Batman vs. Doctor Who



Batman is always prepared for every eventually, and if given sufficient prep time, can defeat any opponent.The Doctor never plans anything, but is perhaps the greatest tactical improviser in the universe. (Doctor #7 is the exception to this rule, and he's probably the most dangerous and calculating Doctor as a result.) Advantage: The Doctor. There is simply no plan in the history of the universe that the Doctor couldn't figure out some way to foil, even if Batman had his whole lifetime to prepare. The Master has had many lifetimes.

Batman's opposite number is the Joker, the clown prince of crime, the human incarnation of chaos and meaningless cruelty. He possesses limitless ingenuity and cunning, and is personally responsible for thousands of deaths.The Doctor's opposite number is, like him, a nameless member of the ancient Gallifreyan race, with many lifetime's worth of advanced science and learning at his disposal. Unlike the Doctor, however, The Master has dedicated his many lifetimes to the pursuit of bending the entire universe to his diabolical will - or, barring conquest, he will be perfectly content merely to destroy all of creation.Advantage: The Doctor. The Joker's best moments were killing Batman's sidekick and paralyzing one of his most trusted allies. The Master's best moments were laying waste to the entire planet Earth with flying vivisection robots from the end of time; and, oh yeah, let's not forget he annihilated a significant portion of the universe in Logopolis.

Batman is a master of every martial art on the planet Earth. The Doctor only knows Venusian Aikido, and he probably forgot how to do that half-a-dozen regenerations ago. However, if pushed into a corner and forced to fight, he can learn any physical skill in as much time as it takes him to observe his opponent's most rudimentary moves. Advantage: The Doctor. Sure, there's no question that Batman knows more about fighting, but Batman would have to incapacitate the Doctor almost instantly for this to mean anything. Otherwise - as during the climactic swordfight in The Androids of Tara - the Doctor would be able to adapt to and counter Batman's best moves in less time than it would take Batman to size up his strange opponent.

Batman is the world's greatest detective, and additionally no slouch as a mechanic, inventor or computer expert.The Doctor is perhaps the most brilliant scientific mind in the universe. Advantage: The Doctor. He would also probably know better than to build a killer satellite using Brainiac technology that would eventually go rogue and try to conquer the planet.

Batman surrounds himself with an army of sidekicks and allies, overcoming his all-too human limitations through the power of teamwork and the support of his ad hoc extended family. The Doctor travels with companions as a way of alleviating the loneliness of constant travel and isolation, befriending creatures from across the universe as a means of distracting himself from the burdens and responsibilities of practical immortality. Advantage: The Doctor. Even the Doctor's lamest companion, Adric, still died trying to save the Earth; Batman's lamest sidekick died getting hit on the head with a crowbar a bunch of times by the Joker. And there's no doubt, Leela, K-9, Ace and Donna Noble are way cooler than Dick Grayson and Tim Drake.

Batman drives around in a state-of-the-art automobile. The Doctor travels across the universe in the universe's last functioning TARDIS, even if the navigation console and chameleon circuit never quite work like they should. Advantage: The Doctor. Come on.

Batman's alter ego is billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne. The Doctor doesn't need an alter ego, he just switches faces ever 50 or 75 years to keep things interesting (his brain gets a bit fried in the process, but that's OK, he didn't need to remember Peri anyway). Advantage: The Doctor. The Doctor has the additional advantage that every time an actor who played the Doctor appears in another movie or television role, the viewer can pretend it's secretly the Doctor in mufti as part of some elaborate ruse occurring off-camera. For example, All Creatures Great and Small is even more fun if you pretend that Tristan Farnon is really the Doctor, slumming in Darrowby as a means of foiling the Daleks' latest invasion. The closest you get with Batman is pretending that Batman is really Patrick Bateman during The Dark Knight.

Batman has an ongoing, on-again / off-again sexual relationship with Catwoman; as well as intermittent romances with the likes of Zatanna, Wonder Woman and Vicki Vale; as well as, in his guise of Bruce Wayne, a host of nameless starlets and debutantes. The Doctor . . . well, um, he's got River Moon, sort-of, perhaps, in the future. And if you read between the lines, maybe Romana. We know he had sex at least once in order to procreate, but probably not with a human woman. Advantage: Well, OK, this one goes to Batman.

But still, there can be no doubt, the winner is . . .







"I'm afraid, my dear boy, I simply have no time to be spent
gallivanting around with men dressed in rodent costumes."

Prepare to Waste Some Time on the Internet

Courtesy of my bestest pal Matte, here's something awesome. Keep refreshing and the fun never ends.

