The Fractal Hall Journal

Well, it is the Holiday Season. There’s an update waiting for you over at the Toybox, though.

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In a recent interview in the Independent (found, I think, via Neil Gaiman’s journal), Terry Pratchett makes a great point about fantasy fiction:

“When you were a kid,” he says, “you’d have a paint box and you’d take it to school. But there was always the rich kid, and he’d got the paint box with the silver and the gold and possibly the turquoise as well. Instead of doing the best you can with the colours you’d got, you really wish you had the colours he’d got. Fantasy gives you the silver and the gold and the turquoise.”

I think that’s true of all the things we’ve talked about here at the Hall, whether it’s fantasy, or SF, or heroes in tights. Sure, it’s possible to get overloaded now and then by the silver and gold and turquoise, but overall you wouldn’t want to make do without it. And that’s why I like the things I like. A story about a wealthy engineer with a drink problem could be brilliant in the right hands. An alcoholic engineer who gets kidnapped by terrorists could make a decent action film. An engineer who then fights back by building powered armour that can fly is, surely, the best option of them all. That’s the gold and the turquoise (or, indeed, the gold and the hot-rod red).

Which isn’t to say Option 1 wouldn’t be fine. Certainly the only option that would ever approach ‘literary merit’, a definition that conceals the metaphorical multitude of sins. Sometimes more grounded work does us some good, and sometimes we need the fantastical.

I can understand completely why someone wouldn’t like any genre stuff. Some people just aren’t set up to have their suspension of disbelief suspended that far. But I don’t really get it when people who have a particular genre thing, but really dislike another branch. Some SF fans dislike fantasy, while there are a lot of fantasy fans who don’t read any SF (just take a look at the balance of books in any given book shop’s SF&F section.) I mean, they’re really not that different. At all. Same goes for the bizarre loathing seen between some comic and manga fans, even taking into account the distorting effects of internet lunatics.

Of course, I would say that. The Journal is something of a broad church, in that if it’s nerdy, I probably like it. I may prefer certain fantasy authors over others, but that’s a writing style thing and I have no objection in principle to the odd elf.

One of the reasons I bring this up is that the fantasy genre’s been on mind. I started re-reading Terry Brooks’ Shannara series again (I think I’ve written about the series before here), and I don’t think I realised before quite how much he gets thing wrong. Thing is, I still like the books, but there doesn’t seem to be a way of describing why without it all sounding like a back-handed compliment.

The Sword of Shannara, the first one, has been taking longer than expected, and part of that is because it is the roughest. And it hits every thing that fantasy authors are criticised for doing; characters lifted wholesale from Tolkien and/or roleplaying tropes, lots and lots and lots of adverbs, odds are good he drew the map before he wrote the first word, and so on. Despite this, I still like it. In fact, it’s exactly the thing I was in the mood to read, because sometimes what you’re in the mood for is an elf belting stuff with a magic sword.

The thing is, if I hadn’t read so much criticism all over the place about adverbs and maps in fantasy novels, I doubt I would have noticed. It underlines how the majority of dos and don’ts when it comes to this kind of thing are purely matters of personal preference at best, and a hoary load of old cobblers at worst.

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I’ve said before that I’m not likely to be doing a delineation on Spider-Man. The character’s one of the most over-examined in comics, and writing a breakdown of the basics doesn’t strike me as worthwhile. Spider-Man seems to be forever getting back to basics, most recently during the notorious Brand New Day thing. Add in the discussions about the roots of the character that have been occuring over the past few years outside of the comics “community” due to the popularity of the films, then I’d guess another go around by me wouldn’t interesting to read, or all that interesting to write.

There is one thing I do fancy a crack at, though. Let’s posit, as I have been doing, that Spider-Man is Peter Parker’s arch-enemy, and vice versa. What does this tell us about what villains are for, and what does it tell us about their purpose in superhero stories in particular?

