I've mentioned before I started pretty young in comic books (age 11ish) and had absolutely no idea what was going on with them so I just started buying the "greatest hits." I bought some Iron Man because the War Machine armor just debuted and that was, to a pre-teen, the hottest shit. I bought X-MEN Volume 2 #1 because literally everyone in the world did back then, and multiple copies at that. And I bought Spider-Man because it was Spider-Man, duh. Batman I never really latched onto, though, despite Batman also being the HOTTEST SHIT at the time. Between the two Michael Keaton led movies and Batman: The Animated Series (TAS) just being the best take for the character possible, in my opinion (which is one I still hold to this day and will divert to in a second), it was literally the best time to be a Batman fan and yet when it came to my newfound love of comic books, I never really tried to make the pointy-earned one a staple in my allowance-based purchases.
A large chunk of the reason why I think I never got wrapped up into a monthly Batman fix in my youth is, quite simply, because he was handled so well in other media. While the movies may have fallen apart after those first two Keaton/Burton movies those were enough of a springboard into the character for me to fall head over heels in love with The Animated Series, which was just and is (again, to me still) the purest distillation of the character and his universe. Every weekly adventure of this animated version of the Caped Crusader had a huge emotional impact because it was typically such a hyper-focused lens on the malevolent or tragic backstory of an important Batman character, usually the villains. I don't remember much about my childhood but to this day I still feel goosebumps about episodes like when Harvey Dent is scarred and finally succumbs to his Two-Face split persona, or the melancholy end to Clayface's debut episode where he becomes a literal husk of what he used to be after the brutal accosting that made actor Matt Hagen the monster he was. Batman in both the movies and the cartoon were simple, idealized versions of the character and his beloved Gotham City that in any time will always stand up on their own because of how perfectly they presented those variations of the Batverse. Meanwhile, at this time, the Batman books themselves were... not so much.
Batman in the early 1990's was kind of the breeding ground for what was wrong with comic books in the 90's. One, there were like six different Bat-books at the time at any given moment because of course their was, he was hands down the hottest property in the world. And all of those book were heavily embroiled in another one of the worst offenders of comic books of that era and that was the giant, multi-mulit-multi-part crossover "event," in this particular case the "Knightfall" saga. As a relative newbie to comic books at the time with a whole five dollars in his pocket on a weekly basis to buy funny books with, seeing several months of story consuming this landscape of Batman books with crossovers stories that numbered legit upwards of twenty parts was very daunting to say the least. Oh, and then there was the whole idea that for a solid year-plus, Batman wasn't even Batman, he was a series of replacement actors after getting his back shattered, which adolescent me couldn't reconcile.
Despite all my better judgement, though, I hopped onto the "Cataclysm" event train a little bit due to cajoling by my LCS guy who had gotten me hooked on the Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel NIGHTWING book of the time, which I adored. I was convinced by him and some regulars that this was an event actually worth catching. "Cataclysm," for those who don't know, was a Batverse story where a sizable earthquake hit Gotham and completely decimated the city to a point where it and its remaining citizens were essentially abandoned by the rest of the country; not the best thing to be when your city is home to some of the most sadistic and murderous human and super beings alive. But I was won over to that version of the Batverse because, as with Batman: TAS mentioned above, the event was very much a character-centric one that really emphasized the personalities of Batman's villains and his Gothamite supporting cast, especially the likes of Jim Gordon and Renee Montoya (who existed in the comics basically because she was about to exist in TAS) during such a harrowing scenario. And seeing as how one of the biggest architects of Renee's push to the secondary character forefront during the time after Cataclysm known as "No Man's Land" was, yes, Greg Rucka (IT'S ALL COMING TOGETHER!), well, when he took over DETECTIVE COMICS following the event, that's when I started buying Batman comics on a monthly basis for the first time in my then-young life.
Okay, now that the "Internet recipe anecdote" intro is done and I laid the groundwork for what lured me into this era of Batman, let's talk about what made this few years of Bat-comics my favorite ever and one of my top Batman works behind TAS, Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," and Frank Miller's "Year One." It goes without saying, given what I aimed at with the last few paragraphs and talking about writers like Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker (now being introduced into the fray on the BATMAN book coming out of Cataclysm and No Man's Land) and what they have produced in their careers, it was all about their character work and injecting some actual factual emotion into the pages of one of comics' most iconically stoic figures. While being the "World's Greatest Detective" is cool and all and it's probably nice being one of the top martial artists on the planet, you know what else is pretty riveting material to have in a comic book? Relationships! Having a butler that basically raised you as their own child and the dynamic that creates, the friendships you make growing up and especially what they mean to an orphan, having a bunch of wards and sidekicks doing their best to both impress you and soften your oft times unbearable level of stonewalled emotion. This is the type of material Rucka and Brubaker emphasized more often than not in their Batman adventures and that's why their hold on the Bat-books stands out to me so much going on twenty years now of Batman buying.
First we'll start with Rucka, since he was the established guy on Batman content going into this. There's two things about Rucka's material that really shine. One, that since he was already working with the Batverse before he pushed to keep "Cataclysm/NML" material reflective of the state of Gotham City, like how the city ended up being split and consumed by several gangs, the idea that Gotham Park was basically owned by Poison Ivy now and off limits, stuff like that. And, second, there was the introduction of Sasha Bordeau as a bodyguard/foil for Bruce Wayne then turned new sidekick and then an evolution into star-crossed lover by the end of the Rucka/Bru tenure on these books. Topping all that with a pinch of some Renee Montoya here and then wrapping it all up in a "Ra's Al Ghul and his agents pulling some fuckery again" in Gotham and it really created a nice filling meal on what can make a Batman book a hot commodity in the medium.
