Don't go to sleep, you may wake up a hero

I've been thinking a lot about Batman recently (no doubt inspired by some truly astonishingly long sessions on my flatmate's copy of Lego Batman for the XBox), and have honestly been meaning for quite some time to turn a lot of my half-baked thoughts on the character and his history into a full-fledged post here on the blog, but I've been having some difficulty. The issue at hand is essentially my inability to reconcile my desire to do a full-on, fully-researched, post-grad level essay on the political/social underpinnings of the character and his fictional universe, a lot of which have re-entered public discourse since the debut of The Dark Knight and its at times sledgehammer-subtle allusions to the Bush doctrine; and my desire to simply rabbit on about some of the sillier comics/videogames that I like and post some pretty pictures (except that I never really like adding pictures in blogger, it really is too much of a pain).

Above: the source of so much recent consternation for me.

Still, I imagine I'm not going to be able to write about anything else until I've at least got this one out of my system, so here goes a pretty half-assed post about a 70-year old superhero (I mean that the comics have been around for that long, not that Bruce Wayne is a septuagenarian, obviously) written almost solely so that I can then go on to write about other things.

Firstly, to sate the former of the two desires outlined above in quite possibly the laziest way possible, here's a pretty neat sixty-second summary of why Batman is at heart a character straight out of Conservative fable (courtesy of Reginald D. Hunter):



I've honestly tried to elaborate on Hunter's point, but every time I do, I read my words back and realise just how incredibly pretentious they sound, so I end up scrapping the whole thing. Needless to say that I think that I'm going to need to have a good, long look at superhero fiction as a whole, and wonder whether there can be any way around the political paradigms so deeply embedded into the narrative that makes up the backbone of the genre.

Then I might make a start on analysing that whole "women in refrigerators" thing, too.

One thing I would like to point out though is a specific Batman comic book I read recently. "Urban Legend" was written by Bill Willingham and was published in a 2003 issue of the Batman comic Legends of the Dark Knight (I could spend entire posts looking at Willingham's own politics, but that's not the point of this post), although I read it as part of the "and Other Tales" of the Batman Begins: The Movie and Other Tales of the Dark Knight collection. The story begins with a beaten and brusied Batman, shown to be suffering from amnesia, all ailments apparently resulting from a recent fight against some unknown criminals against whom Batman clearly came out the worse off. Still, despite his lack of knowledge about his whereabouts, his secret identity, or even his specific mission, and with some really remarkable physical injuries slowing him down, Batman takes one look at himself and realises the superhero he must be, and sets off to find and mete out justice to the villains whom he works out must be responsible for his current condition. The whole thing reads like a bit of a darkly comic farce, to be honest, with Batman phoning the Gotham City police from a payphone, calling a cab because he cannot locate his Batmobile and getting brained by a prostitute that he actually manages to save from a vindictive pimp. Still, when Batman finally reaches the headquarters of the gang of criminals he has spent the last twenty-or-so pages searching for, the twist is revealed as the real Batman shows up and dispatches the criminals, exposing the Batman that we've been following as merely a confused amnesiac who woke up in a Batman suit (for reasons that are explained within the comic but are mundane and incidental, really) and jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Above: Urban Legend

The whole thing has echoes of everything from Memento to Dark City, but a more specific mirror can be found in Alan Moore and Rick Veitch's 1999 Greyshirt short "Amnesia" from the pages of Tomorrow Stories #1. Whereas "Urban Legend", despite its occasional comic turns, seems ultimately an optimistic piece about the innate goodness that could be awakened in us all ("what if, tomorrow, you woke up believing yourself to be a superhero? Maybe you too would act upon all that that role bestows," the comic seems to be saying), "Amnesia" looks at this same concept from the other side of the looking glass, imagining instead an amnesiac who wakes to find himself surrounded by just the right clues to make him believe that he is in fact a certain notable serial killer. In his quest to flee the police, whom he believes are after him, he kills another couple of people, before it is of course all revealed to him that, before those murders, he was in fact a completely innocent man, and actually received his amnesia-causing injury in an altercation with the real serial killer (if memory serves me correctly, that is. It's been a while since I've read this one).