Let’s accept the truism that the mechanism of story is conflict. The primary conflict in superhero stories is between the heroes and the villains, obviously. And what is Spider-Man, as a character, always praised for, ad nauseum? Peter Parker’s real life (ho ho) problems. Can’t pay bills, can’t look after his aunt, can’t bring assault charges against Flash Thompson. The reason these problems are compelling in a superhero story, as opposed to being seen as an annoying tangent, is because they are Spider-Man’s difficulties. By a similar token, Spider-Man’s actions have repercussions for Parker. I’m not saying we’re dealing with separate personalities here; I think of all the superhero identity dichotomies, Spider-Man has probably the most integrated personality consistant across both identities. I’m saying that the two identities, while the same person, are in conflict with each other. And conflict in a superhero story means conflict between heroes and villains.

So, how do we define what a villain, or a hero, is? Not exactly an easy question. Maybe back in the day we could identify the two according to the colour of their hats, but it didn’t take long for ambiguity about even that to creep into popular culture. There’s plenty of things about modern culture that we can moan about, but one thing we have got right is that, regardless of our tendency to label anything we’re broadly unfamiliar with as strange, unnatural, even sinister, it doesn’t take that much time for a vocal opposition to that standpoint to spring up. I suspect that we’re good at pre-judgement, but we’re better at picking a fight. I suppose both things rise from the same instinct.

Why have superheroes, or supervillains, at all? At the most simple level, they were created to make money, obviously. They were successful- hugely successful, by any metric, and continue to be- because they’re a relatively simple way to show the extraordinary. Even today, the cinema fulfils the same purpose. We could argue that there’s nothing simple about the lengths a production goes to to film something that costs over a hundred million dollars, but I’d wager it’s a hell of a lot simpler than figuring out how to actually make someone fly.

People respond to the demonstration of the extraordinary. That’s the key. The drama of conflict is the simplest template to use, and the almost comical simplicity of good vs. evil the most efficient engine. Using incredible powers against plain criminals soon becomes too easy, offering no challenge, so soon we have villains that mirror the heroes, less altruistic characters with fantastic abilities.

There’s an elegance in symmetry, and as we’ve already fallen hook line and sinker for a black and white world, we begin looking for characters that mirror and invert our heroes. Was the Joker ever really meant to be the Batman’s arch-enemy? Did Bill Finger sit down and decide that a dark hero needed a bright villain, a twisted inversion? I have no idea, but organically that’s what the Joker came to be, perhaps not deliberately but as the most obvious vessel for the concept.

A shortcut to giving a hero an arch-enemy is to either mirror or invert the character. I doubt this is an original observation, by the way. It strikes me as the kind of thing that would have come up over at the Absorbascon, say. I don’t recall reading it elsewhere, though apologies if I’m repeating something someone else has already talked about.

An inversion of a character is the character’s opposite. The Joker is the antithesis of the Batman, and I’m sure we don’t need to go over the whole dark/bright, order/chaos thing to prove this. A character’s mirror, on the other hand, is essentially identical, but has opposite motivations. Batman’s most direct mirror would be the Wrath, though he’s rarely used. I suspect Catwoman would be the most obvious equivalent in his classic rogue’s gallery, or maybe Simone’s take on Catman.

There are plenty of others to be found. Luthor is Superman’s inversion, a man who thinks he’s a god to Superman’s a god who thinks he’s a man, while General Zod is his mirror. Iron Man has many mirrors, from the Crimson Dynamo through the Iron Monger to the Armour Wars’ Firepower (anyone remember him?). The Mandarin is his most obvious inversion, though time has weakened this. In the past, he was a communist sorceror to Stark’s capitalist science-adventurer. These days, communism isn’t an issue and his magic is just alien technology. Here’s an idea; Stark needs an inversion, a Mephisto-like being of magic. By the same token, actually, Dr Strange could do with a technology-based nemesis (his mirrors being numerous, Baron Mordo chief amongst them). Along with, you know, an ongoing title. Actually, I can’t believe he doesn’t have one, so it’s probably just me having not read enough of his comics. Suggestions in comments, please.

