Gotham Central: A Retrospective

It may come as no surprise to you that comic books and I don’t exactly have a long history. Even before I entered a major where such things were beneath contempt, they just were never really around the house. Of course, I knew who Batman was, and Superman, but most of my interaction with them came from the excellent television series bearing their respective names…and Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin, but I don’t really like to think about that one.

Comics books were always kids fare, or at the very least, the kind of hobby enjoyed by the 40 year old basement dwellers under Zelda bedsheets. But then something happened in those tumultuous, condescending college years.

Something that I am more and more coming to realize is a key moment in my artistic and critical life.

I saw that awful Watchmen movie.

No, no, I kid. In my opinion, Watchmen the movie isn’t awful by any means. But it does accomplish the difficult task of vaulting from high peaks of awesomeness into bottomless abysses of suckitude within the span of a few frame. Weirdly read dialogue is juxtaposed to gorgerous visual stylization, and a strange, badly soundtracked sex scene comes just a few mintues after a badass prison break…you get the idea. Overall, I think Watchmen is the literal definition of a decent movie. It was certainly good enough to get me interested in the source materiel.
See, my college had this movie channel where every month they would broadcast grainy versions of the hottest new releases, or every once in a while a classic or a really popular film that they knew everyeone liked. Watchmen, coming along my senior year, was one of these, and while I knew it was based on a comic book, I was still rather shocked at the themes and motifs it was delving into…themes and motifs that the movie only did an okay job at portraying. It was one of those situations where what I saw was good enough to make me hungry for more, and more was what I got. The library in our university had a copy in their tiny little graphic novels section (though I should probably count myself fortunate that there were any comics in the place), and snuck it in between the completed works of Wordsworth 1786-1801 and the critical summaries of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves that I was also checking out. And, obviously, I fell in love.

I wanted more comics—I needed more, just like Watchmen. Ones that tackled tough issues with maturity, that took advantage of the visual forms unique attributes…I was 20 years behind, I had a lot of catching up to do.

Of course, being a huge Neil Gaiman fan, I started to tackle the Sandman series. But the one that caught most of my attention, the one that truly secured my place as a comic book fan, was just a relatively short-run early 2000’s series that may just be the best Batman book I have ever read.

This, of course, is Gotham Central.

Now I’m not going to pretend to be a Batman expert. I sure at least one of the four people reading this in Tibet can list off every minor costume change he’s ever undergone over the past seventy years, including ones for miniseries and special events. That being said, I believe I am pretty knowledgeable about Batman, and have certainly seen enough of him that I know the “version” if you will, of Batman I like. I shall call this the Animated Series version. This is a Batman who is humble, stoic but tortured, well-mannered, with Kevin Conroy’s delicious voice. He is fallible, but not conquerable. He strikes from the shadows and rarely lets himself be seen. He is not ostentatious. He has all of these cool gadgets, but there is always a “get your hands dirty” feel to him. This is the Batman present in Gotham Central. I know that’s an odd thing to say considering he’s in the comic for, oh, maybe four percent of its total pages, but it is there. The stealth, the honest-to-god detective work, even the fallibility; nothing says “Batman” to me more than when he suddenly appears in panel, nothing but a black cowl with two white slits for eyes. Gotham Central understands this.

And not only does it understand it, but it takes a very unique position on it. Batman always works best when there’s an air of mystery about him, a broodiness, if I can use that word without evoking pictures of lame 80’s anti-heroes. What better way to shroud a person in mystery than to see him through the eyes of those he comes in (rare) contact with? Gotham Central takes a different position on who Batman is, what he means to Gotham, why he’s important…like I said, it’s the best version of Batman I’ve ever seen, as he’s on the page for less than forty pages out of nearing 1000 in all four trades combined.

So this is a thoughtful retrospective of this fantastic, unique, and in my opinion, slightly unappreciated series. Why it works, what makes it work, and why it made me a comics fan for life. Some of the reasons are overarching explications of the entirety of the book, some of them are more minute, little details picked out of individual stories. It’s not a hierarchy, or a ranking, but it is the things that stuck out to me most upon my second read, when I a gazing it with a more critical eye (close reading, for all you sad English majors out there).

