Spooky Batman! - Batman: Gothic

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If it hasn't already happened, then it will happen very soon: Grant Morrison will be considered the best Batman writer tied with Frank Miller. His eight year epic, consistently playing on, adding to, and stretching the Bat mythos to it's limits is truly amazing; although, his first Batman story, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is perhaps the clearest glimpse into the unconscious mind of a man who dresses up like a bat. Either story could be the best Batman story ever.

Yet, I've never heard Morrison's 1990 mini-series, Batman: Gothic mentioned as a classic. While it may not have the vast scope of the aforementioned two book, it's still quite good. And it delivers exactly what it's title promises. A Batman story draped in the Gothic imagery of 19th century European literature. It's got towering landscapes, unspeakable evil, occult magik, and impenetrable shadows. What more can you ask? Plus, it shows what happens before Bruce and his parents saw that Zorro movie (then became Batman and got murdered, respectively). 

A German priest explains to Batman that the horrifying truth about hell is that it exists within ourselves. Ironic to tell Batman this, as he seems like the person who understands this concept best. He's irrecoverably guilty over his parents death he must be a costumed madman intent on stopping super-criminals. This unknowable knowledge of despair is the horror in Gothic literature. In Edgar Allen Poe's the Tell Tale Heart, it's not horrifying to know there's a beating heart underneath the floorboards (merely messy); however, it's very horrifying to know you're the person who forced the heart there in the first place--you're the reason this accursed muscle will never stop beating! Your own mind becomes a personal hell, an inescapable prison of torture. The internalized knowledge that you made an unfixable mistake, so ghosts of your past are going to haunt you the rest of your life. This is Gothic horror. 

And it's a fear every character in the story comes to realize. What is hell, really? Gotham city is hell, with steam rising up from the sewer grates, monsters lurking in ever dark corner, hidden catacombs full of knight-demons underneath your feet. Thus, Batman is the King of Hell: as powerful as Satan himself. But as Paradise Lost shows, even Satan is in his own prison.

The story starts with the death of Gotham's most high profile mobsters. The crooks ban together, make a Bat-signal, and beg him for protection against an old menace they brutally murdered who's back from the grave to end their mortal lives! Batman tells the crooks to "rot in hell!" but looks into the case anyway, since he's a master detective. 

Batman finds that Mr. Whisper, the man without shadows, is killing Gotham mobsters--and he also soon learns there's a strange connection between Mr. Whisper and the Wayne family past. As a child, Bruce went to a boarding school where a particularly sadistic teacher did terrible things to children/ Batman finds that Mr. Whisper was his teacher, as well as a 300 year old demon in a Faustian pact with the devil. The deeper he investigates, the stranger the case becomes--resulting in Mr. Shadow's plot to use the architecture of a Christian church to summon the devil with the musical amplification properties of the church's steeples! 

The story is delightfully anti-Christian, alluding to the strange and disturbing habits of Christian authority figures behind closed doors. Batman also must face the Hell in his own mind through haunting dreams of his father. In one dream, Thomas Wayne shouts, "I'm not dead!"--is this a foreshadowing to Grant's future Batman stories?

Klaus Janson's art is perfect in the story as well, since it highlights the Gothic elements best seen visually. One reason I think Gothic novels are boring, but Gothic comics and film are interesting, is because the novels spend lots of words describing light, reflection, and shadow. A visual medium can just show this, and Janson is the perfect artist to do it. In most frames, the characters cower in the haunting landscapes, literally over-shadowed by the giant architecture that surrounds them. 

The way architecture plays out in Gothic fiction is similar to memory: it is a relic of the past that stands firm and cannot be removed. It was built to protect it's users, but over time the buildings will crumble and encumber them. Bruce Wayne is driven, like his father was, to restore a harmony to Gotham city that never existed. He haunts Gotham as a ghost of it's past, trying to repent the city of it's many sins--yet he's destined to perpetual failure. That makes Batman the perfect Gothic hero, doesn't it?