Every issue there was just something engaging happening. While Batman is dealing with an all out territory war between several gangs, Ra's agents (Whisper and Abbot) are maneuvering these gangs against each other and working Gotham's socialite circles for connections. While Jim Gordon is wrestling with the loss of his wife during the Cataclysm, the Batman is being constricted by the aforementioned Sasha Bordeaux being forced into his life by Lucius Fox and Gotham Enterprise's board of directors trying to keep him safe also due to that (literally) earth-shaking event. Ivy's staging a last stand in Gotham Park, the Mad Hatter starts pulling his brand of nonsense via corrupting GCPD officers with his tech, Bruce starts dating a photojournalist named Vesper Fairchild who is looking to find and identify the Batman while at the same time Sasha discovers the secret and then becomes a part of it, and on and on and on. Every issue pushed a little moment or unfolded a bigger conspiracy or exposed the emotions of a side character in a relatable way to pull together a two year run that felt great for all the reasons that TAS did, with art by folks like Shawn Martinburough and Rich Burchett that actually captured the same visual aesthetic as that cartoon as well, fittingly enough. If there's anything "bad" to say about this run it's how some of its momentum got cut off due to how the way and story Rucka and Brubaker went out on, but I'll get to that in the next piece about this era.
Ed Brubaker, who at this point in his career (I believe) was still really only known as "plucky Indie writer" and was getting his break doing SCENE OF THE CRIME for DC's Vertigo imprint which landed him the Bat. Obviously he's established himself since then as a big hitter in comics writing very atmospheric and character-centric stories and Batman was no exception except that, unlike Rucka who had the running start that he did working on Batman material, was a little more time limited and therefore good, but not quite as impactful as what Rucka managed in two years on DETECTIVE. Like Rucka, Brubaker really emphasized the state of Gotham post-Cataclysm and personalizing Batman/Bruce Wayne a little more by tying the story into his private life, not the one he spends most nights in costume living. The thrust of this tenure was bringing an old childhood friend, Mallory Moxon, into his life by running into her at a socialite mixer. Of course, in true Batman fashion, there's a darker side to Bruce just getting to relive some few, happy moments from his childhood as it's quickly established that Mallory's father is a long-running underworld boss trying to make waves again and there are hints at him having dealing's with Bruce's father before that fateful night that left him and Bruce's mom dead and created the Bat.
This is really the only story Brubaker gets to tell during his tenure that stands on its own, extenuating circumstances that I'll get into next time dominate the back half of it, but while it's running the story with Moxon's is a good and much needed one for DC's Dark Knight. For a character always so brooding and mopey, watching Bruce Wayne's eyes light up seeing an old friend and him reverting to "the good old days" before the world blew those lights out always leaves an impression. Obviously, though, these are short lived insights as the world around Mallory's dad, Lew, is steeped in the world Bruce has chosen to reside ever since he lost his parents and his machinations brought a new wave of crime and a new menace by the name of Zeiss into the Bat's domain.
Again, there's just a lot of personal touches that make it a good little run, though it's also a little crowded and unfocused is really the concern. For every badass, action-focused issue that features Batman facing down Zeiss - who thanks to some tech basically has the Taskmaster powers of "technique duplication" - or there's an issue where Deadshot is in town to put a hit in on Mr. Moxon, there's a weird two-parter where an alien crash lands in Gotham and Batman has to protect him because, yeah. There's all these neat little moments throughout the run where you have, like, Batman feeling bad for once he did his usual disappearing act on Jim Gordon without considering how inconsiderate that may in the wake of Gordon losing his wife and then there's flashbacks to Bruce with his dad at a costume party and looking up at him in awe as he's dressed as Zorro and they're wonderful. And then there's a Joker Santa thrown into the mix because at the time DC was doing a "Joker month" where he infects a bunch of villains (mostly D-listers) with Joker juice and they run amok and, yeah, sure. The heart of the book is fantastic, it showed some of the most emotionally poignant moments I've seen in a stretch of Batman books possibly ever, but some weird creative choices and company mandates kind of cut it off at the knees (a trend that, again, will be something to talk about next time) since Brubaker himself didn't get to run his own act as long as Rucka did and the collaboration of the two talents was obviously the highlights of this couple year stretch on the Bat books.
One more thing to note before walking out of here and coming back to talk the real meat of what Rucka and Bru did together is that this stands out as one of my favorite Bat eras because of the art teams that paired with the all star scribes. I mentioned Martinburough and Burnett earlier and how their styles so reminiscent of the Batman Animated Series made DETECTIVE COMICS sing, but Scott McDaniel doing the art chores for almost every issue of the Brubaker BATMAN book is one of my favorite things about all of this era, or any Batman era. He was just the quintessential Bat-family guy for several years as his playful, animated, and highly-kinetic style was just perfect for the kind of shenanigans the Bat family got involved in, especially when it came to Nightwing and his tenure on that book with Chuck Dixon. I personally think he's one of the best Batman pencillers of the past quarter century and give the man his due, he really ramped up the quality and enjoyment of this couple year stretch.
But, yeah, that's the first half of this. I'll pop the second one out sometime in the next week or two; I got kind of hyperfocused on making sure I was streaming games on Twitch the past month because there was just so much to do between Cyberpunk 2077 and the Demon's Souls remaster and yeah. I still jones for my old comic book columnist days so I'll keep on myself to get a few thousand words out a month about something in comics I feel deserves a couple thousand words about it. So, yeah, take care and be safe out there. Cheers!
(Credit to Bill Sienkiewicz, John McCrea, and Scott McDanielon the image pulls, respectively)