What We Talk About When
We Talk About Kingdom Come



(This is, hopefully, the final part of my Kingdom Come review; parts 1, 2 and 3 can be found by making with the clicky.)

Kingdom Come is first and foremost, above any other considerations, a powerful work of nostalgia. Not merely on the extrinsic level - that of the creators' avowed cultural revanchism - but on the intrinsic level of the text. The book begins in the future, and proceeds, by means of judicious flashbacks, to relate a narrative of contemporary instability. The moment of crisis is, in the story's own context, the reader's present. Everything preceding the present moment is idealized, and everything proceeding from the present is anathematized: Magog comes onto the scene as the harbinger of a "brave new world" of amoral, intransigent vigilantes and everything goes to hell in a handbasket. Superman's moral absolutism can't handle the types of stories he's being written into, so he takes his marbles and goes home.

In reality, Magog was Cable, the true "founding father" of the Image generation. Cable was Rob Liefeld's first and most exemplary creation, a creature whose instant, enormous popularity was probably helped by the fact that he was an almost total cipher. It took dozens of creators half-a-decade following Liefeld's departure from Marvel to cobble together a workable backstory for the character. (A backstory, it must be noted, constructed partially from the fan-made theories that sprouted up like weeds in the mystery man's wake, since - like Wolverine - he was not created with any identifiable origin in mind.) But none of that matters, and ultimately all the baggage about the Summers family and Apocalypse and Madelyne Pryor and the Askani (shudder) is only so much rationalization. Cable is a bad dude with a gun who dresses like the seventh Village Person, the gay army commando.

It's hard to talk about Kingdom Come without succumbing to the temptation to periodize. But the question remains, to which telos does the book belong? Is it climax and dénouement for the late-80s and early-90s crash-and-burn dialectic, or ground zero for the late-90s early-00s school of neoclassicist superheroics? Can it be both?

Neoclassicism is the most conservative cultural mode. But it is not, is never, a completely digital recreation of the past. The 19th Century pre-Raphaelites created an imaginary Medievalism that owed as much to Walter Scott and the faux-revolutionary conservatism of Disraeli's "Young England" as any actual desire to reengage with a "lost" lineage of the Italian Renaissance*. Similarly, Waid and Ross' neoclassicism is far less about the actual comics of their youth and more about their relationship to the comics they grew up reading, and an idealized conception thereof, used as a bludgeon against the sins of the present.

This is evident from any honest reading of Kingdom Come, separated from its place in mid-90s historicism and set aside its mythic forebears. It's an incredibly cynical book that places the audience's awareness of and affection for its characters, predicated on a lifetime's familiarity with their adventures and tropes, front and center above any other narratological concerns. The text and subtext are, unnervingly, one and the same: superheroes became corrupted in the 1990s, and the "true" heroes became irrelevant as a result. Kingdom Come is the story of the heroes' return from obsolescence, championing the values of moral fortitude and absolute virtue.

Kingdom Come fails in its primary objective, if you understand its primary objective to be any kind of rapprochement with post-Watchmen, post-Image superheroics. It can't answer the questions we've been hacking out these last few days: how do you continue to produce stories featuring morally upright icons in an age of escalating stakes and increasing violence? How do you properly recontain or metabolize the destructive genie of vigilante id represented by characters like Cable? And - perhaps most importantly, considering Kingdom Come is itself one of the most toxic examples of a still-contemporary trend - how do you write interesting superhero stories in an age where the genre has become mired in relentless self-referentially and overwhelming metatextual density? The answer to all these questions, according to Kingdom Come, is that you don't: instead of gaining any insight from the intractable aporia of a collapsing comics industry, Waid and Ross opt for millennialism and false utopia, a clean slate predicated on a scorched earth. It doesn't work that way. You can't just burn everything down and start fresh. The Fourth World is built out of the ashes and the archetypes of the Third. Using nostalgia as a weapon against Bloodstrike only works for so long, before someone comes along with nostalgia for Bloodstrike.

I wouldn't want to lay the blame for Kingdom Come at Alan Moore's feet, but in many respects it is merely another symptom of the general inability of the industry to properly metabolize Watchmen and its ilk. Perhaps an argument can be made that by laying bare the tropes, formulae and ideological mannerisms of superhero comics with such methodical rigor, Moore made it simply impossible for any subsequent writer to approach those same conventions in an unselfconscious manner.

