Legends of the Dork Knight

"Venom" by Dennis O'Neil, Trevor Von Eeden, Russell Braun, and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez

After two storylines that could fairly be ranked with among the best Batman stories of the period, if not ever ("Gothic" and "Prey"), all the momentum that Legends of the Dark Knight had built by its second year came screeching to a halt in the pages of "Venom." This happened despite the killer art team of Trevor Von Eeden, Russell Braun, and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez working together to produce five issues of excellent adventure cartooning with an Alex Toth feel. The reason for this dramatic car crash can only be laid at the foot of one man, and it's a familiar name: Dennis O'Neil, longtime Batman writer and editor, and the writer of the first LotDK arc, the strange and underwhelming "Shaman."

It was easy to be kind to "Shaman," even if the story was a mess, because it was clear that O'Neil was striking out into relatively virgin territory. "Venom" suffers considerably for being a mess that comes on the heels of two very good stories that successfully mapped the space where interesting Batman stories could be told in this format. But over and above the fact that the story itself is a mess, its premised on a central idea so singularly, spectacularly awful that there's very little even the best creators could have done to salvage it - and we know this for a fact because we've got the dream team of Von Eeden, Braun, and Garcia-Lopez working their collective asses off to polish this turd. (I really don't want to undersell the art - it's gorgeous, but all for naught.)

Not to beat around the bush, the problem here is simple: "Venom" is the story where Batman gets hooked on drugs.



One year previous, Captain America had suffered through his own drug problem, in the pages of the thoroughly odd "Streets of Poison" storyline that ran from Captain America #373-378. Even though the story itself may have been problematic, the motivation behind "Streets of Poison" was sound. The prevalence of performance-enhancing drugs in athletics first became a major public health concern in the late 80s and early 90s. (Anabolic steroids weren't even illegal until 1990, at which point they were added to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act.) This side skirmish of the "War on Drugs" was notable at least partly for the fact that steroid use was seen as popular among a far different demographic than that which had previously been targeted by law enforcement for drug abuse in the 80s - white middle class young men, to say nothing of wealthy professional athletes. It was difficult to make the argument that steroids were as harmful as other narcotics when the people who used steroids were often successful, sexy, and wealthy.

Mark Gruenwald, then in the middle of his lengthy run on Captain America, recognized a problem in the makeup of Marvel's star-spangled hero: Cap's origin was, basically, steroids. In order to address this, "Streets of Poison" inserted Cap into the "War on Drugs" in a most unusual way. While becoming involved with street-level enforcement against drug smugglers, Cap was caught in an explosion during which he inhaled a massive amount of Ice. Ice, for those who aren't "in the know" on their street drug talk, is a real drug, a nasty stimulant with effects similar to methamphetamine crossed with cocaine. Not knowing that he had inhaled enough of the stuff to kill a horse, Cap spent the next couple days running around New York, getting progressively more erratic and dangerous, until finally being caught and given a total blood transfusion in order to clear the effects of the drug from his system. This had the salutary effect of cleaning the Super Soldier Serum out of his body, leaving him at slightly less than peak capacity but feeling better for the fact that he was no longer quite so much of a walking billboard for steroid use aimed directly at the children of America.

(It should be noted that this development had to be walked back just a few years later, when Gruenwald established in the "Fighting Chance" storyline that the remnants of the Serum in his system were slowly killing him. At the beginning of Mark Waid's run he received another total blood transfusion, this time from from the Red Skull [in Cap's cloned body], that restored the serum with no more deleterious side effects, where it had remained until very recently. A year ago Rick Remender again drained the Serum from Cap's body, this time with the effect of allowing the decades of aging which the Serum had mooted to rush back all at once, making him a frail old man, albeit one who still manages to get stuff done.)

