Batman #30 Review

When Frank Miller’s nonsensical, racist, ugly, generally god awful Holy Terror was released, I remember a few things. First, I remember deciding that the book made an excellent cutting board, and it’s been useful in that capacity for a while now. I also remember, in Miller’s interviews about the book, how he initially wanted it to be a Batman book. Then he “decided” (or “was told by DC”) that it couldn’t be a Batman book because (in so many words) “Batman fights Two-Face. Batman fights the Riddler. Batman doesn’t fight terrorism.”

Well, Scott Snyder has proven that the Riddler makes an excellent terrorist, thank you very much. Hell, Zero Year is, in many ways, the book Miller would have written if he had a grasp of plot, could still draw, and wasn’t an islamophobic maniac who hadn’t had a new idea in at least fifteen years.

I bring all this up because, until this issue, I didn’t really buy the idea Snyder was talking about of changing Batman’s targets from crime bosses and urban decay to our modern anxieties, like climate change, failing economies, chronically corrupt governments living on bribes and conducting mass surveillance, and the big boogeyman of my generation, terrorism. It’s hard to buy into that, given that terrorism has become the official government codeword for “let us do whatever we want to your rights” even though terrorism is nowhere near the biggest threat we, as a people, face. Not even in the top 10. But then I realized that this idea had already been sold to me.

The Dark Knight trilogy handled it very well. One of the few ideas I liked about Batman Begins (it was by far my least favorite of the three) was that of having Bruce Wayne trained by terrorists and then devoting his career, really, to fighting terrorism. Oh, he certainly fights organized crime in those films, but it’s almost an afterthought, the old guard that doesn’t really present much of a threat in the 21^st century. Ra’s Al Ghul, Joker, and Bane are terrorists, in every sense. They aren’t only interested in wanton destruction, although they certainly employ it. What they’re really after is to destroy Gotham’s soul; it’s the true essence of terrorism. Batman even responds to the Joker by initiating domestic sonar surveillance on the entire city without its knowledge.

Since those movies, though, nobody seems to have really ran with the concept. People are so used to the kind of Batman we were given in Batman: Year One (which is undeniably a classic, even though I just spent two paragraphs trashing Frank Miller) that it’s a bit difficult to see how that works. And what about those other real world anxieties? I can see Batman fighting corrupt politicians, that’s some fertile ground. But how does he fight climate change? Team up with Captain Planet?

It’s the kind of brand new, challenging, scary idea only a writer like Snyder could think up, let alone find a way to pull off. Snyder’s a very soft spoken, almost painfully modest guy (that silly twitter feud with Rob Liefeld notwithstanding), but as a writer, even if you don’t like his work, you have to admit he’s got balls of steel. Saying “I’m going to change Batman’s whole world, give him a whole new set of problems nobody in the real world knows how to deal with” and then actually doing it, is impressive. And somehow, he manages to make the idea of Batman fighting domestic surveillance, terrorism and climate change at the same time work. Using the fucking Riddler.

Eat that, Frank.

I will say it seems a bit hard to believe that Bruce has been in bed for like six months yet needs no physical therapy to get back on his feet whatsoever. I know in a plot as unabashedly absurd as this, that shouldn’t bother me, but the particular implausibility of that somehow stuck with me. Other than that, I can’t think of anything to hold against this book. So there’s my feeble attempt at criticism, for what it’s worth.

Oh, but the withering praise is not over yet! The art is as fantastic as usual, though the visual team couldn’t conceivably be expected to reach the heights they did in Batman #29 again in what is largely a catch-up issue. They are given some pretty big sets to sculpt in this issue, though, and Capullo’s pencils introduce the destroyed, flooded and overgrown Gotham splendidly. They also manage to totally sell the gloriously idiotic idea of knocking over a building to create a domino effect that’ll knock down a bunch of other buildings. On my first read through, it didn’t even occur to me that I should think there was anything odd about that. Probably my favorite aspect of the art, which in this particular issue somewhat surpasses Capullo and Miki’s lines, though, is the colors. The colors in Zero Year are beyond anything else in the New 52, unquestionably. Completely bucking the trend of monochromatic, washed out, overly filtered colors that have become the unfortunate standard in many books, FCO Plascencia uses a fearlessly rich, bright palette. It looks more like something out of the ‘80s, particularly reminding me of Watchmen or a Heavy Metal story with its liberal use of purple and yellow. Hopefully other creators take a hint and start using more bright colors like this. I remember seeing an interview with Joe Kubert before his death where he complained about how the industry standard in computer coloring has made everything look the same. Comparing the rest of DC to Zero Year in general shows just how true this is, and it goes a large way towards explaining why the current standards in comic art are so boring and unimpressive to me. Yes, DC, color is a nice thing to put in your books. Use more of it.

As a whole, Batman #30 is probably not the best installment of Zero Year, lacking the poetry and sense of grandeur #29 had, but it does a great job of explaining Riddler’s motives (or at least his excuses), catching us up to the beginning of Snyder’s third act, and maintaining the standard of gorgeous art this team is known for.