Thinking about it, I think this is the very thing that Mark Waid realised when he thought up leather-clad Magical Mister Doom. Change the Fantastic Four’s nemesis from mirror to inversion, open up new avenues of conflict. I know some criticise, but I liked the leather-Doom stuff and I think a lot of Waid’s FF work was spot on, although I lost interest during the somewhat hamfisted WMD-laden invasion of Iraq Latveria.

But back to the Spider’s “real life” problems. Spider-Man and Peter Parker’s conflict is between two halves of the same person, and as such the are both mirrors and inversions of one another. Which isn’t to say we don’t see external examples of this, of course, Venom being the mirror and the Green Goblin (perhaps) being the inversion. But Spider-Man and Parker are mirrors of each other (they have the same powers in and out of costume, and the same personalities) and inversions (Parker is seen as a kind, clever but dopey and largely useless man who’s secretly a criminal and who lies to everyone who’s close to him, Spider-Man is seen as a criminal but is in fact a selfless hero, and so on) at the same time.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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From the memoirs of Ieuan “\/4LL3yB01″ Thomas; poet, raconteur, and Gold-medalist in the Halo IX Capture The Flag event at the 2020 Olympics.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the Spa shop on the corner. I can never remember if we had sixteen systems linked in the Christmas LAN party when I was fifteen, or fifteen linked when I was sixteen, or whether by that point we looked old enough to get into one of the big clubs in Cardiff with IDs run off on Jack Richards’ uncle’s laser printer.

All the Christmases run down towards the Darkshore, because we didn’t have school in the morning so we could really concentrate on leveling up our Night Elves.

It was raining. It was always raining at Christmas, except for that one time when everything froze and Dad had to take Mrs Gregory to hospital after she slipped outside the Station Inn. Mam always had that grim look on that face whenever someone brought it up.

Times were hard, but we never went without. Not a Christmas went buy where we children didn’t have food from M&S, or at the very least Tesco Finest, while Mam and Dad made due with Value brands. The season could be tough, especially for the working men. I remember one Boxing Day where Dad was nowhere to be found, and when I asked Mam about it she said he’d been called out because the Council’s servers had been buggered again.

“The budget’s been tight, bach,” she said to me. “He had to go into work. Those poor souls have had to make do with Google Maps ever since they took satnav off the gritters.”

My brother Dai would always take me to Blackwood high street in the evenings of the school holidays. We’d sit there, lit up by the warm blue glow of the neon tubes he’d installed under the chassis. We’d watch as the multi-coloured cars would drive up and down in endless procession, occasionally pausing in the Asda car park. Dai’s eyes would mist over with sadness, the deep cerulean Subaru Impreza WRX forever beyond his grasp. I missed the nuance of his melancholy, as I was trying to read his old Uncanny X-Mens by the tiny light cast by his dashboard dials. Mam disapproved, of course, believing she’d forever lost her eldest son once his father had let him install a spoiler on the Punto.

Always on Christmas night there was music. Dai would roll his eyes as Dad put on his Springsteen records and dance around with Mam. My brother could bear it for perhaps half an hour before sneaking upstairs to a crafty fag and happy hardcore on the iPod. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the Blossom Hill (three bottles for a tenner), sang a song with words I couldn’t follow; and then everybody laughed and Mam ushered me quickly out of the room and off to bed.

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the unending drizzle, I could see the flashing colours that covered the houses of all the people who tried to out-do each other with ever more elaborate Christmas light dioramas. I turned the monitor on, slumped into my favourite chair. I typed some words into the password field, and then I logged in.

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To this day, these incidents remain barely reported. There was a flurry of news coverage in the British media during the time, but curiously almost no-one in the media picked up on the alleged occult connections, or even the rumours regarding a possible relationship between Agosto and Winfield.

What is known for certain is that following an ill-fated second week of filming and facing the inevitable abandonment of filming, Winfield did not show up to the final day on set, and it was the early evening when Agosto found him hanged in the cottage where she had been staying. Several days later, on Christmas Eve, Agosto herself was killed in a collision on the M25. She had been returning to London, and was found with several boxes of research material on Daniel Morgan that had been collected by Harry Grant and passed on to Winfield.