So without further ado:

THE MANY REASONS WHY GOTHAM CENTRAL DESERVES YOUR TIME

  

I: THE COMIC FORM 

Sequential art is a unique medium. And as a unique medium, it has certain advantages over its brethren: e.g. television, movies, books, games. Of course, this is true of all unique mediums: movies can do things books cannot, books can do things movies cannot, games can do things movies and books can't, etc. Discovering the unique attributes of whatever medium you are writing/creating in is a boon for a person's work, because they can take full advantage of whatever method they are using to get their story across. Problem is, many creators and fans don't understand this. Which is why you get amateur novelists trying to fit things in prose that would work best visually, or see screenplays that have novel-like descriptions even though you can only see what's presented to you visually in a movie. (It's also why a lot of people have problems with adaptations of their favorite works...but that's another post. --E).

Now the advantages that comic books have are in themselves singular in the medium. That is, they are a synthesis of two mediums, books and film, and therefore can plunder whatever they want from either. This gives it much more of a range than it would otherwise have. Sure it has limitations, but it also has more freedom in some ways. Want to have a dynamic angle on two
characters hinting at their past backstory and the conflict between them? You can. Want to have powerful prose descriptions and philosophical eruditions? You can. Want to do a dramatic zoom in on a character, have a quiet moment of reflection, stretch a moment into a lifetime? You can. Want to set a visual style while still having character introspection? You can.

Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker understand this dynamic that comics offer, and take full advantage of both the written and visual portions of the comic book milieu. Gotham Central is decidedly film noir, and Michael Lark’s (1) pencils are full of dark, heavy lines that accent the aesthetic. The colors are very muted and plain. You can tell Gotham's a drab, dingy, and disreputable place without even reading a word of dialogue. The writers also take full advantage of the comic's unique “sequential” structure, but do so by focusing on minimalism and as little affectation as possible.

Not that multi-page spreads and flowing, staggered panels are bad—the recent issues of Batwoman are proof enough of that, but they would be unsuited to the stark, methodical nature of the series. Rucka, Brubaker and company use every tool at their disposal to make Gotham Central look and feel correct even before they get in the nitty-gritty of writing. The panel layout is very basic, maybe five or six at the most with rare exceptions. They are usually square blocks, and extremely sequential. While in other comics this could possibly be construed as stunted or even unimaginative, in Gotham Central it merely serves to highlight the characters and stories we are going to be reading. The comic is, after all, a police procedural, and so the comic is structure in a very tight, grounded, no frills way, just like its characters.

Rucka and Brubaker also make use of one of my other favorite comic tricks of the trade, what I call a “pause panel.”

I've always like these due to the powerful emotions and depth of character present in one simple frame. We see the guilt, or the joy, or even the connection that partners have, in half a second of visualization. Could you do this in a movie? Probably, but it would have to be much more complicated with very clever camera work, and it wouldn't have the immediateness that comics have. Because comics have the advantage of interrupting a conversation, having a pause panel, then going back to that conversation with no “time” having passed. If you had this sort of thing in a movie, you would have to have the “look” or “pause,” then pull back out and get the characters in the flow of the conversation without having the third character ask something like “What was that look about?” Has it been done in movies? Sure, but in my opinion it doesn't carry the same weight that it does in a comic, simply because a pause panel in a comic can be half a second of narrative time, that, because of its structure, can be its own self-contained character story.

Another advantage of comics that Rucka and Brubaker take advantage of is the comic form of single pictures forming a complete narrative. Basically, comics take frames in a movie and pick and choose which ones they want that still get the story across. The plus side of this, of course, that you can have advancing moments of time right next to each other, and you can show whatever you want with every panel, like a movie cut. Difference being, that if every frame in a movie were a different cut, it would cause confusion and probably a few headaches. But in a comic you can “cut” however much you want. A panel with a close up can be next to a panel with a wide vista can be next to a panel of an entire city, and so on.

Of course, this also allows for one of my favorite Batman effects, his “next panel appearance.”

Now obviously the use of this is by no means unique to Gotham Central, but considering that I have already stated I like Batman best when he's shrouded in mystery and shadow, it's no surprise that I get a particular joy out of this visual play. Nolan's Batman films have done similar things, but it's not quite the same, because in a movie, a cut is necessary between two views to have the same kind of effect. In a comic book you can have the same exact view, but have Batman enter in the second panel. This adds more weight and dramatis to him, and more pertinently, gives us an insight into how the characters of the comic view this masked vigilante, whom they can never be sure is trustworthy.

