to combine the second two.

However, there is one somewhat encouraging trend in these stories - increasingly, it’s less about a war on crime than it is about the hero taking on his or her own demons in the form of a specific enemy. That is, it’s more about examining the character than it is about about an uncomfortably fascistic power fantasy for paranoid shut-ins.

The Talking Picture, Ep. 14 - Remaking Continuity, A Limerick Sequence

On Lex Luthor

I was listening to a Mark Waid interview recently where he said that he liked the idea of Superman and Lex Luthor having been childhood and/or teenage friends because it adds a lot to Superman’s character to have that little splash of darkness. 
However, I think that the guy he was debating against did have one very good point: while it probably helps develop Superman’s character, his loss is Luthor’s gain in terms of character development. I don’t like the idea that young Luthor was obsessed with things extraterrestrial because as I understand Luthor he is fundamentally a man. He has spent years rising through the social ranks, pulling dirty tricks but at every turn striving to become as powerful as a man can possibly become. Eventually, he reaches the pinnacle of his achievement: he is the most brilliant, most wealthy human being on the planet. And just at that moment of triumph, an alien being who is both naturally more powerful and naturally more beautiful in both body and soul than Luthor can ever be appears and outdoes him. This, to me, defines Luthor’s character. His evil arises from the fact that his principles are founded in petty jealousy and desire for revenge. But, like all good villains, his foibles disguise a pretty legitimate point - that anything as powerful as Superman, however benevolent, is inherently fascistic merely by placing itself that far above everyone else. 
What if Superman turned bad? That’s the classic refrain. But what Luthor understands that he thinks everyone else is blind to (and, to some extent, they are) is that Superman doesn’t have to turn bad to be oppressive. He doesn’t have to be The Plutonian to feel that cracking down on human flaws is fundamentally the right thing to do. His very presence is an affront to humanity. The fact that he is roughly omni-benevolent is a happy accident. And to be fair to Mark Waid, the solution he comes to in Kingdom Come is the best one I’ve heard--if Superman really does have a stronger and more accurate moral compass than anyone else, let him prove it by not using his powers, by living among us as equals.

Back to the topic of villains, in my experience the best villains define and crystallize the hero’s character through contrast. The Batman is largely defined by his principles. So the Joker challenges those principles and tries to get the Batman to break all of them. Superman is a super-powered alien life form whose powers are bestowed upon him through no achievement on his part who has never had any need for jealousy. So Lex Luthor is a pathologically jealous self-made man who cannot go any higher simply by virtue of being only human.