The story that later emerged indicated that the two had been having an affair. Both were married, things had likely gone sour, no doubt exarcebating an already stressful production. As a result Winfield took his own life, and though the coroner found no intoxicants during post-mortem it was generally accepted that Agosto’s accident had probably occurred while she was under the influence.

The timeline of events preceding their deaths is unclear for several reasons. Many of the crew were never interviewed during the short inquiry that followed, several refusing point blank to talk to investigators. It remains a mystery why this was never pursued up by anyone in authority. Much footage had been rendered unretrievable. Mirroring the earlier accidental destruction of White Ship Films’ negatives, most of the tape used degraded during transport back to the company’s offices in London. Quality control may have been an issue for one set of tape, but the documentary segments of the shoot had been recorded on a different type and different brand. It seemed an odd coincidence that both would types degrade within the same narrow time frame.

From the few written accounts available, it’s clear that the incidents on the set increased in severity over the final week. The predicted bad weather caused most of the delays, and contributed to the damage that continued to happen to the crew’s equipment. During the daylight hours no apparitions were reported, but items would go missing and more than one person reported hearing strange banging noises coming from the empty buildings they worked around.

Towards the end of the week, a replacement generator had to be brought in after an engineer was injured by the equipment they had been using. The injury he received was never specified. The new item arrived in time for the last session of night shooting.

The final night was the worst for the production. Many of the crew who were present that night did not return the next day, contributing to the delay in discovery of Winfield’s body. No records remains of the exact events, but several strange things were seen, and much audible phenomena was recorded. Needless to say, everything captured on tape was lost when the storage media degraded.

To date, no-one has attempted to adapt any of Daniel Morgan’s work. The rights are still available, though both White Ship and Conrad Media are no longer ongoing concerns. Most of the crew involved in both attempts at filming have since left the industry, and the ones who remain are clear in their belief that another attempt should not be made. They are not alone in believing that Morgan’s work is cursed.

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Time, I think, for a Christmas ghost story.

During the winter of 1996, Conrad Media began filming a television series and documentary based on various pieces of Daniel Morgan’s short fiction. The BBC had subcontracted the work to them following the acquisition of the licence from Harry Grant.

Conrad were a dependable firm made up of veteran film and television producers, and were seen as a safe and budget-conscious option for a production with an already disastrous history. Filming was almost stopped due to the somewhat superstitious views widepsread at the BBC. Corporate gossip had tagged the endeavour as doomed from the outset.

Bad luck was one thing, the prospect of financial failure another. Not one of the naysayers came close to predicting the extent of the tragic events that followed.

Principle photography started on December 9th, and was to continue until the weekend of the 21st. Various locations had been chosen in and around the Rhondda and Rhymney Valleys, not far from the colliery where Morgan had once worked. Particularly convenient for the production was an extensive plot of land that sported a disused textile factory in surprisingly good order and various buildings, including a modestly-sized farmhouse. The land had once been owned by an industrialist who had made his fortune in the area, before losing it all following the Second World War. The reason it had remained relatively untouched by local vandals soon became apparent.

Filming proceeded to plan during the first week, despite several significant technical glitches. Equipment malfunctioned on-set, and a number of different vehicles were unable to be restarted after parking outside the factory. Despite the hitches, the crew were just about able to keep schedule. A forecast of poor weather in the following week convinced Adam Winfield, the director and one of the main stockholders in Conrad, to bring the night shoots they had planned to do during the final couple of days forward to that weekend.

Delyth Agosto, the actress playing the main character in the series, was the first person to report seeing strange activity on set. Within minutes of beginning the first scene, outside the ground floor of the factory, she complained of seeing people inside staring out through the windows at her. Winfield sent several people inside, but they found nothing. Throughout the first couple of hours, Agosto became more and more agitated, certain at first that the crew were playing a practical joke. Matters became worse after the production manager convinced her it wasn’t their doing, as it was at this point that she started to believe that the events were of unnatural origin. The shoot ended when the portable generator that powered the camera set-up shorted out.