(Also: "Streets of Poison" is very goofy in places - Cap does a chicken dance at one point - but it has much to recommend it. It's something of a follow-up to Frank Miller's run on Daredevil, using a b-plot to pit the Kingpin against the Red Skull for some portion of the New York drug trade. Also, it was the first use of Bullseye since the character had been sidelined in Daredevil #200 [not by Miller himself, but none other than Dennis O'Neil, still cleaning up loose ends from Miller's run], when Bullseye was hospitalized after a definitive beating at DD's hands. As strange as it might seem now, Bullseye was out of commission for over five years at the time, so his breaking out of jail to kill Cap was a pretty big deal. Also, while high on Ice Captain America beats Daredevil so badly that he literally spent six months as an amnesiac in his own book. I don't believe Cap ever apologized for that?)

In any event, as awkward in execution as these kinds of anti-drug "after-school special" stories may have been, "Streets of Poison" at least managed to finish up without seriously compromising Cap's character in any way. He was involuntarily dosed and lost his mind, but he got better and everything wrapped up with a nice anti-drug message (except for poor Daredevil, who received a severe traumatic brain injury which no one else seemed too worried about). "Venom" tries mightily for the level of plausibility of "Streets of Poison." It fails from the very beginning, when Batman willingly begins taking performance enhancing substances.



You can do a lot with Batman, as his over seventy-five years of continued publication should make abundantly clear. But there are a few no-no's about which I think most readers and creators would agree: Batman doesn't kill (except in the movies when he does all the time, sadly), Batman doesn't use firearms, Batman never gives up, and - this one should noy even need to be said - Batman doesn't take drugs.

The story concocts circumstances under which, the logic goes, we are to believe Batman is brought face-to-face with his biological limitations in such a significantly traumatic way as to baffle his better judgment. The story begins with Batman failing to save a little girl from drowning, due to his inability to lift a giant boulder blocking an underground tunnel. This is a bummer, admittedly. He later pulls a muscle lifting weights and gets beat up by some thugs who wouldn't normally have presented much of a problem, but he's having an off day. All of these actions themselves are fine: failure to save an innocent life would certainly spur Batman on to work harder, and it's been shown in the past that a tendency to push himself past human limitations is one of his few weaknesses. But even here - even in Legends of the Dark Knight's continuity-lite "One Year Later+" time frame - I can't believe for so much a single second that any Batman, ever, under any circumstances, would do what Batman does on the page above.

Getting Batman hooked on drugs is just part of a larger plan on the part of the above doctor, Randolph Porter (the father of the aforementioned dead girl) and retired General Timothy Slaycroft to develop a drug that will enable the United States to field an army of, well, super soldiers. If you guessed that Porter is a bad dude just from that page, congratulations, you're smarter than Batman, who should have figured out Porter wasn't playing with a full deck when he didn't really seem upset at the news that his daughter had drowned in the sewers as the result of a kidnapping plot designed to get at his designer drugs. (It's implied he was in on the plot, concocted with the purpose of bringing Batman into their orbit.) General Slaycroft isn't a nice person either, which we know because he eventually sacrifices his son Lil' Timmy Slaycroft Jr. to be a guinea pig for more of Porter's drug testing. (We later find out, incidentally, that Slaycroft killed his wife because she was coddling Timmy, so, you know, evil military guy.)



After being asked by Porter to murder James Gordon in exchange for another dose of pills, Batman finally realizes he's made a big mistake. And here we see Batman's idea of rehab, which involves locking himself in the basement for 31 days. Not 28, not 30, but 31 exactly. At which point Bruce emerges from having spent a month in the cave with six month's beard and hair growth, which is pretty impressive. The story tells us that the time spent detoxing from Venom and recovering physically was six months. Meaning there was a six month period right at the start of Batman's career where he disappeared. No one ever mentions this again, even though technically it should bring the series firmly into the territory of "Year Two" (but please God let us hope we never actually get to Year Two.)



From here, Batman has to track down Porter and Slaycroft after they flee the country, heading to a small Caribbean island named Santa Prisca (previous introduced by O'Neil during his run on The Question). But at this point you're just reading out of a sense of obligation. Even the promise of Batman fighting a shark can only do so much to salvage this mess. But since we're here, let's look at this shark fight, anyway. (Again, it's about as beautiful as a shark fight can possibly be - it's not the artists' fault this story is so awful.)