That’s the meta-sense of what makes Gotham Central a good comic: it makes full use of the intricacies of the form. But there’s more to it than that. A good aesthetic must be supported by a host of factors, including but not limited to:

II. THE CHARACTERS

The cast of Gotham Central is one of the best of any work you could ask for, television, movie, novel, what have you. Rarely do you get such a varied group of individuals who are fleshed out and given life to such an extent. Cris Allen, Renee Montoya, Sergeant Davies, The Probe, Maggie Sawyer, Marcus Driver, Josie MacDonald, Romy Chandler, Stacy the Temp. Each one is three-dimensional, with their own griefs, joys and dangers. Each one has their own voice and personality. Each one sounds and feels like a real person…seriously, this is some of the best characterization of an ensemble cast I have ever seen.

What sets Gotham Central’s characterizations apart is the dialogue, which is some of the best you’ll see outside a David Mamet play. Rucka and Brubaker, for whatever reason, are entirely tapped into what “real” dialogue sounds like; not necessarily dialogue you’d hear in everyday life, but dialogue that sounds true to the human mind. The cops in Gotham Central have hints of the best of Raymond Chandler’s 40’s noir in their interactions, but in the end the characters are built on a steady emotional core that comes through their words. Remember, GC doesn’t have the grand sweeping vistas of a Jim Lee, or the film advantage of a music score or a novel’s beautiful prose to put you in the right frame of mind, to get you to care for these characters. All the comic has are the pictures in the panels and a few words in a square or oval box. And while the pictures are well-done, as we discussed, they are intentionally grounded in quotidian details, or barren to the point of bereft to set the tone of Gotham City. As such, the characters themselves have the same grounded, realistic feel…yet you really have no trouble telling them apart, even though objectively some of them look similar, and that fact can be entirely traced back to the dialogue that gives each of these characters heart.

To give every character in a story his own unique voice is a challenge, and to do it in a true ensemble like GC is remarkable. There are no less than thirty main-to-side characters walking around, and each of them has their own little dialogue to let us know who they are. Renee is brusque and honest, Crispus is cynical and sarcastic, Marcus is stoic and brooding, Burke is flashy and suave, Davies is bombastic and querulous, and so on.

Now this isn’t to say that each character conforms to an archetype: like Davies is the “funny” one and the Probe is the “official” one. Archetypes have their place, certainly, but in GC they would not have meshed well with the tone of grounded realism, and Rucka and Brubaker were wise enough to understand this. So while each character has base traits expressed in their dialogue, it never devolves into pastiche and self parody. That is, each character is complex and thought out to the point that their personal dialogue can still run the gamut from despair to compassion.

For example, let’s look at Sergeant Davies. Hard-nosed. Likes to debate. Likes to ride and mock people, all for fun, of course. He’s a wise-ass in the best possible way. So let’s take a look at him when he is experiencing the keenest of disappointment, after he has been passed over for promotion to Lieutenant:

Right here we grasp Davies, sadness, disappointment, and humanity, while keeping his same base character traits that we’ve known him to have. Likewise, Tommy Burke: sure he’s a playboy and a gambler to boot, but when the going gets tough, he’ll back you all the way. Take a look at this exchange here, when he’s helping Partner Procjnow sneak in to see her son’s violin concert:

Again, maintain the characterization we understand—Burke can smooth talk his way out of anything—but using it to highlight a moment of compassion and selflessness.

Now obviously the dialogue is not the only thing that is giving these characters their heart and their unforgettable souls (although I will say that it’s a rather large reason). The other biggest factor has to do with the art I mentioned slightly above. You know, when I said it has less to do with the characterization than in other comics? That’s still true, but the art does provide the other important piece in GC’s characterization puzzle: action.

I realize I’m risking devolving into a Fiction 101 course at this point. Most discerning readers would look at the preceding paragraphs and go: “character is determined by action and dialogue? No shit, Sherlock!” And while it is true that at its root what I am saying is one of the most basic, guiding principles of storytelling, I think every once in a while it’s good to review the fundamentals, and how and why they work. In the stories of GC for instance, the fact of the form signifies the type of actions that are going to take place. That is, implied action. Since we are looking at still photographs, we don’t have the privilege of seeing the action in full motion, or having every bit-by-bit detail elucidated to us in prose. The actions are shown in frames, and it is up to us to fill in the back story. On the one hand, this can lead into misinterpretation of confusion about what is being shown (see some of Grant Morrison’s work), but on the other, this allows for implications and subtleties that really form the emotional core of the characters.

