Gangland Dreamland: Batman in 2020 (Patreon)

By Doris V. Sutherland

2020 was not a good year to be Batman. In the pages of the comics, he had his own company and all of the gadgets that come with it swiped from under his nose by his archenemy – the premise of “Joker War”, a big-event storyline spearheaded by writer James Tynion IV and artist Jorge Jiménez. In the real world, meanwhile, the character faced adversity of a different sort. Not only was the latest Batman film delayed by lead actor Robert Pattinson catching COVID-19, but the year’s events placed a large portion of cultural discourse directly against the ethos of this fictional hero.

Amidst an outpouring of rage against police brutality and unaccountability, with “defund the police” becoming the slogan of a campaign successful enough for various local governments in the US to reduce police budgets, the latest round of images showing Pattinson in what resembled quasi-medieval SWAT armour struck a somewhat discordant note. Were this billionaire vigilante and his two-fisted tactics really what we needed in our modern mythology?

This question is not exactly new, of course, although it receives more amplification in some periods than in others. Those on the side of the Caped Crusader have long since developed a straightforward argument in his defence: that as Batman is not real, ad inhabits a world largely detached from reality, there is little sense in holding him up to real-world standards. While some versions of the Batman saga (most notably the Christopher Nolan films) have striven to give the character a veneer of verisimilitude and sell us on the idea that Batman could perhaps be real, the default setting of the comics is a never-never land: an urban fantasy, if not necessarily in the supernatural sense.

Nevertheless, like a mirror from one of the Joker’s dark carnivals, the Batman comics inevitably provide a reflection of their era that is still recognisable for all of the distortion. For one, the early years of Batman roughly coincide with the early phases of police militarisation.

Radley Balko’s 2014 book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces charts the police’s preoccupation with hardware back to August Vollmer, who from 1905 to 1932 served as chief of police in Berkeley, California: “Vollmer pioneered the use of police adios, squad cars, lie detector tests, and crime labs.” Balko presents all of this as a double-edged sword, noting that “[a]t the level of individual cops, the use of squad cars and radios clearly brought a lot of benefits, but could also isolate police officers from the residents of the communities they patrolled” and that “[i]n poorer communities, that could bring about an increasingly antagonist relationship between cops and the citizens on their beats.” At around the same time, meanwhile, the American military was being advised to take harsh measures against protests:

When the US Army made its Basic Field Manual available to the public for the first time in 1935, it included a section on strategies for handling domestic disturbances. The recommendations were unsettling. The guide suggested firing into crowds instead of firing warning shots over their heads, and it included instructions on the use of chemical warfare, artillery, machine guns, mortars, grenades, tanks, and planes against American citizens.

This led to a backlash from the press and public advocacy groups:

The outrage grew loud enough that in early 1936, Army chief of staff general Malin Craig retracted the manual and ordered it removed from circulation. By 1941 much of the offending language had been either removed or replaced with instructions emphasizing the use of nonlethal force.

Such was the backdrop against which Batman made his debut in 1939: with even the squad car a relatively recent development, the Batmobile will have looked positively futuristic. Come 1966, television audiences who enjoyed the exploits of Adam West’s Batman were also watching news broadcasts about riots and murder a world away from the camp and colourful adventures of the Caped Crusader.

1966 was the year in which Charles Whitman went on a killing spree, ended only when he was shot by a police officer. “Crime had grabbed America by the lapels”, writes Balko, who cites the incident as a key influence on the development of SWAT teams as a police tactic – one first put to use in December 1969. This was when the LAPD mounted a raid on the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panthers, and were permitted by the Department of Defence to use a grenade launcher on the headquarters. Throughout all of this, Batman’s TV-land – where an explosive was a black ball with a sparkler stuck to the top – retained its escapist appeal.

Come the '70s, as Balko outlines, police chiefs were asking for tanks and even submarines, a fleet that would rival the arsenal of the Batcave. Richard Nixon pushed the militarization of the police still further. Then came the eighties: as well as a boom time for Batman, as such luminaries as Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Tim Burton put their individual (and often subversive) spins on the character, this was the decade of Ronald Reagan. The Republican president – aided by certain Democrats, including then-Senator Joe Biden – launched a purported war on drugs, ramping up battlefield rhetoric to justify battlefield equipment and tactics.

Summarising the general ethos arising from all of this, Balko quotes an (unnamed) U.S. military officer who helped to train civilian SWAT teams in the nineties: “Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38? With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun.” This ethos, it scarcely needs pointing out, is also what lends the Dark Knight much of his enduring appeal as a character.