The two tales may, on the surface, appear to be telling the same story, but it's hard to ignore the ultimately far more optimistic note of the former (although that was published later and may, perhaps, have actually been inspired by the Moore tale). An idea central to the Batman mythos is that fact that he really is just a man (a concept from which Batman Begins extracts a lot of mileage, emphasising the difference between a mortal man and a faceless figurehead, the darker side of which is explored in that film's sequel), but one whose 'powers' come from the fact that he has spent years building himself into a very different kind of 'superman': the unspoken implication being the supposedly inspirational message that anyone of us could do the same if only we had the will to do so; if only we could also spend years training our minds and bodies the way that Bruce Wayne did. Of course, this is once again where the spectre of the underpinning right-wing politics of superhero narratives begin to show, as such an assertion renders totally invisble the phenomenal privelege that Bruce Wayne enjoys. Despite what certain people would have you believe, we literally cannot all afford to become superheroes.

Edited to add: there are of course exceptions to prove every rule. For a great example, I'd highly recommend immersing yourself in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta as well as almost any comic featuring transparent V knock-off Anarky. Also, while we're on the subject of Mr Moore, don't forget to go out and read Watchmen right now, before the film comes out and potentially ruins any chance that you might be tempted to read it. Hurry, the film's release is only days away!

Far too many words (and too few eloquent ones) about War & Pieces

((warning: spoilers ahead for Fables: War and Pieces))*

Something occured to me while I was reading The Good Prince, Fables' tenth volume. I realised that, for a series supposedly entirely based around the concept of some kind of Israel parable, wherein a tiny nation is surrounded by larger, hostile nations (and indeed, this is a reading supported by interviews with series creator Bill Willingham), the "Fabletown" that is the focus of the series really is a place populated by people who could probably each take out all of their opponents single-handedly, so why the hell is there supposedly an ongoing war between the people of Fabletown and the much-feared "Adversary?" I mean, as excellent a read as it was, with shadows of some exciting and suitably epic Arthurian tales (helped of course by some actual appearances by Arthurian knights), The Good Prince was a story in which Fabletown's resident janitor strikes up some kind of incredible magical powers that basically grant him an invincible army of ghosts and the ability to seemingly do whatever the hell he wants, all because his cause is deemed "just." Hence, he takes a sizeable bite out of the series' key antagonist.

Now, this "simple but honest young man makes good as a swashbuckling hero" formula (here also given the classic fairytale twist of the royal prince disguised as a mere unsupposing serf) is the stuff that makes for great fairy tales, and therefore I suppose should be Fables' bread & butter, and it was genuinely impressive the first time Willingham handled it, back in Homelands, but by the time it was repeated, with the scale greatly increased, in The Good Prince, it only served to raise one big question: if one man can be so powerful can do so much against the Adversary, why on Earth haven't the combined forces of Fabletown completely overcome him yet?

Clearly, Willingham either did not want this question hanging over the remainder of his series, or else The Good Prince was designed from the very beginning to lead into a conclusion for the series; a final, fateful battle between good and evil and the conclusion to over six years' worth of this multi-award-winning comic book franchise, because Fables' eleventh volume - War & Pieces - is precisely the one that wraps up this long-running arc with a bang.

That's not to say that further volumes aren't coming. This is simply the end of this particular chapter in Fables' history. Whether the series can continue without its primary antagonist and main plot device or whether this will become regarded as the moment when the series "jumped the shark" remains to be seen.

To be honest, I'm reasonably optimistic about the series' future, whilst at the same time cautiously keeping a couple of reservations about me, and really, the reasons for both my positive and negative thoughts about the series can be found within War & Pieces, for it really is a rather messy beast of good and bad ("Pieces" indeed, it seems) that perhaps represents a little of what is right and a lot of what is wrong about Fables.