I’ve already mentioned the “pause panels,” one of my favorite conventions and uses of comics, and in GC they really shine through, giving character emotions and depth, letting us know their shames, hopes, the awkward moments of forced contact, the realization of a truth, the regret of words best left unspoken—the saying “a picture’s worth a thousand words” never had a better representation than GC. The pause panels are not simply ways to get a point of emotional poignancy across. Because they can be examined indefinitely, arguably are even meant to be examined in such detail, each one adds weight and emotional and realism to the character. We see partners exchanging knowing glances, indicating the partner relationship is so complexly connect they know what the other is thinking (as Simon Lippman pretty much says verbatim).

Likewise, some of the panels evoke disappointment, introspection; some of my favorites are when the whole room falls silent, when someone enumerates a truth that the other detectives knew but hadn’t really wanted to face.

Again, the entire point of this is characterization: this series, foisted in realism, can’t ride on amazing feats of the characters: none of them can through buildings or shoot green lights from magic rings. If the audience is going to read this series, basically Law and Orderin Gotham City, it has to care about the characters. Now, of course that’s not to say having good characterization in traditional superhero comics is not important; but in a series like this, where we’re basically focusing entirely on supporting characters from Batman and Superman, people who would have had bit roles or have been sidekicks otherwise, when they are the main characters, we have to have a reason to keep reading beyond, oh, what’s Batman going to do to save the day in THIS issue of Gotham Central!?

And on that note, we’ll get into this more in a bit, but it’s a testament to the strength of the characters that I honestly did not care if Batman showed up in an issue or not. The stories without him were just as good as the stories with him, and that can entirely be traced by to what Rucka and Brubaker did with the ensemble they created; and you know what? That does nothing but make the Batman in this series a more believable character.

But like I said, we’ll get to that in a minute.

The more ostentatious actions also inform the kind of characters we’re dealing with, like the dialogue. More importantly, the character’s actions make sense and fit into the context of the story. Realism, like I said, is the name of the game in GC. Characters get in major trouble for losing or misusing service weapons, meaning every gunshot has a purpose and a meaning. Whether the cops are chasing after a perp on the run, hounding one for information, or cutting off a couple of delinquent kids cool as cucumbers, there’s a sense of realism. Verisimilitude is the apt word for this. The setting of Gotham informs the actions of the characters; but more importantly, the characters actions also inform the setting. Since they make sense in the context of the world that has been created, the character’s actions feel real, whether or not they would be in real life (although from what little I knew about the Police force GC is relatively accurate for a work prominently featuring a masked man in a bat suit). For a pertinent example, let’s look at one of my favorite moments in the entire series (SPOILERS ABOUND!):

In this scene, Romy Chandler has accidentally panicked and shot Batman; this is due to a steadily building anger and frustration at Batman, because she believes he was tangentially responsible for the death of her partner Nate Patton.

Now there’s a lot going on in these three pages, but let’s focus on Romy, and how the action in the panels builds her character. Now Romy has been billed the entire series as a tough, no nonsense kind of girl, like Renee, who doesn’t shy away from knocking some teeth loose or dating a fellow detective. But her reaction here is one of confusion, panic and downright bafflement: did this really just happen? What this does is serve not only to enunciate the gravity of the situation at hand, but to add a lot of depth to Romy’s character. Sure, she’s tough and no nonsense and can handle pretty much anything, but this? Even this might be beyond her abilities to contain. Discharging her service weapon at an unarmed man alone is enough to get her fired, but possibly killing the Batman? That’s an entirely new realm that no one would know what to do with. I really like how Rucka, Lark and Brubaker structure the panels on the title page, providing a dominating portrait with little snippets of the following conversation lining the right side. The small panels and shorter focus inherently make the pictures go by faster; this has the effect of putting us in Romy’s head. We can feel everything spiraling out of control just like she does.

On the next page, the actions tell us more about Romy, specifically about her instincts in a moment of loss and confusion. Notice the first panel: eyes closed, gun still aimed and pointed. If this were Maggie Sawyer, or Detective Crowe, would they have reacted like this? Maybe, but probably not—their characters have been informed to be more tolerable of quick changes in paradigm. Romy, however, is caught completely off guard, and so, as befits her character, we learn that in a moment of panic she immediately falls into wary aggressive-defense mode. She aims the gun because, well, what the hell else is she going to do? The situation is out of hand, and the only thing to do to block it out is the keep the gun aimed and the eyes shut. I especially like how the action is rendered with blank backgrounds with single solid color. It really puts us inside the madness of the situation and the stark turmoil of what’s occurring.

