Holy 1980s, Batman! (100 Books ... 54 Left)

43. Batman: Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli
44. Batman: Year Two by Mike W. Barr, Alan Davis, and Todd McFarlane
45. Batman: Full Circle by Mike W. Barr and Alan Davis
46. Batman: A Death in the Family by Jim Starlin, Jim Aparo, and Mike DeCarlo

I think that rereading Crisis and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow is what prompted me to pick up these particular dark knight works that I haven't read in the better part of a decade and a half. They're some of the more prominent late-1980s Batman stories (some others include the Ten Nights of the Beast story as well as Gotham By Gaslight, which places Batman in the late 19th Century and has him solve the crime of Jack the Ripper), as post-Crisis, DC wanted to retell the origins of each of its major characters, keeping most of the more famous elements but updating them for a more modern audience (see also John Byrne's Man of Steel miniseries).

Miller does this very well in Year One. He tells a story of a young Bruce Wayne returning to Gotham after training for at least a few years to become a vigilante; concurrently, Lieutenant James Gordon arrives in Gotham after transferring from Chicago (Gordon becomes commissioner in Year Two). The villains in this story are not the usual ones you expect from a Batman story; instead, they are the Gotham mafia and the corruption that lies within the police department and city hall. Miller's story and Mazzucchelli's art are excellent film noir fare and the parallel stories of Gordon's fight against police corruption as well as his marital problems, and Bruce Wayne's becoming Batman and creating the "millionaire playboy" persona are excellently told (a great subplot, btw, is the origin of Catwoman as a prostitute who decides to become a thief and the presence of a pre-Two-Face Harvey Dent, still a prosecuter).

Year Two, however, doesn't hold up as well. When I was 13 and read it for the first time, I was blown away by the artwork and the villain. It's not Gotham corruption that Batman fights against, it is The Reaper, a vigilante who terrorized the criminal element of Gotham back in the 1960s and has returned. The difference between Batman and The Reaper is that The Reaper kills in a gruesome fashion. After Batman encounters The Reaper the first time, he decides he needs to use a gun to combat him, and he also needs to ally himself with Gotham's criminal underworld. This causes a rift between him and Commissioner Gordon and also causes him to be "partnered" with Joe Chill, the man who killed his parents. In Full Circle, The Reaper returns although the person in the costume is Joe Chill's son, who found The Reaper's costume after the original Reaper fell to his death in Year Two.

Both Year Two and Full Circle don't really do it for me anymore, although I can totally see why I loved them when I was 13. The reason Batman has to use a gun (not only a gun but the gun that killed his parents) never seems that clear, as well as the total coincidence of him being paired with his father's killer (also, The Reaper happens to be the father of the woman Bruce Wayne is dating--how conveeeeeeeeeeenient) seems contrived. The Reaper himself seems like he's a product of the decade, when Marvel was still overtaking DC in a lot of ways, because the villain is a cross between Wolverine and The Punisher, both of whom were outselling Batman like crazy (Batman would fight The Punisher in a crossover book in the 1990s and there is a brief, hilarious encounter between the two in the JLA/Avengers book). Both Davis and McFarlane went on to do Marvel books shortly after this--Davis did the X-Men-related book Excalibur and McFarlane became a superstar with Spider-Man (and would leave Marvel to create Spawn), so it makes sense that Year Two and Full Circle lack the nuance of Year One.

A Death in the Family, on the other hand, is a disaster. This is easily the most famous storyline from the 1980s because it's the one where Robin dies. As explained in the introduction, a few years before this story, Dick Grayson, who had been Robin since 1940, quit being Robin to become Nightwing (he is actually currently Batman ... Bruce Wayne "died" at the end of Final Crisis) and lead the Teen Titans. What the writers of Batman did was give Batman a new Robin, Jason Todd. According to his origin, which is recounted in A Death in the Family, Batman found Jason trying to steal the tires off the Batmobile and took him in then trained him to be Robin (yeah, it doesn't make sense to me and it makes even less sense than Dick Grayson's origin but we'll go with it).

Thing is, this version of Robin didn't really work. The fans didn't like him that much and DC obviously wanted to return the character to his darker roots, as Miller had done with Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, so they created a storyline wherein at the end of Batman #427, Robin was caught in an explosion and fans could call one of two 1-900 numbers to vote on whether or not he lived or died. He died by a slim margin of a couple hundred votes, and the story accomplished what it set out to do because over the next couple of years, Batman became a darker character and even when a new Robin was introduced (Tim Drake this time), the darkness stayed (probably because the company allowed Robin more independence and there were quite a number of Batman stories without Robin).

The story itself is pretty awful. Robin is "grounded" by Batman because while on a drugbust, he blows his cover and acts impulsively. This causes him to "go for a long walk" to his old neighborhood. He encounters a woman who gives him a bunch of his dead parents' personal items and then discovers that the woman he thought was his mother was really his stepmother and his birth mother is still alive. He narrows the field down to three women, all of whom are in the Middle East. Meanwhile, The Joker has escaped from Arkham and is headed to the Middle East because he has stolen a nuclear missle and wants to sell it on the black market. Batman, naturally, follows. Eventually, Robin finds his mother only to discover that she is being blackmailed by The Joker and when all is said and done Robin dies. Then, The Joker becomes the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations (complete with cameo by the Ayatollah!) and tries to kill the entire General Assembly, but Superman and Batman save the day. The Joker, btw, is not captured but is presumed "dead" because his helicopter crashes into the East River (he would not return to comics for another two years).

It's no wonder they brought Jason Todd back from the dead, and I think that if the storyline hadn't been something out of a bad A-Team episode it might have still held water. But all that really remains is the "controversy" surrounding it.

Next up: To Kill a Mockingbird and Green Lantern