But it should be underlined that he holds appeal as a character, by his nature able to glide cape-billowing over the concerns of us flesh-and-blood mortals confined to the real world. Batman will never have to worry about one of his dramatic window-smashing entrances leading to the target of the raid being killed in bed, nor will his batarang-flinging duels cause the death of a suspect’s girlfriend: such things simply do not happen to superheroes outside of dark-humoured parodies or particularly unflinching deconstructions. Batman’s status as an unabashed fantasy figure was dominant in the comics of 2020, which made a point out of placing Bruce Wayne into the context of the fictional heroes who came before him.

“Their Dark Designs”

Before “Joker War” began, its lead-in story, “Their Dark Designs” ran from January to July in Batman issues #86-94. Written by James Tynion IV and drawn primarily by Guillem March, the story’s inciting incident sees Gotham attacked by five assassins from across the DC stable – Cheshire, Gunsmith, Mister Teeth, Malcolm Merlyn and Deathstroke – all working for an enigmatic character known as the Designer, who serves as a potential rival to established villains like the Penguin and the Riddler. This is what kicks off the main plot, anyway; but in thematic terms, the story starts a little earlier with “City of Bane”, which was penned by Tom King and ran from July to December 2019. The prior story saw both the death of Alfred and extensive destruction across Gotham, leaving Batman recovering from the loss of both his city and his father-figure.

The prospect of rebuilding Gotham leads to much meditation as to exactly what Gotham is. The first issue of “Their Dark Designs” opens with Batman’s narrative captions describing his former hobby of sketching designs for buildings: “Alfred called them my little Gothams. He said that they were designs for the city that lived in my head, a better city without all the pain and horror. A city that doesn’t need a Batman.” Towards the end of the issue, he resumes this narration: “My designs for Gotham were a fiction. A fantasy. Not worth kindling into something more. They were impossible. I would tell him that over and over again late at night in the cave. He would always just grin at me and smile. He’d tell me ‘Master Bruce… for God’s sake. You’re Batman. I think what’s possible is only limited by what you believe is possible.’”

The villains have their own ideas for the city. “Gotham is an equation,” says the Riddler, “and I have set my magnificent mind to solving it. In solving it I seek to solve myself. A riddle with no solution. A riddle befitting a Riddler!” Meanwhile, Deathstroke – the practically-minded mercenary – sees Gotham primarily as a challenge: “That’s what I like about Gotham. Never easy here. I’m not a gamesman like most of the costumed set. I‘m not interested in the metaphors and all of that.”

The overarching theme is obvious: Gotham City is a dreamland. The various larger-than-life costumed characters may try and shape it like a sandcastle, but at no point is it in any danger of resembling the real world and it complexities.

This is graphically illustrated when city authorities try to imprison the five assassins in a holding facility called the Black Block that looks more like a sci-fi space-station than a jailhouse, guarded by armed and armoured men straight out of Halo. The prison is supposedly inescapable, but Batman learns of a fatal error: one assassin, Cheshire, is still free; her likeness in the prison is a fake. “Clay… they’re using clay”, says Batman. “She’s not a person. She’s a body double.”

This raises questions: at what point after being apprehended was Cheshire able to replace herself with a dummy? Or is the fake Cheshire made out of animated clay, like Clayface, allowing it to impersonate the villainess fighting-moves and all? The details are vague, but the point is clear: Gotham’s prisons, like the rest of the city, run on fantasy logic. The reality of prison security has no bearing in the world of a Batman comic, where super-crooks can escape justice with wildly improbable stunts involving squishy decoys.

Another fantastical touch can be found in the Designer’s choice of henchmen: zombies. Exactly how the archvillain raised the dead is, like the particulars of Cheshire’s clay double, left unexplored within the main series. Only the anthology Batman Secret Files #3 from June 2020 gives an explanation, with Batman declaring in a Tynion-scripted short story that the zombies arise from “high-end nanotechnology injected into human corpses […] it’s either algorithmic fighting, or the Designer has his people controlling them remotely.”

But in the pages of “Their Dark Designs” itself, Harley Quinn’s quip about “robo-zombies” is the only indication that the shambling corpses were raised with anything other than dark magic – and really, given the obvious absurdity of the nanotech origin, the only difference is that dark magic would have broken a general rule that Batman exists in a world of technofantasy rather than the supernatural.

While the story’s characters debate the future of Gotham, “Their Dark Designs” probes the history of this gangland dreamland. Batman #90 contains flashbacks to a time when Catwoman, the Riddler, the Penguin and the Joker all met up in response to an invitation from the Designer, then only an urban legend amongst Gotham’s criminals. The setting here – “years ago. Not quite at the beginning, but soon after” according to Catwoman – not coincidentally resembles a bygone era of Batman.

Although not quite the colourful camp of the Adam West show, this period is clearly defined as a more innocent era in which the villains were less intimidating (the Riddler, Joker and Penguin not only sport vintage costumes, but are drawn in noticeably less ghoulish styles) and good-versus-evil battles left less collateral damage. The Joker’s presence is shown as controversial because, as Catwoman says, “there were real casualties last spring when he attacked that TV studio”, implying that the other villains’ schemes were simply harmless runaround.