Also, we learn the Batman has no qualms about hitting women, and young rookies new to MCU can’t stand up to the bat-glare.

So by the end of the third page, when the crisis has passed, and detail returns to the panels, we learn something else about Romy Chandler: she recovers quickly, and drops back into competency at the drop of a hat. Cast into a situation for which she had no protocol, thrown into a raving panic, then getting her nose broken, still doesn’t manage to keep her in a fugue. She pops right back out of it—this highlights not only how tough she truly is, but how professional she is. The first thing she realizes? Her weapon's gone. And the look on her face tells you all you need to know.

Not to go back into the comic form section about, but if this were, say, a film, then this three page scene would have been over in thirty seconds; that offers its own rewards and analysis to be discovered, but the scene being in comic form allows us to dissect those moments more incisively, and get at the heart of the matter: what are these panels telling us about Romy? What do they say about Batman? How do they both respond to things, and why, and what happens to them after? All of these things inform the characters. They make them feel real. Romy’s reaction is a completely understandable one, and her moment of frailty in this scene where she had previously shown very little makes her a more compelling character to us because we relate to her and cheer for her, hoping that everything comes out all right in the end. From there, the writer has almost unlimited paths he can take with a character, but it all stems from the small moments—an action here, a word there, a pause in the right place—that gets the writer to that spot in the first place. Rucka and Brubaker have this down to an art, and that’s why the twenty-four detectives in MCU are people who are not only fleshed out and complex, but also heroes that we are willing to cheer for, and whose stories we are willing to follow to the bitter end.

III. IT’S ONE OF THE BEST VERSIONS OF BATMAN I’VE EVERY READ.

Now a lot of this is personal taste—actually, I’m sure the entire argument is personal taste, but anyway. Unlike Superman, who has constant warring versions of himself at play in the hearts and minds of his fans: Golden Age toughness, Silver Age wackiness, dark age seriousness, and Modern Age conflictedness—fans of Batman typically, not without exceptions but typically, like the vision of him as a dark, brooding champion of the night. A man who strikes from shadows, can appear behind you and disappear in nigh-impossible frames of time, who is smart enough to come up with a solution to any problem, and driven enough to see it through. There are fans of the 60’s era Batman campiness, but for the most part, fans of Batman like the darkness, the angst, the cape and cowl, the shadow in the half-light of evening.

I’m no exception. I think Batman works better this way, not only because it adds an air of verisimilitude—you can’t see a normal man doing the things Batman does, but you could buy it better than if Batman, being a normal man, ran at gun toting thugs in the middle of the day without getting his head blown off—but because it sets him up as a natural foil to Superman. I think the dynamic between those two characters is very interesting, their methodologies and ideologies, and one of the best things about DC comics since the 1980s. Light vs. Dark. Revenge vs. mercy. Hope vs. Rage. Plus there’s just something about that dark outline, with only the narrowed slits of his eyes shining through his cowl—it's terrifying. Gotham Central understands this.

Now it’s ironic that one of the best pictures of Batman occurs in a comic where he’s featured in person in less than forty pages. But that’s what makes it so profound. Batman in GC is a force of nature. He hangs over everything and everyone in the MCU. When they can’t solve a case and Batman does, the MCU takes it personally. When they need Batman despite their reservations, and they know they have no other choice, it hurts them, because they feel as if they aren’t doing their job. Every “freak” that walks through the doors is connected to the masked vigilante in their city—and some of the detectives blame him for the deaths of close friends and other officers.

So even when he’s not in the comic, his shadow is there, and it makes his portrayal very powerful indeed. Rucka and Brubaker didn’t feel the need for Batman to have to solve every case, or swoop in and save the day every time. This makes the moments that Batman is needed feel more serious, and his appearances gain a different sort of perspective. In this comic, there’s no internal narration by Batman, no pathos for him, nothing that humanizes him or makes him relatable. He’s not the main character: we’re seeing him entirely through the eyes of those he inevitably comes in contact with. This gives him a sort of…ambiance, I guess. We see him as he truly would be if he existed in our lives: a terrifying spectre to behold.