Upon reaching Santa Prisca, Batman's plane is shot down by an RPG. Alfred - still wearing his butler's tuxedo, because why not - is captured by General Slaycroft soon after. They tie Alfred to stakes far enough off the beach to represent a significant swim, but not before cutting his feet and ankles to attract sharks.









Do you see the problem? Please tell me you see the problem.

Remember earlier when I said there was a hard-and-fast list of things that Batman should never do. What was the first thing on that list. The very first thing, even above taking drugs. You can scan back to look, it's OK, I'll wait.

Batman doesn't kill. Except when it's a couple Hispanic fishermen who tried to hit Alfred with an oar, apparently, in which case it is totally acceptable to feed them to hungry sharks. Even better if you do so while making a "shark repellent" joke, because oh boy there's nothing we like to do more than remind ourselves about how much better and more mature we are than Batman '66.

At this point in the story we've seen Batman become a junky and feed people to sharks. Lovingly rendered, sure, but seriously. The worst part is, it's not even done yet. Batman is captured by the bad guys after being clobbered by Lil' Timmy (who has been turned into a giant monster), and is then locked in a room with the world's worst deathtrap. What makes this deathtrap so terrible, you ask?

Batman is locked in a room with a leaky pipe that will fill the room with water in exactly two days. In order to open the airtight door that will release the water and allow Batman to survive, he has to be able to pull down a chain to open an 800-pound steel door, which he will only be able to physically accomplish unless he takes more Venom. But hey, they left Batman in a locked room for two days, I'm sure he could never think his way out of this problem.



But hey, turns out that even though Batman is smart, he's still not that smart. Do you see the problem with his plan?

It's a simple problem, really. He's making more work for himself than he needs to. He doesn't have to open the door a crack and then rush out before it slams shut again. He's racing against rising waters, so all he needs to do is open the door enough for the water to drain. After that, one of two things will happen: either someone will come into the room to figure out why the hallway is filled with water (at which point he can beat them up and get out that way, because he's Batman), or he'll have enough time to chisel out another block or three to to add to the counterweight. As it is, he ends up almost getting cut in half by the falling door because he's a nimrod. (And boy, it's a good thing that extraordinarily sturdy table wasn't Ikea, hey?)

So then it's just a matter of capturing the bad guys, etc. But there's one more plot point I should mention, just in case you were worried there wasn't another remarkably stupid thing hiding out in this remarkably stupid story. Here we see Porter and Slaycroft (which would be a great name for a 70s soft rock duo) relaxing in their villa, not too worried that Batman is somewhere out in the surrounding jungle.



Do you see what they did there? Think about the time frame for a minute: "Venom" was released in 1991. By that time, according to post-Crisis math, Batman had been in operation since the early 1980s, the period in which this story is set. If you remember our previous discussion of Cloak & Dagger, you should recall that crack cocaine first rose to prominence in the United States in the mid-80s. So even though Denny O'Neil doesn't say it directly, the implication is pretty obvious: in the DC Universe, crack cocaine was the product of the same mad scientist who created the super-steroid Venom.

Good times, good times.

Strangely enough for such a singularly irredeemable story, "Venom" would go on to have significant consequences for the regular-continuity Bat-books. "Venom" was published in mid-1991, and in late 1992 DC introduced a new villain named Bane. Bane was designed as the ultimate "anti-Batman," a formidably smart and strong character who comes to Gotham in 1993 for the express purpose of defeating Batman. This storyline became "Knightfall," the most important Batman story of the decade (please note I didn't say "best," although I do think it holds up pretty well, and Bane remains one of my favorite villains). Bane's origin ties into "Venom" in two ways: one, he's a native of Santa Prisca, and two - at least at the outset of his story - he's addicted to Venom. (Strangely, Bane eventually detoxes from Venom using a method similar to Batman's: after "Knightfall," in Vengeance of Bane II, he's sent to Blackgate Prison, at which point he suffers greatly from Venom withdrawal. He's thrown into solitary confinement for a couple month . . . and uses that time in the hole to reshape his body and mind. He would remain sober for the remainder of pre-Flashpoint continuity.)