Catwoman’s narration compares this to a still earlier time in which, thanks to “the power of the Falcone family and their allies” along with general “corruption and horror”, the city was deadly: “you were never sure if you could survive the walk from the subway to your rundown apartment.” But that was before Batman arrived, ushering in a new era of costumed excitement: “If a person had the skills, and a colourful costume, they could rob a bank or a vault for the thrill of it, and sure, they might have to tussle with the Dynamic Duo. But on a good night, they might get their hands on a diamond the size of a bull’s head, and fleece it for millions on the black market.” Any semblance to real-life crime has been swept away by romanticised adventures.

However, the villains’ meeting with the Designer leads to a flashback-within-a-flashback in which we see that this pre-Batman era was scarcely less fanciful – and the story grows still more meta. The sequence shows a younger Designer sword-fighting with a character referred to as “the finest detective the world has ever seen”. A later issue reveals that the detective was named Cassander Wycliffe Baker.

This character is a new addition to DC canon, although the idea that Batman had a predecessor is not entirely new. A 1992 episode of Batman: The Animated Series established that Bruce Wayne was inspired by the Gray Ghost, a costumed crimefighter echoing such Batman prototypes as the 1930s pulp vigilante the Shadow Will Eisner’s 1940s comic hero the Spirit. However, the Gray Ghost was not a “real” person in the series canon, but rather a fictional character watched by young Bruce on television. Similarly, Frank Miller made it comic canon that Bruce saw the film Mark of Zorro the night his parents were shot, thereby paying homage to another of Batman’s fictional precursors.

Baker, by contrast, is portrayed as a real person rather than a fictional character. Nonetheless, he is an obvious composite of multiple characters that could be termed proto-Batmen.

The flashback gives him a rapier, ponytail and ruffle shirt that echo swashbuckling heroes from countless films and paperback covers; this brings to mind Batman’s Zorro connection, although it is the black-masked Designer who more closely resembles that character. A later flashback in Batman #94, where a young Bruce Wayne meets an elderly Baker, shows the latter wearing the hat and trenchcoat ensemble of Dick Tracy and other American gumshoe detectives. The surname Baker is a clear allusion to Sherlock Holmes, the most famous resident of London’s Baker Street. By extension, the Designer forms the second half of the classic fictional pairing between the great detective and his archenemy: Holmes and Moriarty are the obvious comparisons, but there are others (Sexton Blake and Monsieur Zenith; Nayland Smith and Fu Manchu).

The Batman #90 flashback ends with the Joker killing the Designer, implicitly taking his place as Gotham’s preeminent villain. “Something in him changed that night”, says Catwoman. “His eyes… they were different from they had ever been before. It was my first time seeing what kind of evil he was going to become.” The fictional genealogy is firmly established: Holmes/Zorro, to Baker, to Batman; Moriarty, to Designer, to Joker. The characters are placed firmly into the romanticised world of literary crime, not the murkier business of real-world crime and punishment.

With Gotham dominated by demigods from Baker and the Designer through to Batman and the Joker, the police are inevitably sidelined. In a typical Batman story, the city’s cops serve similar purposes to the almost literally faceless clown-masked minions of the Joker: they are either temporary hurdles for the costumed characters, or they act as stage-hands, clearing the way while the key players take the spotlight.

“Their Dark Designs” is no exception. The cover of issue #91 promises a fight between Batman and “the threat of a Jokerized GCPD”, but while the story does indeed use robo-zombie police officers as mindless heavies, the fact that they are undead policemen ether than – say – undead firefighters is arbitrary. In any case, the undead cops actually spend most of their time fighting Harley Quinn and Catwoman, who are hardly strangers to being on the wrong side of the blue line. Elsewhere, Commissioner Bullock puts in a cameo where he articulates his own embittered vision of Gotham’s future (“Bruce Wayne isn’t going to build a big fancy new GCPD headquarters and give it to me”) before vanishing again.

“Their Dark Designs” is not a story about the heroism of the police, but rather the heroism of a quasi-fantastical man in a bat costume. And yes, Batman is squarely a hero. This is not one of the more deconstructive works to feature the character. The scene in Batman #91 where our hero fights Deathstroke clearly positions the Caped Crusader as a good guy pushed into action by bad guys:

Batman: You know who I am. You know how it started… in an alley with a mugger and a revolver… and I changed to stop that… and the muggers changed too… you always come back with a bigger gun.
Deathstroke: You escalated first. Don’t pretend that your hand was forced.
Batman: I’m trying… I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to make it better, make it right. I’m trying to do everything I promised to do that I never did before. But you people just need to stop and let me save them.
Deathstroke: No.