The next day Agosto told Winfield of her intention to quit. She had endured a restless sleep during what was left of the night, convinced that a presence had followed her back from the set to the holiday letting that had been provided for her, an old miner’s cottage not far from the shoot. Winfield was able to talk her round by agreeing to limit the rest of the filming she would have to do at night, and putting it back to the end of the following week.

On the Sunday night, the crew had prepared to shoot without Agosto at the old farmhouse. Whether provoked by her previous behaviour or due to an actual increase in unexplainable activity, this time others reported seeing movement within the house, and in the surrounding area. Winfield struggled to keep order during the long night, as piece after piece of equipment failed and more people claimed to see figures watching them. Winfield was able to cap the rising levels of panic until the end of the scheduled shoot, an achievement made all the more impressive following his admission the next day to his DoP that not only had he too been seeing indistinct figures throughout the site, but had also heared someone whispering behind his shoulder more than once during the night, when there was no one there to be making a noise.

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Core Genre: Science Fiction. Space opera mainly though not always, and shading towards the Original Star Trek horrorish take, under Geoff Johns in particular.

As the architect of Jordan’s return from the dead, and the principle GL writer for a number of years, Johns is going to be the major influence on this post. He’s done more than pretty much any other writer to show us who Jordan is, and what makes him tick.

I’m not keen at all on the characterisation of Hal Jordan as, essentially, a thick ignorant prick. Hal Jordan Internet Joke is somewhat played out. Let’s accept he has a somewhat privileged, conservative mindset, evidenced by an alpha male jet jockey backstory and as originated during the Hard Travelling Heroes era. Is he small- or narrow-minded? Of course not. As Johns has gone to lengths to show, he’s focused. This is both a positive and a negative character trait. He’s as precise and instinctive and as you’d want in a test pilot or, indeed, a space cop, but this does lead to missing some of the surrounding detail of a given situation. It makes him stubborn, and single minded, but this is a world away from being narrow minded. Gardner, on the other hand…

There’s a recklessness about the character too. But a certain kind of recklessness, not the same as Oliver Queen’s, for example. He’s honest and fearless, as all Green Lanterns are, with the formidable will that goes along with that. Marry that to precision and focus, not to mention confidence, and you’re going to get a character who does rush in.

Funny, but some of the first posts at the Journal were about what makes a Green Lantern’s tick. At the time, I mentioned that I prefer GLs to simply not know fear, rather than to know fear but be able to overcome it. Johns has again made explicit that overcoming fear is the important thing, as seen in fearful new GL recruits who are still vulnerable to yellow. To be fair, I’ve been happy to change my viewpoint on this, as Johns has built some great work from this foundation, in particular as regards the different Corps he’s been creating.

I’m still fond of the idea that GLs are honest because they have no fear of the consequences of the truth. There’s been nothing to contradict this either. In fact, I think it makes a lot of sense, with Jordan in particular. Focused, willful. Damn straight he tells the truth, and he’s not scared to do it either. Not in the slightest.

Let’s take a second here to talk about the Guardians. They work best when portrayed as grumpy space-bureaucrats. Galactic police captains who want Jordan’s god-damned badge and gun because he’s gone too damn far this time. Unfortunately, they’ve been known to drift too far into big blue sky daddy territory. This doesn’t work as well, because then they become DC’s Odin to Hal Jordan’s Thor. A conflict between child and parent, an endless cycle of replacing the father. They leave the kids to fend for themselves, then they come back, then they die, then they come back, now it looks like they’re on the way out again. Wrong way of looking at it. They shouldn’t be nurturing their adoptive children to take over after they’re gone. They should be your cosmic boss, hypertensive and pissed off that you haven’t finished the monthly spreadsheet yet.

This post’s about Hal Jordan specifically rather than Green Lanterns generally. That’s because I think there are factors that are specific to getting his character right that don’t quite transer to other Lanterns, Kyle Rayner in particular. The first two factors, however, are the classics (and due to this there’s a lot in a GL’s character that will overlap with other members of the Corps):

A) Honest.
B) Fearless.
C) Power ring that creates things willed into existence. Is green. Obviously. Need recharging.
D) Blue cosmic bosses.

