I really do wish that people were more inclined to not call and instead send e-mails, but alas the majority of my e-mails are spam mail and anyone important calls and I absolutely hate that. Stop doing it.
I’m also reading a lovely book called The Rook, which is pretty great in its first hundred pages or so. There’s a blurb somewhere that compares it to a cross between the Bourne series and War of the Worlds and that’s a fantastic comparison, I’d say.
I’m thinking of doing a Note (and by ‘thinking’ I mean ‘I already started a draft for’) titled something like “The Best of the Decade” wherein I talk about the best books, serieses, movies and games I watched, read and played that were released from 2010-2019. Still not sure how I’m going to approach movies though, because there are a lot of movies and I don’t really have a way of keeping track of movies I’ve seen.
Also this note is inspired by me reading Joker: Endgame and having read some of Scott Snyder’s run on Batman (which is much better than Tom King’s I think).
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Batman as a Horror Story
Should probably give you some background:
Comics goes through cycles occasionally, and different authors will have different turns leading different comics and characters and such; that’s just how it goes. When there’s a shift in direction, like in a company-wide reboot, this often leads to radical new styles and story types, like what we got with DC’s New 52 reboot, which was an attempt to try to simplify comics for new readers. It didn’t work, and some of the comics that came out were… less than great, but there were also some notable works that were pretty good, like Geoff Johns’s Aquaman (which is mostly the basis for the recent movie), or Gail Simone’s Batgirl, and of course Scott Snyder’s turn on Batman.
Right off the bat (okay that wasn’t intentional) we get a story arc that gives us some great Greg Capullo art, like this and this, and has wonderful character beats like Batman going insane while trapped in a maze under Gotham, and some dickwad claiming he’s actually Bruce’s long lost brother. And it keeps going! When the Joker is brought in, one of the first things that happens is that his face is sliced off, and he’s assumed dead; when it’s revealed he’s not dead, he staples his face back on and creeps the fudge out of me. And even when he gets a proper face again, he decides to Jokerize the city into violent zombie minions obsessed with turning everyone. Also maybe the Joker can’t be killed, judging by the time Gordon axed him in the chest and he just got up and kept going.
The point I’m making here is that some of the best moments in Scott Snyder’s run on Batman when he approached it as a horror story. Not all of the story arcs are stellar, but there are plenty of little moments that really stick out and are genuinely terrifying. To me at least, a guy who only sometimes dips his toe into horror fiction.
It got me thinking, “Does Batman work better as a horror story?”
“Not necessarily,” was the answer I think I landed on. Batman often carries heavy horror elements; like I said, that’s not new, and a lot of the most popular iterations of the character play with this idea. Batman: Arkham City has moments like the entrance to Wonder City (where you see several men hanging from the ceiling as one guy screams in horror and falls down with a sword in his back) that are incredibly effective in ramping up the tension and showcasing Batman’s Gallery of Rogues. But many of the popular iterations don’t rely on those horror elements too much; The Dark Knight has some frightening bits, sure, but I don’t know if I’d call the majority of it horror as much as a crime thriller?
I’ve complained a lot about how comics just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, using the same characters, and how because there’s not actually an overall end goal in sight it kind of feels pointless and no major changes really stick in a way that matters. And that’s true, but one thing that is an advantage of this form of storytelling is that different authors and artists can take a hold of the story and tell different kinds of stories with the characters. So Wonder Woman for instance, is sometimes an epic mythological story, or it’s a more straightforward superhero story, or it can be a coming-of-age story. Likewise, Batman can be a crime thriller (like with The Long Halloween) or it can be more horrorcentric (like with Endgame). And those work, because it’s using already-established elements, just in configurations that we haven’t seen before.
And Batman works really well as horror. A lot of the elements of horror are right there: the gothic environment, the widespread corruption, the useless asylum staff, the creepy asylum, underground mazes, infested sewers, and a killer clown. The stories don’t have to use all these elements to be a good Batman story, or even a good Batman horror story. No really, guys, please stop overusing the Joker. But those elements are right there, and I think it’s great that they’re being used in this way. I’m not suggesting that all Batman stories now need to be horror; I don’t want that, and I suspect the general public doesn’t either. But it’s a really cool take on the character and I’m surprised I hadn’t really thought about it more before.
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