That said, the story does give Bruce an Achilles’ heel – and, significantly, this is where some semblance of realism intrudes upon the fancy-dress fantasy. Catwoman, looking into Bruce’s financial connections, comes across the manner in which the billionaire playboy handles his money: “Bruce Wayne, the person, doesn’t own much of anything. I don’t think he even owns the manor. Bruce Wayne, the shadowy configuration of shell corporations, is one of the richest people on the planet.”

The climax of “Their Dark Designs” reveals that the Designer’s apparent resurrection is actually a hoax perpetrated by the Joker as elaborate bait for a trap, the object being to steal that “shadowy configuration of shell corporations” right from under Bruce’s nose.

“I tried to be a version of myself that Alfred wanted so badly to exist, but I don’t think ever did” says Batman at the story’s end. “I was… breaking myself to become it. But Joker saw the cracks in the design… he hit them all at once… and I let him.”

This conclusion leads into the high concept of “Joker War”: the Clown Prince has Bruce Wayne’s wealth.

The war begins

“Joker War”, which ran from July to October in issues #95 to 100 of Batman, bears a title with overt military connotations, like the so-called War on Drugs. As a story in which hi-tech tools nominally obtained for law enforcement fall into the hands of homicidal clowns, its subject matter certainly chimes with contemporary concerns about police militarisation.

This is, after all, an era in which reality sometimes appears to have become a grotesque parody of pop-culture sci-fi, rather than vice versa. Comparisons between the two are certainly common enough. Radley Balko, in the introduction to Rise of the Warrior Cop, asks “[h]ow did a country pushed into a revolution by protest and political speech become one where protests are met with flash grenades, pepper spray, and platoons of riot teams dressed like Robocops?” Criminologist Peter Kraska, quoted in Balko’s book, notes an unnamed purveyor of SWAT gear that calls its line “Cyborg 21st”. In his 2005 book Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing, former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper compares the riot gear ordered by his department to the costume sported by Darth Vader. The fact that media celebrities such as Shaquille O’Neal and Steven Seagal have accompanied police on disastrous raids only adds to the surreal blurring of fact and fiction.

So, “Joker War” hit upon a potent metaphor for America’s law-and-order arms race. There was ample room for satire – but none of it was used. The story ultimately does very little with the main hook of the Joker getting hold of Batman’s technology: we get a lot of establishing shots showing parts of Gotham exploding, a montage of clown-masked thugs driving modified Batmobiles, and a climax in which the Joker wears a vandalised Batsuit prototype, but all of this amounts to a string of visual signifiers telling us the basic fact that Gotham is in danger.

Nor does the story find much use for the police. Once again GCPD is sidelined, with Gotham’s corrupt mayor actively preventing Bullock and the other cops from fighting the Joker. The finale has a dramatic moment in which Bullock, tired of this impasse, throws his gun and badge to the ground before addressing his officers: “I don’t need a badge or gun to do what’s right, I’ve got my radio, and I’m going to follow Oracle and go @#%# help people. So, the lot of you are going to have to decide right now… do you want to be a cop in this crooked city or do you want to do what’s right?” Yet this is the last we see of the GCPD in “Joker War”. Bullock is never shown helping people, and we never even learn if the other cops sided with him.

At the end of the day, “Joker War” is simply not a story about the police, and its satirical undertones are apparently accidental. Instead, it is a story that delves deep into Gotham-as-dreamland. So deep, in fact, that much of the story occurs quite literally in dreams.

Batman #96, the second issue of “Joker War”, opens with a fantasy sequence set in a sunny, glistening Gotham akin to Metropolis in the more hopeful and carefree Superman stories. There is still crime, but it is crime of a campy sort that is hard to take seriously: the villain of the sequence is Mr. Freeze, now sporting two sidekicks named Icepop and Sno-Cone who deliver lines like “chill out, Bats”.

Batman himself is greying at the temples but very much active, clad in a metallic blue suit (the prototype we later see commandeered by the Joker) quite unlike his usual Dark Knight duds, and minimising civilian causalities with a handy mobile app. He is accompanied by an elderly but still very much alive Alfred – until Alfred turns into broken-necked ghoul and the dream becomes a nightmare, the entire sequence having been a hallucination brought on by Batman’s exposure to a Joker toxin. Batman is still under the effects of this toxin for much of the story, a concept Tynion uses to blur past and present.

Ghosts of Gotham past

Batman stories – particularly those presenting themselves as turning-point events – often show a fetishistic preoccupation with replaying incidents from the character’s past. “Joker War” is no exception, its first issue opening with a flashback to the Joker’s very first murder spree (including the death of diamond magnate Claridge, killed back in 1940’s Batman #1). Rather than simply replaying all of the greatest hits, however, this trip through Batman’s history finds a specific theme to home in on: father figures.