Every good superhero comic, after Watchmen, had to be about superhero comics. Everything was "deconstructed", up to and including the most plebian examples from the contemporary scene. Kurt Busiek's Avengers was about creating the Platonic ideal of an Avengers comic, a reaction to the disrepair into which many of the company's flagship franchises had fallen by the late 90s. Brian Michael Bendis' New Avengers is a comic that is very explicitely intended to mark a clean break with the "old school" Avengers style - it's a superhero team book with the mannerisms and dialogue tics of an HBO crime drama. Bendis' Mighty Avengers was an attempt by him to write an "old school" Avengers book while simultaneously maintaining many of the faux-naturalistic narrative techniques he'd previously utilized for New; Dan Slott's Mighty Avengers is a neoclassical reaction to Bendis' New, an extremely mannered and deliberate return to the franchise's most elemental form. To a degree this self-referentially becomes self-parody, and nowhere is this more obvious than the readers themselves, who (like myself) see trends and metatext hiding behind every bullrush, long past the point of absurdity. But this is the market and this is the creative climate we've built for ourselves.

The most lasting legacy Kingdom Come has had, I believe, has been the solidification of a certain school of superhero storytelling that could be called "momentism". Waid and Ross did not invent "momentism" - again, we can look back to Alan Moore for inspiration.

Moore only really wrote two Superman stories (excepting a Swamp Thing team-up for DC Presents) - "For the Man Who Has Everything", and "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" Considering they make up a scanty hundred pages between them, it's remarkable just how influential they have been - or, hell, let's just say - how blatantly these two stories have been mindlessly copied, practically verbatim, time and time again through to the present day.

Moore's approach to these Superman stories is, in its own way, as remarkable as his approach to Watchmen: instead of deconstructing the entire genre, he deconstructed a single character. He reverse-engineered Superman in such a way that he was able to deduce the most optimum possible vehicle for telling the best Superman story - what story can hit the best Superman "beats"? How do you build a superhero comic around an iconic character like Superman? Easy: you figure out the most quintessential things Superman does and build a story around them. "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" is, by design, a laundry list of Superman's greatest hits, and Moore hits every emotional beat with the precision of a Pentium. In "For the Man Who Has Everything" the approach is effectively the same. How many times have we seen a recreation of that initial confrontation with Mongol, that moment of absolute panic on the readers' part where, for the first time in maybe ever, we see Superman flex his muscles with seismic authority and go after the villain with all the power at his disposal? All I have to do is say one word: "Burn". You know the panel. Of course, that one panel has been redrawn and rewritten a thousand times over the years, if not more. Hell, Kingdom Come is itself built around such a moment, only substitute Captain Marvel for Mongol.

But the problem is that what seemed so incredibly potent in Moore's hands has become simply blasé. Whereas Moore's canny manipulation of tropes was novel, Jeph Loeb and Mark Millar doing that same thing is simply crass. What else is Hush? What else is Millar's Spider-Man? Or Ultimates? Or the entirety of the Ultimate line? Or Final Crisis? This is "momentism" - a style of writing predicted on the singular iconic "moment" as the indissoluble element of superhero writing. Kingdom Come is packed to the rafters with "moments", and the creators' understanding of the characters is good enough that many of the moments are good - a few of the Superman moments are very good.

But how do you build a story around isolated moments? What about all the stuff that has to go between the moments? You could be like Millar and just not bother to write anything between these moments. "Old Man Logan" is simply a marvel (no pun intended) of storytelling economy. All significant exposition, all character development, all the world-building in the strange alternate future of the story, is delivered in "moments": everything that isn't a giant Venom-infected T-Rex or Hank Pym's giant skeleton is just padding to keep the book from being a pin-up gallery. And it's even worse if you consider that the story is itself building, with a maniacal ruthlessness, to the biggest "moment" of them all, the moment where Wolverine finally overcomes his decades of pacifism, pops his claws and kills all the bad guys - I predict it will happen exactly on the final page of the story's penultimate issue. It's not even a guess; it's practically scientific observation.

Sometimes the most effective tool of the momentist writer can be delayed gratification - but momentism only works as long as the outcome is never in any real doubt. The most obvious and predictable thing has to eventually occur, or there's simply no story. It is best, paradoxically, if the most predictable thing happens in the least predictable manner possible - the greater the obstacle to normative resolution, the greater the audience's satisfaction when that resolution finally occurs. This is true, it could be said, for all narrative art, but momentism depends on the audience's intimate familiarity with character and genre tropes. It is a style of writing that could only develop in a closed-system hothouse like mainstream superhero comics. It all depends on familiarity, and the process of creating a story where characters can act in their most familiar, most essential ways, giving readers the unalloyed pleasure of seeing icons with whom they are intimately familiar acting exactly like themselves.

