[Greg yells at a cloud a bit in this column, which was published on 20 June 2015 and which you can find here and which has only corrupted scans but good comments from Jeff Nettleton, Edo, Travis, T. (crotchety as ever!), Rob Schmidt, and Luis Dantas, among others, including a fairly insulting one from some dude. And Greg is totally wrong at the end of this: Fate was AWESOME. Enjoy!]
Why do so many people think Batman should become a franchise?
I don’t mean in the real world. I understand why DC Comics has always published a bunch of Batman comics. No, I mean in Gotham City.
In Batman’s fictional world, there are just an awful lot of people putting on Bat-outfits of one kind or another. We’ve had “replacement Batman” stories for as long as we’ve had Batman comics. I remember “Batman For a Night” being one of my favorites back when I was a kid.
Those I understand. Once in a while it’s fun to change it up and show why the hero is unique.
It’s a new way to shine a light on Bruce Wayne and the character of Batman …
… but those stories are always about why the Batman identity is uniquely suited for Bruce Wayne. The moral is always some variation on why no one else can do it. Whether it was Jan Paxton or Tommy Carma or Jean-Paul Valley, the crushing burden of trying to be Batman almost always destroyed the substitute, and invariably the stories underlined why it had to be Bruce Wayne under the Bat-cowl.
But that’s changed. These days, apparently anybody who’s in pretty good shape and knows a little kung fu is allowed to hit those mean streets in a Bat cape. It used to be that Batman had to actually train you …
But even THAT arena’s getting a bit crowded.
I’m not even counting the Robins …
… or the Batgirls and Batwomen.
And now apparently it’s Commissioner Gordon in some sort of Bat-mecha outfit. Seriously, DC?
Gordon seems to have pretty much the same opinion of this development as I do.
Pretty soon it’s going to be the case that everybody in Gotham City gets to be Batman for fifteen minutes. Hell, DC even sort of tried out that idea in an Elseworlds a few years ago.
Then there was Battle of the Cowl, which WASN’T an Elseworlds but did seem to have that same idea that lots of people might have what it takes to be Batman.
Look. Some of these substitute-Batman stories are good and some of them are awful but the problem with all of them is the same — they come with an expiration date. We know Bruce Wayne will return. We know this. Each time DC does a “there’s a new Batman in town, everything’s different” storyline, it looks more desperate and fans take it less seriously, especially those stories that use the apparent death of Bruce Wayne as a jumping-off point. The reader response to that is NOT “oh my God, how can there be a world without Batman? Who will save Gotham City now?” It’s, “Been there done that, there’s no way you are serious about this, it’s comics, he’ll be back.” The more DC flails around swearing no they really mean it this time, the more readers become convinced it’s another dumb stunt.
I confess I’m one of those readers. Dumb stunts are what chased me off most superhero books in the first place. It seems to me that with the new James Gordon/Bat-Mech concept, it’s reached peak absurdity, the same way it did a few years ago in the Hulk book when it became apparent that everyone Bruce Banner hung out with would become some sort of Hulk, including the Hulk’s military nemesis General Ross.
This is even more tone-deaf than the General Ross Hulk, if you ask me. The whole reason Commissioner Gordon exists as a character is to NOT be Batman. He can’t do what Batman does, and more, he wouldn’t do what Batman does. He’s the symbol of law and order in Gotham City.
You put Gordon in a Batsuit of any kind and he stops being about law and order. More than that, he stops being the guy Batman admires and needs.
Everyone looks up to Batman … but Jim Gordon, the cop’s cop, is the guy Batman himself looks up to. Because Gordon stayed a cop and still fights the good fight.
Apart from all the thematic reasons why it’s a bad idea, even a story about WHY it’s a bad idea (which is what all the replace-Batman stories end up being on some level) is really not a great concept … because it’s been done. Again and again and again. Just off the top of my head, the list of characters who’ve taken over as Batman include Dick Grayson, Alfred the butler, a crook named Harry Larson, a private eye named Hawke (his partner Wrenn was Robin), a Batman robot, the aforementioned Jan Paxton and Tommy Carma, Jean Paul Valley, Superman, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, and now James Gordon.
This reminds me of an old, old cycle. You see it a lot in superhero comics — hell, you see it in any long-running adventure series that’s written by a group of diverse people, whether it’s James Bond or Star Trek. The newest creative crew want to do something DIFFERENT, so they add new characters or try a new tone or approach, or make some other change. Creators keep adding to it and changing it until one day it becomes unrecognizable. At that point the realization hits that you’ve lost the part people liked in the first place and it’s time to go ‘back to the basics.’ You can really see that particular pendulum swing in James Bond movies, but lots of long-running series have it. Hell, the earliest Batman comics I read were examples of that — “New look Batman” from Julius Schwartz, which supplanted all the weird alien stuff. That approach in turn was rebooted post-Adam West into THE Batman, dark scary vigilante.
For the last couple of decades in superhero comics this return to basics is almost always presaged by the “put a new guy in the suit” storyline. It’s happened not just with Batman but also with Captain America, Thor, Green Lantern, Superman, the Black Panther, Daredevil, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, and so on and so on.
Sometimes the replacement gets lucky and is allowed to stick around — John Walker becomes USAgent, Rhodey becomes War Machine, Eric Masterson gets to be Thunderstrike, and so on. Marvel’s better about this than DC but even DC let Jean Paul Valley and Steel headline their own books for quite a while after they stopped pinch-hitting for the REAL lead hero.
So there’s a plus side to this sort of thing, it can serve as a series tryout for a new character. But I’m thinking the world’s not going to catch fire over a new series about Jim Gordon, CopMech. This is probably one of those times where the pendulum can’t swing back to the “back-to-basics” position soon enough. If you’ve been around comics a while you probably remember those misfires too.
Considering how fast the internet took to calling the Gordon RoboBat “Bunnyman,” I know which outcome I’d bet on.
See you next week.
Man, until today I’d completely forgotten about that Mecha-Bat Gordon with rabbit ear antennas was a thing for a while. It’s definitely something that makes you throw up your hands in despair.
“The newest creative crew want to do something DIFFERENT, so they add new characters or try a new tone or approach, or make some other change.” It used to be “give them a new love interest” or “new costume” not “new identity.”
Wally West as Flash was the change that I think lasted longest, and should never have been undone.
I remember when Jim Gordon questioned whether he could be Batman, the response was “You were a Marine!” Military experience is not magic; I’d think twenty years as a cop would be more useful.
I also remember how far the story tried to show that Bruce absolutely positively could not ever be Batman again. No, they never convinced me.
“when Jim Gordon questioned whether he could be Batman, the response was “You were a Marine!””
He was?
When did that happen?
I’ve zero idea I’m afraid. My bat-reading has been spotty enough since the early 1990s it could have been thrown in any time.
Having dropped all DC when Nu 52 was launched, I have not read the Bunnyman stories yet. I started buying the Batman and Green Lantern books as back issues but have not read up to Bunnyman yet (I am up to end of Year Zero on most of the Bat-titles, but I am not reading the books consistently).
I do kind of love the Batman Inc guys and gals (not keen on Ghost Maker though). I never saw any of them as on equal footing as Batman though, as far as being able to replace him. They are more comparable to Blue Beetle, Question, Sandman I and the like.
“Having dropped all DC when Nu 52 was launched,”
Yeah, I kind of did the same.
Can’t add much to what I said in 2015, except moreso.. I still agree that Batman, inside the comics, should not be a franchise thing. Bruce Wayne as Ray Croc doesn’t work.
BATMAN: OVER 10 MILLION PUNCHED!