While any exploration of Bruce Wayne’s backstory will involve his parents in some capacity, “Joker War” shows a particular interest in paternal influences. As well as the literal father (and mother) figures of Thomas and Martha Wayne, the story emphasises the late Alfred’s role as surrogate father. February 2020 had already seen two special issues devoted to the Bat-family’s reminiscences about Alfred (Batman: Pennyworth R.I.P. and Detective Comics Annual #3) and even though it takes place after his death, “Joker War” has multiple appearances from Alfred in flashbacks, hallucinations, and – during the climax – as one of the Joker’s zombies.

Finally, it features the intertextual father figure of Zorro.

Tynion is clearly fascinated with Batman’s debt to this black-masked pulp hero, who was created by author Johnston McCulley in 1919. While “Their Dark Designs” introduced the Zorro-cum-Holmes figure of Cassander Wycliffe Baker, “Joker War” emphasises Bruce’s childhood love of Zorro. The story sees the Joker purchasing the cinema in which young Bruce saw The Mark of Zorro before his parents’ death. This is part of a scheme that involves inviting people to watch the “Gotham cut” of the Zorro film, with a new ending that reveals Batman’s true identity.

As Batman follows the trail, he continues to hallucinate: he sees his parents tuning into broken-necked ghouls, as Alfred did in his earlier dream; he has a long conversation with a hallucination of Alfred; and when he arrives the Joke’s cinema – decked out in rows of Zorro posters – he is unable to tell whether it actually looks like that, or whether his memories are blurring with reality. As it happens, the story’s reality tends to look distinctly nightmarish itself. The cinema’s audience is made up of everybody ever killed by the Joker, their grinning corpses reanimated as robo-zombies, but even this scenario is warped by hallucinations, with Batman seeing the zombies become an army of Joker clones. Here, the Joker is one of many Jokers – just as Batman is one of many Zorros.

Tynion also uses the Zorro motif in “Ghost Story”, his short collaboration with artists Riley Rossmo and Ivan Plascencia for September’s Detective Comics #1027. A flashback shows Bruce as a child having trouble sleeping after watching horror films with his father. His bedroom contains various hints of his later identity: a poster and statuette of Zorro can be seen, alongside comics, a toy car resembling the Batmobile and a book of ghost stories showing a sinister man in black. On a later page we see Bruce’s memories, including three figures that presumably come from the horror films he watched: a man resembling Bela Lugosi’s Dracula; a lank-haired woman in white and a sheet-clad ghost. The implication is clear: Batman was influenced by his fictional precursors, both in reality and in his fictional world.

Returning to “Joker War”, the story reaches its most overtly intersexual moment when the Joker arrives in the run-down cinema. “Folks don’t want to see something they’ve seen a hundred times before”, says the cinema’s owner. “They always say that, but they never mean it”, replies the Joker. “They want all the pieces in the right places. All the characters saying the parts they want them to say. Which isn’t to say they don’t want something new. They want to see it peeled back. To find out there was a layer underneath all this time they didn’t know about.”

Many of Batman’s major-event stories have hinged upon some revelation or alteration to the canon: the killing of Robin in “Death of the Family”; the introduction of a man who may or may not be Batman’s long-lost brother in “The Court of Owls” and “The City of Owls”; or the twist that the Joker was actually three different people in Three Jokers (a detail curiously unmentioned in “Joker War”, despite the two stories being published at the same time). Here, though, Tynion is trying something different. “Joker War” acknowledges that the Batman mythos is not so much an unfolding narrative – the sort in which every new revelation can have a meaningful long-term impact – but a repeated narrative, one told and retold for each new generation. Tynion even acknowledges, via the Zorro and Holmes homages, that aspects of the story were being told and retold long before Bob Kane and Bill Finger even created Batman.

New rogues for the gallery

While concerned largely with Batman’s past, “Joker War” does make a few gestures towards predicting his future. The aforementioned Mr. Freeze dream sequence is one example of this; more significant, however, are the attempts made by the story and its predecessor to expand Batman’s list of antagonists, setting the stage for battles to come. Other than the Designer – already dead by the time Batman gets to him – “Their Dark Designs” and “Joker War” introduce three new costumed characters to the rogues’ gallery of Gotham: Underbroker, Clownhunter and Punchline (a fourth, Ghostmaker, puts in a brief cameo to set up the next storyline, “Ghost Stories”).