That is the legacy of Kingdom Come: the cosy pleasures of the familiar codified as the aesthetic apogee. Predictability has always been the underlying ethos behind superhero comics, but now it was overt scripture. The new overriding narrative became atavism, the conscious desire to return to the past, a desire that overwhelms any superhero comic that stops to linger on its own metatext. Superhero comics have become superhero comics about superhero comics, which are themselves stories about superhero comics in a fallen world. We are forever trying to return to the purity Hesiod's Golden Age, and we - like Socrates in The Republic - can't understand that heterogeneity is not merely a sign of weakness and inevitable torsion but an inevitability as well.

---

NEXT: I think I have managed to say just about everything there is to say about such a deeply, deeply flawed, but nevertheless interesting and indisputably important book as Kingdom Come. But, hey, in for a penny in for a pound, so next time I think I'll say a few words about Kingdom Come's redheaded stepchild, the incredibly weird Earth-X.

I've Run Out of Cute Titles



Kingdom Come was a sharp criticism of the absurd trends of early-mid 90s mainstream comics. In fairness, these trends were already on the wane by the time Kingdom Come saw print. Certainly, the huge lead time required for Ross to produce the book contributed to this - the book was in production for over a year, from my recollection. But by 1996 the comics industry itself was already something of a "smoking crater". Pointing partial blame for what had become self-evident - the "Extreme" self-parody of the early Image books and those who responded in kind by producing progressively worse comics - may have seemed, at such a late date, slightly moot.

Regardless, the story was conceived and designed to answer a specific kind of problem that had come to infect superhero comics, not merely since the dawn of the Image style, but dating back earlier, to the 1980s. At the story's heart lies a single point of divergence, the point at which the universe of Kingdom Come separates from that of the regular DC Universe. The story may as well have been called, What If . . . the Joker Killed Lois Lane?

The problem is simple: in the service of the ever-escalating stakes of contemporary superhero comics, villains had stepped beyond merely general arch-fiends, thieves and world-conquerors - they became terrorists and mass-murderers. If you accept that characters such as Superman, Batman and Spider-Man necessarily possess indomitable moral codes, and that they never, ever under any circumstances should be allowed to kill, putting them into regular conflict with villains who do kill becomes incredibly problematic. As soon as you start giving the villains inflated body counts, the idea of costumed vigilantes playing by Hoyle's Rules becomes increasingly difficult to sell. I would go so far as to argue that telling these kinds of stories repeatedly actually causes permanent harm to the characters themselves.

Back in the early 90s, Marvel created a villain named Carnage. Carnage, for those of you who may have forgotten, was essentially a really evil clone of Venom, created for seemingly no reason besides the fact that they needed a character so horrifying that Venom would look positively heroic in comparison. There was a Venom solo series to sell, after all - a lot more money to be made by spinning-off one of their most popular properties as a plausible protagonist than merely another Spider-Enemy. Carnage was himself insanely popular. I remember seeing Amazing Spider-Man #361 bagged and sold for $5.00 and $7.50 right out of the box - as in, the retailers took the book out of their Diamond (or Capital City!) shipping boxes, popped it directly into a Mylar snug and sold it for 750% markup. The 90s was a crazy time.



Anyway, the problem with Carnage as that there is literally nothing you can do with this character that doesn't create storytelling problems, besides putting him in jail and sending him to the electric chair. Seriously: he's a serial mass murderer. The Maximum Carnage storyline saw the character racking up a massive bodycount by tearing a swath through New York City, killing and maiming hundreds - thousands? - of people. This is Miracleman territory, not Spider-Man.

One of the most pressing questions bothering fandom in the 1990s was the open question of whether or not Spider-Man should kill Carnage. This occupied quite a bit of space in the Wizard letter column, from my recollection, and it may even have spun out into the letters pages for the books themselves. One side would say, Spider-Man doesn't kill, he never has killed and he never should kill; the other side would answer - albeit perhaps not as eloquently - that Spider-Man had to kill Carnage, there simply was no logical alternative given the story's brutality. The problem is that both sides are correct, but the correct answer is not {A} or {B} but {C}: Spider-Man should not be placed in a position where he has to kill, and writing such a story in the first place represents a serious misunderstanding of the character's milieu.