Just like Superman needed to kill a guy just to "get it out of his system" at the start of his career, Batman needed to try drugs just to see what would happen. That's the story logic behind "Venom." Also, it's totally cool to throw brown people to sharks if they commit the cardinal sin of trying to hit your butler with an oar. For someone with decades of experience working on Batman stories, Denny O'Neil somehow has very little understanding of how Batman should operate. Even though this is still the young, untested Batman of "Year One" (a premise that is, again, stretched pretty hard by the six month gap here), it is still well nigh inconceivable that any Batman would ever do many the things he is depicted as doing in this story. What the fuck, man.

What the fuck.

Legends of the Dork Knight

"Prey" by Doug Moench, Paul Gulacy, and Terry Austin

If the Batman vs. Superman trailer that leaked last week proves anything conclusively, it's that the positive influence of Frank Miller's late 80s work on Batman ran out of gas a long time ago. The people in charge of the franchise don't know anything else to do, really, but keep aping Miller's work (and Burton's films, which followed naturally from Miller as well as Moore) onscreen as well as in the comics themselves. Accordingly, there's a certain breed of comics fan who gets very upset - pants-wetting territorial, really - about any deviation from these same well worn Batman formulae laid out during the Reagan administration.

This wasn't always the case, and the immediate of success of Legends of the Dark Knight is a testament to that fact. Rather than serving up issue after issue of Miller / Moore pastiche, each early arc takes a completely different approach to the idea of telling a "mature readers" Batman story. "Shaman" was a thematic misfire from a veteran creator still stuck uncomfortably between paradigms. "Gothic" was a success that eschewed the strictly ground-level noir of Miller and Mazzuccheli's Year One in favor of an engagement with the supernatural, a horror story well within the literary genre from which the story took its name. "Prey" is something else entirely.

This isn't Batman as supernatural avenger, the "Dark Knight," or even Miller's shadowy hard-boiled detective hero. This is Batman as a man, a fighter and a scrapper without magic gadgets or Super Saiyan finishing moves. He gets cut, he bleeds, he almost drowns, he ends up stranded in the wrong part of town and has to walk through the sewers to get home. This is also, crucially, Batman as a man with definite psychological trauma, one whose scars are never quite so deeply buried as he would like to think.

"Prey" was also notable for reasons other than its status as a Batman story. Although this isn't the first time either Moench or Gulacy worked on Batman - and isn't even the first time they worked on Batman together - it was nevertheless a big deal to see one of comics' most storied teams working on a lengthy prestige format Batman epic. (Remember "prestige format"?) One telling detail here is that while Miller's influence has loomed larger and larger over each successive generation of creators, Moench and Gulacy (as well as Denny O'Neil and, for obvious reasons, Klaus Janson) were either Miller's peers or elders. While the existence of Legends of the Dark Knight is directly due to Miller's success with the character, his vision of Batman was still only the proverbial first among equals - not, as it would later become, the default. I doubt Moench and Gulacy felt particularly intimidated by Miller's influence, even at that point in his career.

(The question of Grant Morrison's debt to Miller is another topic entirely. It's almost tempting to read Morrison's later Batman work as an attempt to come to terms with Miller's disproportionate shadow by forcing the post-Miller Batman to confront the most scandalous elements of his long history - objectified as the "Black Casebook" stories that many longtime Batman fans believed to be dead and buried. Miller himself spent time in the 00s trying to disown his Batman, by tearing him down in The Dark Knight Strikes Again and All-Star Batman. The attempt failed, in any event.)

But anyway, to cut to the chase, this is an excellent story. Maybe one of the best unsung Batman stories, and certainly the best story yet in Legends of the Dark Knight.