D) is the primary way in which a villain is located and put into context. Clunky kind of exposition via briefing, perhaps, but if it worked for Hill Street Blues then it can’t be completely inelegant. GLs aren’t really detectives, anyhow, and a GL story is different to a Batman story for this reason. There are, of course, exceptions, and this is when the power ring comes in. GL drinking game: everytime they “scan” something with the bugger. You’ll be plastered before DC Nation.

You know, having said they’re not really detectives, I have to admit I quite like the times where we’re reminded that the Corps isn’t so much a group of superheroes as it is a group of coppers. You know,w hen they make reports, or refer to sentencing procedures and breaches of intergalactic law. I like how it grounds the incredible. Jordan using the ring at one point as a CSI-style scene of crime scanner (for an autopsy, I think) was pretty cool. I like the way it suggests GL rookies are taught specific complicated construct patterns or designs that there’s no way they could come up with themselves.

The ring, then, becomes both a tool of location and the primary means of interaction. Honesty is a mode of interacting with their world, either through action or communication. A lack of fear informs this too, as well as shaping the way a Lantern locates an antagonist.

Conclusion: There’s not much to sum up, in that the personality of a Green Lantern is clearly delineated already in the central concept, not to mention the job Geoff Johns has done in exploring what makes Jordan tick. The last thing I’ll say is that although the job requirement means a Lantern has to be a certain way, I’ve always liked the way the different characters are shown to be very different too each other. Honesty and fearlessness does not automatically make you a good person, after all. Gardner’s obnoxious as hell, and honesty and a lack of fear only exacerbates his worst tendencies. I may return to this later, as I suspect both Gardner and Kyle Rayner’s profiles would be fairly different to Jordan’s.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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A new strip up over at the Toybox.

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I think it’s probably time to take some of the assertions I’ve made in the delineations and try and explain what I mean. Gibbering about core genres and a character’s engineering can only take us so far, and I really should attempt to prove that I’m not talking completely out of my arse. Batman was the first character we looked at, and he’s as good a character as any to start with again.

In the initial post, I noted the character’s four most important factors as being his distinctive costume, fighting skills, detective skills, and gadgets. And as Friend Plok pointed out in comments, Bruce Wayne’s practically limitless fortune should also be noted. I don’t know about anyone else, but I always find it difficult to pick a ‘favourite’ of anything, be it music, film or comics. There’s just too much great stuff in the world. But if I had to pick one Batman story, it would have to be “Gothic”, Grant Morrison’s contribution to the old “Legends of the Dark Knight” title, and one of the main reasons why everyone looked forward to his run on the main book (and, unfortunately, probably one of the main reasons why everyone was disappointed when he took a different approach to his earlier one).

I suppose you could argue that the story edges too far to the horror/supernatural end of things, and too far from the crime/noir core genre. But then it is called Gothic. Plus, it’s meant to be a Year One era tale, and back during Batman’s actual first year of publication the book touched on a lot of these themes (something that Matt Wagner has more recently extrapolated to great effect in his Batman: Dark Moon Rising series). Besides, gangsters and organised crime play a large part in the story, so we’re never that far away from typical Batman territory.

There are a few other things we could poke holes in too, if we were enclined to. Bruce Wayne’s childhood connection to the bad guy is a little too coincidental, but Morrison uses it to such disturbing effect that we should probably let it slide. After all, it doesn’t break the mechanism of the story. There’s also the matter of Thomas Wayne, which we’ll look at next.

Detective skills: Essential for a Batman story, and the character’s fairly well-served here by Morrison. It’s important to note, I think, that we don’t need a carefully crafted Agatha Christie mystery every issue. A fair-play ‘tec yarn is a bit much to ask every single time out. But showing a little of Batman’s legendary powers of reason shouldn’t be. As it is, it’s enough that Batman is able to figure out that at least one murder was due to a double-crossing crook.