The Underbroker – a man in a mask and pinstripe suit who engineers the Joker’s hostile takeover of Wayne Enterprises – is more a symbol than a character, a middleman between the dismal science of economics and the fantasy underworld of Gotham that is usually beyond such matters (“The Underbroker and his army of lawyers are at city hall, making sure the city stays payalyzed”). Clownhunter, a homicidal teenage vigilante wearing some sort of Battle Royale-meets-Mad Max cosplay, is similarly symbolic: other than setting up his larger role in “Ghost Stories”, his presence in “Joker War” serves mainly to show how violent Gotham has become, and to provide a contrast with Batman’s code against killing. Intentionally or not, he also further demonstrates the essentially fantastical nature of the Batman mythos. The idea that a teenage boy with no apparent combat training can pose a significant threat to a hardened gang of city-destroying criminals makes sense only if we remember that, in Gotham, an eye-catching costume will automatically bestow the wearer the strength of five men (with a traumatic backstory adding one or two more).

That leaves Punchline, the Joker’s moll. While a case could be made that she is superfluous to the story – her material could conceivably have been given either to the Joker or to a generic henchperson, and most of the narrative would still stand – she undeniably leaves an impression. Her design is attention-grabbing and memorable, offering a successful new take on the now-familiar evil clown motif, and Jorge Jiménez’s artwork fills her with manic personality. Of course, it has to be admitted that a major reason Punchline works is that she is designed to fit neatly into an existing slot – that is, the original role of Harley Quinn.

When Harley was retooled into an antihero rather than the Joker’s sidekick, this left a vacuum. Just as every Robin who dies or goes solo will someday be replaced by another, it was inevitable that we would see the arrival of a replacement Harley. Indeed, something similar had happened back in the New 52 era with the rebooted version of “Joker’s Daughter” Duela Dent (a character who had been around in one form or another since 1976) but somehow, this addition to the Bat-mythos never really stuck. How appropriate that it was Tynion’s run – one so concerned with fictional genealogies and the re-telling of familiar stories – that finally found a successful replacement for the old Harley.

The grand finale

When “Joker War” reaches its climax in the plus-sized Batman #100, it flirts with role-reversal. The Joker now has his vandalised Batsuit and zombie Alfred, while Batman has only just recovered from the mind-altering toxin that led to Harley Quinn, of all characters, acting as his straight partner. However, all of this amounts to a cosmetic twist on what is ultimately a traditional Batman-versus-Joker battle.

Which, of course, is the point. As the Joker said earlier on, audiences “want all the pieces in the right places. All the characters saying the parts they want them to say” but at the same time want to see the story peeled back to reveal “a layer underneath all this time they didn’t know about.” And so, behind Jorge Jiménez’s lavish fight scenes of glistening spandex, glowing cityscapes and the iconic, sure-to-be-an-action-figure sight of Bat-Joker, we find Tynion bringing the story’s intertextual thread to its conclusion.

This element arises from the uneasy alliance between Batman and Harley Quinn, who have one major disagreement: what to do with the Joker. Harley, as established back in “Their Dark Designs”, wants to kill him; Batman, meanwhile, clings to his philosophy against lethal force. So, “Joker War” is in part another outing for that old chestnut, the “why-doesn’t-Batman-kill-the-Joker?” story.

The question is an awkward one, in large part because it runs into the basic fact that – once again – Gotham and its inhabitants do not abide the rules of reality. We could just as readily ask why Batman and his associates have failed so miserably in keeping the Joker confined: and there, the answer would be because Gotham exists in a surreal world where Cheshire can evade capture by making some sort of golem as a decoy.

Were Batman ever to kill the Joker, we all know that somebody at DC would find a way – no matter how implausible – of bringing him back. A second, graver issue is that if we treat the Joker as a hypothetical human being, rather than a fantasy figure with as much psychological verisimilitude as Daffy Duck, then any discussion about killing him inevitably turns into a discussion about euthanising the criminally insane.

Yet the question keeps bubbling up in Batman’s adventures, and different writers have come up with different answers. Scott Snyder, in the 2012-3 story “Death of the Family”, had Batman expressing the fear that if he killed the Joker, then Gotham would send someone even worse – which, if nothing else, dovetails neatly with Tynion’s more recent idea of the Joker having replaced the Designer. The stock answer, however, is to re-assert that Batman has a code of honour against killing people in any circumstances and leave it there.

This is the general approach taken by Tynion, and it fits his wide conception of Gotham as a dreamland populated by larger-than-life heroes and villains: of course this clean-cut version of Batman would never kill the Joker. But Tynion also offers an alternative answer through the character of Harley: killing the Joker would end the story. “It’s time for his story to end”, she says in Batman #99. “This can’t be like all the other times. The story needs to change. It needs an ending.”

The Dark Knight Returns, the animated film Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker and (according to some interpretations) The Killing Joke all depict Batman killing the Joker, and in each case the act is framed as marking – at least figuratively – the simultaneous death of Batman, the breaking of the hero. But unlike these stories, “Joker War” is ultimately another story arc within Batman’s monthly adventures – Harley cannot be permitted to get her way, and the Joker must be spared so that the story can continue.