"Prey" observes the letter if not the spirit of the series' "no supervillains" mandate by offering the first post-Crisis appearance of Dr. Hugo Strange. Strange occupies a unique place in Batman's rogues gallery. Although he predates the Joker and Catwoman by a few months, he's never been a mainstay, appearing only sporadically and rarely to any lasting effect. The most memorable thing about him is his name - and even that, for obvious reasons, serves as much of a hinderance as a help to his larger career. He began as a super-villain before the rules governing super-villains were established. He was initially another in a long line of interchangeable mad scientists who bedeviled the first generation of super-heroes. His first gimmick was the invention of a super smoke machine to help his gang rob banks. After a couple follow-up appearances - and different gimmicks, like deadly zombies and fear powder (an idea to which the franchise would return) - he got put in the freezer for thirty years, and has appeared sporadically ever since.

In the last few decades creators have mostly defined Strange as a criminal psychiatrist - that is, a psychiatrist who treats / profiles criminals while also being a criminal himself. "Prey" takes place, like the two stories that precede it, in the post-Year One period wherein Batman's circumstances were not yet solidified. "Prey" picks up on Miller's use of the police as early foils for Batman, setting out to tell the story of how Batman won the trust of he police department and the mayor's office after his early splash as, essentially, a violent vigilante at odds with the city's most powerful citizens. James Gordon is stuck in the middle between Batman and the mayor: after Year One, Gordon knows Batman is on the side of the angels, but sticking up for the vigilante could jeopardize his job.

Enter Hugo Strange. After a debate on a local public affairs program (yeah, you can tell this was 25 years ago), Strange catches the mayor's attention. The mayor hires Strange to advise an anti-Batman task force being put together in the police department and to be led by . . . James Gordon.



Moench wastes no time in showing how twisted Strange is. He's a profoundly ugly man with an even uglier attitude towards women - he keeps a blonde department store mannequin as his confident, and seethes with jealousy over Batman's physical prowess and (imagined) erotic potency. He builds a homemade Batman costume in order to inhabit his enemy's mind. But despite all this, he's not stupid: with just a little bit of help from the police, he manages to deduce Batman's secret identity while at the same time framing him for a series of copycat crimes performed by a member of the anti-Batman task force who has been brainwashed into believing himself to be some kind of anti-Batman.

You can tell that Moench and Gulacy were mainstays of Bronze Age Marvel, because there's a lot of plot going on here. It works, though: there are many moving parts, but everything moves logically from one character to the next over the course of the narrative. Although there's a copious amount of actual fighting, the real battle is the contest of wills between Batman and Strange. (Middle-aged Strange, it goes without saying, represents no physical threat to Batman.) With Strange manipulating both the police and the mayor in order to tear down Batman, Batman has to piece together a counter-plan that depends on trusting Gordon in perhaps the most critical moment of their friendship - although we, the readers, know that Gordon eventually becomes Batman's most trusted ally on the police force, they both have to earn this trust, and Gordon's reluctance to fully embrace the vigilante is understandable. The wild card in this relationship is Catwoman, who also appears - in a follow up on her supporting role in Year One - during the early phase of her career, still at the time an unknown quantity who isn't very happy about being caught in the crossfire of the police force's war on Batman.



Although the ideas explored weren't exactly new, the story gains a lot from the assumption of a slightly older readership. Strange is a Freudian, so his ideas about Batman are both on-the-nose but also, as Miller himself acknowledged, fairly accurate. Baseball bats and swords represent masculine overreaching. Caves are dank and dark wombs. Women symbolize either childhood innocence or adult transgression - with Strange himself representing the kind of misogynistic arrested development that Batman needs to move past in order to grow up. Batman's burgeoning flirtation with Catwoman is an acknowledgment of the existence of adult relationships beyond the shallow Madonna / whore complex that fixates Strange, and which threatens to derail Bruce Wayne as he struggles to overcome the grief over his parents' deaths. While Strange is still stuck play-acting sexual aggression, Batman has to embrace the feminine - literally descending into the (womb-like/chthonic) earth of the Batcave in order to be reborn as a cohesive individual, able to overcome Strange's emotional manipulation.