Every character is different. Wolverine kills. The whole point of his storyline over the first 150-odd issues of Claremont's run on the title was that he started as an irresponsible thug and gradually matured, until when Uncanny was creeping around the 220s and 230s he was a responsible leader and moral compass (this character arc has been eradicated in ensuing years, because the dangerous thug is more saleable a character than the seasoned warrior, apparently). The Punisher obviously kills - but that's who he is. Whenever he crosses over with Spider-Man or Daredevil, he's essentially a villain. Even Captain America kills when he has to: he's a soldier, and has no compunction about doing so when absolutely necessary. (He did, however, draw the line at executing the Kree Supreme Intelligence in cold blood at the conclusion of Operation: Galactic Storm, which remains one of the character's best moments in my own personal pantheon of "Best Cap Moments".)

But there are some characters who don't kill, and putting them into situations where any reasonable person would have to kill seriously weakens their credibility as characters. Does it add anything to Batman's character that he treats the Joker with kid gloves when his on-page body count is in the thousands? No, it just makes him silly. "You killed thousands of people and tried to start World War III by killing the president, but I'm going to make sure you get due process even though I've personally seen you escape from Arkham Asylum three times this month alone." Don't even get me started on Mr. Zsasz.

I have to stress that I don't believe in capital punishment, but I'm not a pacifist and I do believe in self-defense. I believe that if I have the ability to stop one man from killing three men, it is my moral obligation to do so - and I think anyone, if pressed in that same situation, would do so as well. But Batman - he isn't law-enforcement, he isn't beholden to anyone but his own conscience, and his conscience is pretty damn selfish and squeamish. As long as there isn't any blood on his hands, he doesn't care that he's essentially enabling these characters - who, according to years of history, will do everything they can to kill as many people as they can for no good reason - to kill again. At best it seems disingenuous, at worse, it soils the characters completely. There's a reason why the Joker dies at the end of the Batman movies - filmmakers know that without any need to keep the character alive for future serial publication, there is no feasible way he should still be be alive in the last reel after killing thousands of people.

The problem isn't a problem with Batman, it's a problem with the Batman writers. The problem with Maximum Carnage wasn't that Spider-Man pussied out, but that he should never have been put in that position to begin with - or, if you must write that story, have the courage of your convictions, a la Byrne's Superman, and tell the story of exactly why Superman shouldn't kill. The result was that because the "old guard" of heroes looked like wimps, the "new breed" of heroes took after Wolverine and the Punisher, only without any of the wit, imagination or appeal. The popularity of the new-breed super-soldiers may have temporarily eclipsed the old-breed super-heroes, but there really wasn't a lot to most of these characters. They were just thugs who killed other thugs, for whatever reason no one knows - if you read Bloodstrike, feel free to explain why anyone in that book did anything.

So: the Joker kills Lois Lane, and Superman stops the Joker, and the Joker enters police custody. Magog shoots the Joker, and Superman gets pissed because - well, why, exactly? All his best friends and his wife were just murdered, and he had the good breeding necessary to bring the fiend to justice without harming him. Now, I suspect we're supposed to dislike Magog - based simply on the fact that he's one of the book's villains. But, you know, if you insist on having characters like mass-murderer Joker, the only rational option is to have characters like Magog. This is the initial misstep that eventually created the massive imbalance of the post-Image landscape. Write a Spider-Man story where he doesn't have to choose between his own moral righteousness and saving people's lives: people did it for 30 years, why did they suddenly lose the ability when the clock turned 1990? No, in order to counter Carnage you have to bend the rules of Spider-Man's fictional milieu so egregiously that it threatens to burst in two.

In this light, the problem is that these cutthroat vigilante characters like Magog make an intrinsic degree of sense: it's easy to criticize Bloodstrike, but harder to get to the bottom of why exactly these characters have become so prevalent in comics. It's easy to put them all in one place and blow them up with an atom-bomb, harder to come to grips with the fact that Magog is himself an archtype, and not so readily dismissed. Especially if you have the Joker killing lots of people. If the Joker were real, would you sleep better knowing Batman was going to track him down and put him back into the revolving-door justice system, or that someone like Magog was going to blow him to smithereens before he could kill your children?

I wish I remembered where I read this - probably in one of the many thousands of interview features Ross did around the time of Kingdom Come - but something he said at the time has stuck with me even after I've forgotten everything he said about, I don't know, bribing the UPS man to dress like Batman. Magog was designed to be the most over-the-top, unbelievably absurd cliche-ridden apogee of 90s "cool" conceivable: robot arm, huge impractical shoulder pads, bionic eye, meaningless pouches and huge kneepads. But as the series wore on Ross eventually grew to like Magog's design, and came to like the look despite himself. That's always struck me as pretty telling. Perhaps I enjoy Kingdom Come for reasons which are slightly at-odds with the creators' own repeatedly stated aims, but even the arch-neo-classicist Ross himself admits there is something seductive there . . .

Because Caleb Demanded It