“Joker War” ends the only way it could ever have ended. Bruce Wayne’s money is retrieved, the villains are routed, and the Joker goes back into hiding despite Harley’s best efforts to kill him. “The city”, says Batman at the end; “it’s changed to much.” There is precious little evidence for this, however. Gotham is still Gotham, with little having changed since the start of “Their Dark Designs” beyond the introduction of a few new costumed villains.

So, this is “Joker War”. Or, at least, the main body of it. No event story is complete without its tie-ins, and if we move the margins of “Joker War” we find a few more tales worth discussing...

Gotham’s thin blue line

Also published in 2020 were an assortment of Batman anthology comics that probed various corners of his mythos. In doing so, these short stories were able to explore areas ignored by the main Batman title – including the police. Indeed, the spectre of police brutality turns out to be a recurring theme across the anthologies, one handled by a number of different creative teams.

One example is “Afraid of America” by writer Dan Watters and artist John Paul Leon, which was published in the “Their Darkest Designs” tie-in Batman Secret Files #3. This story is focused on the assassin Gunsmith, who wears a US flag face-mask and is characterised as something of a gun nut: “I agree, it’s a disgrace”, he says, after describing a weapons amnesty program. “All those good firearms going to waste. You know they melt them down? So I took them, All of them. Even when they didn’t want to give them to me.”

The story sees Batman rescuing a boy Gunsmith is keeping hostage. At one point Gunsmith orders another hostage – the boy’s brother – to shoot Batman, or else the boy will suffer. Batman survives the attacker’s shot and rescues the boy, but the armed hostage still has his sights on Batman out of fear of retaliation: “if you anger Batman, he gets you.” Batman proceeds to talk sense into the reluctant gunman. “My anger is not for you,” he says as he takes the hostage’s gun and empties the bullets. “My anger is for those who would burden you for this.

So, a fairly simple confrontation between a gun-loving villain and the famously anti-gun Batman, with the police again absent – for most of the story. But then come the final three panels. Here, Gunsmith resumes as narrator: “The Batman isn’t afraid of guns”, he says. “That’s not the trigger. The Batman is afraid of America.” This is illustrated with a scene of Batman looking down from a building as cops with assault rifles march below.

In September 2020 came another anthology, Batman: The Joker War Zone. One story, “Family Ties” by writer John Ridley and artists Olivier Coipel and Matt Hollingsworth, has Lucius Fox and his family being attacked at home by the Joker’s henchmen. Two police officers arrive and, upon stepping out of the car, immediately point guns at Lucius. “Jeez”, says a male cop. “Sorry, but… you don’t know what we’re dealing with out there. And you look like—“ his female colleague interrupts: “Whitaker, just call for back-up.”

The comment on Lucius Fox’s physical appearance ostensibly refers to the lingering effects of the Joker’s toxin, lending him a wild-eyed look. But Lucius is also African-American, as is the comparatively level-headed female cop; the gung-ho male cop, meanwhile, is white. The subtext scarcely needs analysis.

Also published in September was Detective Comics #1027, a plus-sized anthology marking a thousand issues since Batman’s first appearance. Here, it is writer Greg Rucka and artist Eduardo Risso who examine police brutality In Gotham via their short story “Rookie”, which went on to be nominated for an Eisner Award.

“Rookie” introduces us to Lynne Baker, a new recruit to GCPD (she is also African-American, although the story generally does not press upon race relations: cops and criminals alike are drawn as diverse groups). Upon graduation, Lynne listens to a speech from Commissioner Gordon about the life of a Gotham police officer:

What he doesn’t say in his speech is that the odds are not in your favor. What he does not say is that you’re joining a police force where most of the people you’ll be working with, they’ve already made their choice. It’s okay. You knew that already. You were surrounded by them at the academy... cops who’d betrayed their oath before they’d even taken it. And if you dare ask them how they can do what they do, why they do what they do... they just look you in the eye and say... it’s Gotham, rookie... like that explains it all.

There is no supervillainy in "Rookie". When the Penguin gets a cameo appearance making a deal with a corrupt cop, he is serving merely as a quick shorthand for the criminal underworld and is given less prominence than the repeated acts of brutality witnessed by Lynne. Heroism, however, still has a part to play. Lynne herself is framed as an idealist amongst her cohorts: “You remind them of what they once were, or what they should’ve been. And each day you don’t do what they did, you prove everything they’ve been saying wrong. You prove that they’re weak, and you’re not.”

The story ends with three corrupt cops being confronted by Batman, who overpowers and apprehends them as he would any clown-masked mobster. Commissioner Gordon promotes Lynne to the major crimes unit, while Batman looks on with approval in the final panel. This conclusion is rather too rosy for the story to be read as an entirely convincing treatment of issues surrounding police; but considering that it is a story in a Batman comic – and so has an aspirational model of heroism baked into it – “Rookie” is about as realistic as it can get without breaching the boundaries of the genre.