But, really, you're reading a Batman story by the team behind Master of Kung-Fu, so you want to see the fights. Which are uniformly excellent. Gulacy is one of the best fight choreographers in the medium, and every battle throughout the story has a convincing verisimilitude. Instead of random figures colliding over monocolored backgrounds, Gulacy give us real bodies existing in concrete relation to other bodies. If you see a blow in one panel you see the counter blow in the next panel, with scrupulous attention paid to staging throughout the fight. Gulacy's Batman is a superb acrobat but no Superman: he takes as good as he gives, and there's a sense of real peril throughout. Years spent translating the filmic language of martial arts into the language of comics pays rich dividends.

Moench and Gulacy's Batman is one of the best: human and fallible, nowhere near the supremely competent Bat-God that he would become as the 90s wore on and Miller's characterization of Batman in The Dark Knight Returns became the standard approach. You believe that this Batman can be hurt, and that means everything in the context of a franchise where the hero's infallibility is usually accepted as his only weakness.

Legends of the Dork Knight

"Gothic" by Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson

If "Shaman" was an ambitious misfire, "Gothic" is the story where Legends of the Dark Knight finally came into its own and fully embraced its remit. It's important to remember that, back in 1989, there really wasn't much in the way of a track record for Batman stories like this. The three models for "mature readers" (I'm putting that phrase in necessary scare-quotes) Batman stories that LotDK was initially pulling from were 1988's The Killing Joke, 1987's "Year One," and 1986's The Dark Knight Returns. The same year that LotDK premiered also saw the release of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's Arkham Asylum graphic novel. The idea of a Batman story designed to be read by an audience that didn't include young children was still new. We take it for granted now that many - if not, unfortunately, most - Batman stories currently published just aren't appropriate for kids. But back then the idea was, pardon the pun, novel, and it was this revelation that served as the inspiration for hundreds of subsequent "Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore" headlines. It was a strange idea for many, many people to wrap their heads around.

Even though "Shaman" lacked the Comics Code seal, there was nothing in the story that would have proved problematic for the Authority. Denny O'Neil was an old hand, and even though the story was concerned with "heavy" themes such as myth, cultural theft, and ritual murder, it was still essentially a Batman story of the kind that could have been told at any point in the previous twenty years, just told with a darker color palette. Not so "Gothic." This was a story that couldn't have been told with pre-1986 Batman. The violence, the intensity, the presence of explicit violence and (not so explicit but still upsetting) sex was new. It didn't go as far as Arkham Asylum, but it also wasn't anywhere near as abstruse. Although many of Morrison's early habits were well in place, the story was more brutal and direct than its more highbrow cousin. This was a murder mystery that touched on child murder, sexual abuse, satanism, and rape in the course of its unraveling.



Morrison has written many Batman stories in his career, and much of his later work is prefigured in "Gothic." For one, Morrison wasn't afraid to cross the line separating Batman's mundane crime-ridden Gotham from the kind of supernatural horror elements exemplified by the story's villain, Mr. Whisper. The idea that Gotham is somehow a genuinely haunted, specially cursed placed was one that would become more and more central to the mythos. Now it's often a given that Gotham city, rather than merely an exaggerated vision of 1970s urban hell New York, contains some kind of Mephistophelian affinity to the literal hell. (For modern examples, see Snyder and Capullo's Batman, as well as Batman Eternal.) Morrison also introduces the idea that Thomas Wayne was a deeper and more significant figure in Gotham history than previous writers had intimated. And finally, even though "Gothic" is close to being a straight horror story, Morrison also has fun mixing and matching a few motifs from previous Batman eras: in the midst of a heavy supernatural mystery, he finds time to strap our hero into a Rube Goldberg deathtrap straight out of the 1960s TV show. The idea that all of Batman's diverse and thematically inconsistent histories coexisted as parts of the character's development was one that Morrison would return to later.