I may be reading more into this next bit than I should, but bear with me. At more than one point, Thomas Wayne points his son in the right direction, through dreams and the accidental use of a misfiled audio recording. This will likely annoy those who dislike supernatural overtones, and in terms of story is the second use of coincidence which is usually regarded as bad form (you can maybe get away with one bit of luck in lieu of plot progression, but no more). On the other hand, the use of the subconscious in deductive reasoning is a well-established theme, which may have guided the Batman’s hand. I suppose it is a bit of a stretch, but Morrison’s recent Batman stories show us that the operation of Batman’s subconscious is something the writer considers important to explore, and there’s no reason to think this wasn’t his first go at it. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Gothic is obscure about whether or not demons and ghosts are involved. It’s explicit that they are.

Bonus Batman cleverness:

Fighting/acrobatic skills: Well, this is Batman we’re talking about. You really need the pictures?

Gadgets:

You know, it’s the bat-gyro that recently tipped me off to something I’d never realised in god knows how many years of reading this story. Long before Wagner’s recent retelling, ‘Gothic’ was Morrison’s take on Detective Comics #31 and 32’s ‘Batman versus the Vampire’. Mad Monk: Check. Creepy European setting: Check. Improbable Bat-Gyro voyage across the Atlantic: Absolutely.

Oh, and before I forget:

Costume: Present and correct. And a good ‘un too, thanks to veteran artist Klaus Jansen.

Rich-boy Bruce Wayne: Well, the manor house, gadgets, and several mentions of attending private school takes care of that. Plus the man servant. Speaking of which-

At least one essential member of supporting cast: Ladies and gents, Alfred the Butler.

Batman as raving nutcase: As I’ve noted before, I don’t see it as essential myself, but it is a popular take and Morrison gives us plenty here. Apart from the crazy dreams and, for that matter, dressing up as a bat, here he is relaxing in a room full of stopped clocks.

What’s the importance of these elements? For it to be a Batman story, these Batman-specific elements have to be engine. They have to drive everything forward.

Let’s accept that stories, certainly superhero stories, are all about conflict. And let’s say that the conflict here is made up from two types of interaction, the first being Batman’s method of locating the villain, the second being his method of dealing with the villain. The first type requires no direct interaction, as by definition this occurs during the second of the two types of interaction.

Batman’s one of the easiest heroes to use for the first part, because he is, famously, the world’s greatest detective. I think this is why he’s one fo the most enduring of these characters. His villains are as fascinating as he is, and we learn all about them through his use of detective work. I think this may be why he’s generally more engaging than, say, Superman. He has better tools to analyse his world, and as he’s the main character with whom we identify with, by extension we as readers are better placed, too.

Magic expository Thomas Wayne dreams aside, in Gothic Batman fully explores the history and circumstance of Mr Whisper, the primary antagonist, in detail before he ever faces him. We find out Whisper’s backstory, his connection with Gotham, and eventually the ins and outs of his evil plot, all via Batman’s observations. Batman is well equipped to place Whisper into context.

In this story, Whisper’s context is, in escalating levels of importance, Plague-era Austria, Gotham Town, Gotham City, the Gotham criminal underworld, and finally Bruce Wayne/Batman himself (we could also, I suppose, throw in the Devil). Batman uses his detective skills to reason all of this out, with help from his gadgets (Bat-Gyro transport is apparently a lot more efficient that you’d likely believe) and, in the strongest twist of all, his own wealthy background. Had he not been rich, he likely would not have gone to private school, and his past connection with Mr Whisper would not have existed.

Finally, the culmination of all of this how Batman deals with his villain. And Batman deals with all his villains pretty much the same way. By beating the shit out of them.

I mean, he intimidates them first; this is where the costume, of course, plays its part. The panel I use above, from when Batman goes after Whisper, is a real fuck yeah moment. But essentially, he gives them a kicking.

Whisper is immortal, so Batman doesn’t take him out, or even get to send him to Arkham, but I think that’s ok within the context of this story. He saves Gotham (er, spoiler), and in doing so ensures that Whisper’s soul is forfeit. It’s implied that Whisper is finally dealt with by the spirit of an abused woman who cannot rest until he’s been taken care of, and really that’s a good enough resolution for me.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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…Thursdays means a new update at the Toybox of Solitude.

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