If Gotham City is a dreamland, then the scenes of police brutality and intimidation in “Afraid of America”, “Family Ties” and “Rookie” are the moments in which we wake up and catch fleeting glimpses of the real world -- but it does not take too long for us to drop off back to sleep.

Also included in Detective Comics #1027 is a story by writer Grant Morrison with artists Chris Burnham and Nathan Fairbairn. Entitled “Detective #26”, this is notable for just how perfectly it chimes with the themes – if not the tone – of Tynion’s work on the main title. Morrison and their collaborators spend the story introducing a character who, like Cassander Wycliffe Baker in “Their Dark Designs”, is assembled from Batman’s various prototypes and influences. This time, however, the effect is much more comical.

A series of panels tells the life story of the protagonist, whose real name is never divulged. We see him as a child, watching a Lone Ranger-like character on television while his father reads a newspaper rport about the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents. “Those poor rich people”, exclaims the father. “It’s about time some remarkable character took the law into his own hands.” The boy grows up to become a private investigator, one who resembles Dick Tracy – and is even shown alongside a group of people with extravagant facial deformities, echoing Pruneface, Flattop, the Brow and other villains from Tracy’s adventures.

He finds it hard to stand out, however. “Trouble is, tough private dicks and feds back from the front are a dime a dozen in this town – just ask hard men like Slam Bradley and Steve Carson. How could I even get noticed when I was just Detective #26 in Flatfoot’s bar and grill?” The choice of number is not accidental: before Batman was introduced in issue #27, Detective Comics was devoted to the exploits of characters who never found the same success – Slam Bradley and Steve Carson being amongst them.

The homages soon start piling up. On panel shows a gang of masked vigilantes patrolling the rooftops, with Detective Comics’ own Crimson Avenger prominent in the foreground. Inspired by their example, the protagonist puts together a mood-board showing such figures as Sherlock Holmes, a man resembling Will Eisner’s Spirit and a Nosferatu-like vampire. Citing the Scarlet Pimpernel as an inspiration, he chooses a colourful name – and so the Silver Ghost is born. In terms of both moniker and costume, this character appears to have been modelled upon the aforementioned Gray Ghost from Batman: The Animated Series. Meanwhile, he expects to meet criminals with names like Split-Face, Gum-Face, Giant Lizard-Face and Doctor-Face, suggesting halfway points between the villains from Dick Tracy and those from Batman.

Compared to Batman, however, the Silver Ghost lacks a vital resource: money. Throughout the story he has been shown to be a working-class lad. Rather than murdered millionaires, his parents were a man who died after accidentally drinking white spirit while drunk and a woman who objected to her son’s decision to drop out of higher education. As an adult, his arsenal includes “a secondhand roadster I planned to drive until I could afford to hire a real Rolls-Royce and chauffeur.”

And so, when the time comes for his first proper mission, the Silver Ghost has his thunder thoroughly stolen. Before he can defeat the criminal and rescue the hostage, Batman crashes through the roof to do exactly that. As this is specifically the early Kane/Finger Batman – whose code of honour against killing was not yet canon – he has no qualms about kicking the villain into a vat of lethal acid before remarking upon the appropriateness of this fate. He then abandons the scene, leaving the Silver Ghost distraught and unnoticed.

“Detective #26” is the true punchline to “Joker War”. Like Tynion, Morrison celebrates Batman’s pulp predecessors and four-colour forebears, but does so while acknowledging the essential arbitrariness behind the Dark Knight remaining a hardy perennial while so many of the characters who can lay claim to having influenced him enjoy only sporadic revivals at most. It may be pleasant to picture Batman, Zorro, Dick Tracy and the Crimson Avenger all cavorting across the rooftops of our collective imagination, but at the end of the day we are still left with the decidedly unromantic business of which franchise is the most bankable.

Conclusion

Batman’s bankability as a franchise is key. Things have long since passed the point at which the highest honour for a Batman comic is to be successfully reworked into a Batman film or television series. The Bat-comics of 2020, under James Tynion IV, offer a productive response to this state of affairs: they actively celebrate their status as one more stage in an ongoing process of recycling and reworking, even incorporating this role into their worldbuilding. Their Gotham replaces many Gothams of the past, and will eventually be replaced by still more Gothams to come.

The future will see more villains added to the rogues’ gallery of Batman comics, and more actors will don cowls to fight them onscreen, but the underlying narrative will remain. Even if Batman were to somehow fade from public consciousness the way that Zorro and Dick Tracy (and Cassander Wycliffe Baker, and Detective #26) did before him, doubtless some new crime-fighting mystery-man shall emerge from the shadows as a replacement.

No matter how dire things become in reality – or even, perhaps, because of how dire things become in reality – audiences will find escapism in gangland dreamland.