The story begins with the a series of murders of Gotham's most powerful criminals. In desperation these criminals turn for protection to Batman, who scoffs at their attempts at negotiation before setting out to hunt the killer himself. (Oh, yeah, I guess these are spoilers for a 25-year-old Batman story?) Morrison performs an extremely clever maneuver here: in the early pages he leads the reader to believe the story will focus on the crime lords being hunted and killed by some mysterious force. But it turns out that the crime lords' purpose in the story is mainly to give Batman (and the audience) a red herring. The actual plot has little to do with the mob bosses. Mr. Whisper is killing them, but more out of boredom while sitting around Gotham waiting for his real plan to kick in.

The "real" plan actually involves a 300-year old serial killer who made a deal with the devil, and his plan to murder every man, woman, and child in Gotham as a means of escaping this obligation. There are allusions peppered throughout, from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus to de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, the latter of which he would return to in the second arc of The Invisibles. Meanwhile, the catalyst for Mr. Whisper's crusade of vengeance against Gotham's underworld is revealed to be, basically, the plot of Fritz Lang's M. Morrison here is still operating very much in the mode of fellow "British Invasion" writers Moore and Gaiman - processing literary and artistic influences in a very literal-minded way, plucking plots and themes directly from older works to create a thick metatextual stew. Morrison would, of course, largely outgrow this tendency over the course of the next decade, with the aforementioned Invisibles acting as his own version of The Sandman, a means for a young creator of digesting and reflecting a large mass of influences through the lens of familiar genre fiction signifiers. Like Moore and Gaiman, Morrison would become a far more subtle writer with age, but his earlier work retains a pleasing density sometimes missing from his later, more streamlined efforts.



If anything could be said to account for the story's relatively low profile compared both to other early attempts at "mature readers" Batman stories and in the context of Morrison's well-plumbed oeuvre, it may be Klaus Janson's art. Janson is, it must be said, an acquired taste, a master of mood and setting (he can draw castles and gothic cathedrals for days), whose figurework often suffers from a merely expressionistic relationship to reality. I happen to like Janson's art, the occasional strange potato-head notwithstanding. Something Janson gets which many more superficially polished artists do not is how to make a fight seem painful and punishing without also appearing pretty: the brawl between Batman and Mr. Whisper that takes up much of the story's last issue is brutal, with broken bones and bloody knuckles, and Batman facing down an opponent who may be nowhere his match in terms of martial skill, but simply can't be stopped, not even by a speeding subway train. It's exhausting to read, and Janson's Batman - far from the invincible paragon he is often portrayed as - feels the rattle of every blow.

"Gothic" isn't a perfect story, despite its many virtues. Some of its defects are still present in Morrison's work down to this day: for instance, pacing can seem a jumble. Each episodic set-piece is exquisitely measured by Janson, but the episodes themselves can seem abrupt. The series' mandate of tying each adventure so closely to the "Year One" era results in a questionable continuity implant that sees Thomas Wayne on the verge of solving a series of brutal child murders on the very day he's shot and killed (while also raising the question of whether or not the Waynes' murder was as random as believed, which carries regrettable implications for the character's origin). The same over-enthusiasm that made Arkham Asylum interesting and frustrating in equal measure can be discerned here, even if Janson's art provides a much firmer grounding for the writer's earnest digressions. Arkham Asylum is ultimately redeemed not despite but because of its excesses - it's a ludicrously overstuffed, ungodly pretentious monstrosity that works because of its deep commitment to every overwrought and underbaked bit of juvenile psychodrama. There isn't nearly as much at stake with "Gothic", and Morrison is far more restrained. Despite the surprisingly cosmic scope, at its root it's still a murder mystery with a bit of supernatural horror thrown in for good measure. If the story seems to overreach at times, its portrait of Batman is perfectly balanced, a human, fallible hero who nonetheless manages to triumph in the face of unearthly evil due to his demoniacal singularity of purpose.

Legends of the Dork Knight

"Shaman" by Dennis O'Neil, Ed Hannigan, and John Beatty

For all the conventional wisdom that superhero movies don't sell comic books (an iffy proposition, if not altogether incorrect), the perpetual exception that proves this dubious rule for armchair market watchers remains Batman and Batman, ca. 1989. Batman the movie ended up selling a lot of comics, and also a lot of everything else. As strange as it may seem now in the year 2015, there were only two regular Batman titles on the stands at this time: Batman and Detective Comics, both continuing their numbering from the Golden Age. So the premiere of a new ongoing solo Batman book was actually an event worth noting, even if the release had been catalyzed by a juggernaut motion picture.