First, let's examine what Fables even is at the generic level. First presenting itself as an anachronistic fish-out-of-water tale and perhaps immigrant parable about a collection of fairy tale characters living in modern day New York, Fables soon revealed itself to in fact be a war story of truly epic proportions. 'Epic' gets bandied around an awful lot, but considering the scale of the story at hand, I feel it is more than justified in this instance. With an ensemble cast of both considerable size - constructed as they are from the massive tapestry of all of Western (and later, middle-Eastern, too) storytelling - and also such strength that each could likely support a series all to themselves (although the not-quite-as-good Fables spin-off series Jack hints that that may not be such a good idea), Fables really is a grand project.

This war narrative though is equal parts Ian Flemming Cold War spy thriller and Lord of the Rings-style fantasy adventure. The first part is well represented in the story that makes up much of the first third of War & Pieces: a tale that sees Cinderella, having honed the skills of the spy trade over several lifetimes (the fairytale characters in Fables are, of course, as old as the classic stories that feature them), jetting around the globe and taking out nameless henchmen in a story that borrows as much visually as it does plot-wise from a Sean Connery Bond thriller. The bulk of this volume though tends towards the latter part of this equation, and perhaps suffer for it. After all, magical or fantasy writing can, in the wrong hands, easily descend to the playground antics level of "my magic is more powerful than your magic," "no, my magic is more powerful than your magic," with no clear rules other than those of poor plotting deciding which way any battle or confrontation should fall; sometimes magic just works and sometimes it doesn't, it's magical that way. Considering how much of Fables is entirely predicated on characters with magical abilities squaring off against one another, it's honestly surprising that Fables isn't a much weaker series for it, with Willingham revealed as some kind of master illusionist who's somehow tricked us all into not noticing just how bare some of his plots are. Again, I stress that for the most part that's because his plots are not so thin at all, but in fact fleshed out by fascinating takes on familiar characters as well as labyrinthine plots based around Cold War-era paranoia and counter-counter-espionage.

However, that trust really is stretched to its limits in this latest volume, which features scenes in which we are presented with magical arrows that, so we are told, always kill their intended targets (after all, they're magical), only to see said arrows limply fail to kill their intended targets, seemingly because their target was in this instance a popular character. Or perhaps, like I said, it really was magic. "Magic," of course, being some sort of code-word for convenient but inexplicable plot developments or catches.

Far too much of War & Pieces continues in this vein, with our multiple heroes apparently beyond any fear of death or retribution thanks to their "powerful magic" and general incredible popularity (which actually, in the Fables mythos, really does amount to the same thing, as characters cannot die so long as their tales keep on being told en masse). Perhaps this is the real reason the series cannot go on as a war tale and is instead attempting to reinvent itself. When your heroes are, rather miraculously, armed with the entire arsenal of all of Western and Middle Eastern literature, from magic carpets to Vorpal blades, any army that stands against them seems to do so in the face of truly ludicrous odds, making the series' main arc of the Adversary threat seem increasingly redundant as the series continued and revealed more and more about our heroes' hidden powers and abilities.

Fittingly then, in an era that seems to spell the end of Fables as we have known it, the series does give us one prominent character death, apparently standing as a metaphor for the end of the series as it has run up until that point. Indeed, none other than Prince Charming himself meets his end in this volume, perhaps implying that a certain classical, fairytale, "magical" type of Fables story really is over. There'll be no more Pince ex machina coming to save the day. No more simple love stories. Of course, in Fables true love never has been simple, or else the late Prince would not leave a veritable gaggle of widows behind.

War & Pieces is at once a suitably large in scale story of love and war, yet at the same time a wonderful display of the kind of ridiculous storytelling that has largely up until this point been hidden behind spy tricks and plot twists, and yet stands a little barer than usual in this volume. I'm still very much looking forward to the next chapter, though.

*I tend to loathe spoiler warnings, but happen to know that one of my readers may well appreciate this particular one.