Legends of the Dark Knight was, at the time, an altogether different kind of monthly comic. Instead of launching with a stable creative team, the book was conceived from the get-go as an anthology, with rotating creators switching arcs. Additionally, the book was not set in the present of the DCU, but in the past - specifically, the "Year One" period popularized by Frank Miller in his work (with David Mazzucchelli) of the same name, which had also served as one of the stylistic influences for Tim Burton's movie. So while LotDK was designed to fit into the then-modern post-Crisis continuity, filling in the gaps of Batman's early years, it was still, like "Year One," at a distance from contemporary goings-on. What this meant in practice - although this mandate loosened as time wore on and the "Year One" period became increasingly crowded - was: no yellow Bat-symbol, no other superheroes, and especially no Robin. Oh yeah, the Comics Code was conspicuously missing as well - although, at least for this first arc, the lack was often academic.



The series' first story had all the ingredients of a hit: longtime Batman writer / editor Denny O'Neil paired with experienced draftsman Ed Hannigan for a paired-down, atmospheric mystery starring a young and still inexperienced Dark Knight, in a brand-new mature(er)-readers Batman book. Unfortunately, the end result ended up being, well, not so auspicious.

The story begins in Alaska, just south of the Arctic circle. Young Bruce Wayne is still in his training period, this time following a famous bounty hunter as he tracks a desperate criminal across a windswept snowy mountain pass. (You have to wonder, just how many experts did Bruce shadow in his apprentice years? Did he train under a master sommelier somewhere? The world's greatest cabinet maker?) Anyway, things go awry and everyone dies except for Bruce, who is also about to die before he just happens to be saved by an Inuit medicine man and his comely daughter, who nurse him back to life with the aid of a magical story about bats. After he gets better, Bruce returns to Gotham and decides he's ready to begin his crimefighting career.



Parts of the story take place literally between panels of Miller's "Year One," and not surprisingly "Shaman" manages to step on the toes of that other, far superior story. For instance, the bat story / legend Bruce hears while recovering in Alaska precedes the fateful moment where the bat flies into his study. Think about that for a second: instead of the iconic image of the bat crashing through the window and Bruce deciding just then to become Batman, in O'Neil's version the bat flies through the window and Bruce thinks, "oh, a bat, that reminds me of the bat story my Alaskan friends told me. I think maybe I should follow that inclination and dress up in a bat mask, just like the helpful shaman, and this other bat here which was more incidental than anything else."



There's some other stuff here to pad out the five issue arc. A death cult based on a syncretic combination of Alaskan and Santa Priscan myth pops up in Gotham to take advantage of the fact that Gotham gang members really are stupid enough to believe ritually killing people will grant them mystic protection. It turns out that Bruce Wayne really did those Inuits a solid by telling everybody about how awesome they were because within a year the outside world had descended on the small community, built an airport and tourist industry from scratch, and plunged the previously-seen natives into poverty and drunken dissolution - all within a year if you follow the story's time frame. Bruce feels guilty about this but doesn't really dwell on it. Would you believe the killer turns out to be the guy from the beginning of the story who you thought died by falling off a mountain, but it turns out survived and just so happened to figure out Bruce Wayne was Batman? And of course, when Bruce tries to return the stolen bat-mask to its original owners, they let him have it because he's now . . . The REAL Bat-Shaman.

I could go on but there's no point. O'Neil was obviously stretching here, but the best intentions in the world do little to elevate the story beyond regrettable. If this story had come out thirty years earlier, the cover caption would have invited readers to wonder "What Is The Mystery Behind Batman's First Mask?" That's essentially what this is: another pseudo-origin story superimposed over another, better origin story, adding in details that don't make a lot of sense for no reason other than it seems to be the series mandate.