One of my favorite moments he’s involved in is in the Dead Robin arc. A man has been going around killing young men and dressing them up into Robin costumes that are nigh-indistinguishable from the real thing. The plot concerns the GCPD trying to hunt down the man, as well as figuring out who is leaking secret crime scene photographs to the press.

A man finally turns himself in, voluntarily—because he wants to be a part of the “world,” as he calls it. The world of superheroes. He’s been killing these boys and dressing them up entirely because he wants to talk to Batman—and if he doesn’t get the chance, another child will die.

Faced with an untenable situation, the police summon Batman despite their deepest reservations. What follows is pure awesome terror (MORE SPOILERS ABOUND!):

A lot of things are happening in this scene: MCU turning to Batman when they don’t want to, tacitly condoning torture of suspects, giving into the demands of a criminal; but I want to focus mainly on Batman and how he’s used. Not a single time is the superhero ever in anything but his outline, which is as MCU sees him. Then we get a first-hand look at what a normal schlub would experience if they every got their wish to meet Batman. I simply love the progression of panels from the lights going off to Batman’s murky appearance in his first panel, and his grizzled: “You could say that.”

What really comes across in these panels, though, is what Batman is truly built around: fear. Striking ball-shriveling terror into the heart of his enemies, turning them into sodden, weeping messes. It helps that there’s very little fantastical elements in GC, save by editorial mandate (Sunday, Bloody Sunday). This is a truly grounded Batman, one whose sole realm are the evil pricks that prowl our streets, and it adds a layer of reality to the comic that the comic depends on. Suddenly all the little touches—the nods to bureaucracy (no one from MCU can technically touch the Bat-signal because it would imply that the cops know of Batman and approve of his actions) to the very somber and true-to-life crimes that you could almost see playing on the news(Marcus Driver’s investigation of Bonnie Lewis’ death, the Joker sniper shooting spree) all seem to come together to support this vision of Batman, one whose relative lack of presence in the comic makes him more viable, believable, and menacing than in many of his own comics.

IV: THE STORIES PUT EVERY SINGLE LAW AND ORDER TO SHAME.

Yes, even the good ones.

As I mentioned before, GC is the perfect combination of film noir aestheticism, gritty realism, and superhero zaniness. All three work in conjunction together splendidly, and that alone would make GC unique among many of its peers.

But Rucka and Brubaker reached higher, crafting stories of such subtlety and understated complexity that they could very easily be parsed and puzzled over in a college academic course.

Comics as a medium have been very slow to grow up about things. Hell, DC rebooted its entire continuity just six months ago, and proceeded, in 2011 mind you, to make every character that wasn't a goddess into a goddess(like Amanda Palmer), and make characters that were already goddesses into almost self-parodic exploitations (i.e. Starfire and Catwoman). In light of this, GC was refreshing to read as a comic simply because it surprised me with the depth of its stories, the weight of the narratives, and the complicated and sometimes even controversial issues that it handled with deftness and nuance. Probably the most famous of these is Half a Life, where Renee Montoya is deliberately outed by Two-Face, and is one of the most maturely handled, emotional, and heartfelt treatments of a homosexual character, her struggles, and the reactions among her peers that I have ever seen. It's not a condemnation of the homosexual lifestyle, nor is it an idealistic portrayal of a Utopian dream where Renee's sexuality is received with universal praise. Some of her colleagues outright mock her, some of them poke fun at her, blissfully unaware that they're insulting her. Her brother, already knowing her sexual orientation, still loves her but doesn't accept her lifestyle. Her family, otherwise, rejects her and condemns her because of their Hispanic background and their Catholic faith. Her partner, Daria, of course is on her side, and her other partner, Crispus, is entirely supportive, at the most gently admonishing her for not letting him know sooner. In a moment where the entire story could have been a one-note political statement for either side in the raging issue of homosexuality, GC instead chose to go for introspection, complexity, and human connection.

And best of all, it’s all tightly bundled into a completely “Batman” story, where Two-Face has developed a raging hard-on for Renee due to the kindness she showed him in a previous series. What I found interesting and really liked about the story was Two-Face's justification for his actions, and why he finds Renee so alluring. He sees himself in her: she leads two lives, as does he, and its implied that him breaking down the walls between those two lives will save her, and ultimately, him as well. Or so he believes. Two-Face is insane after all, and I simply love the moment where Renee berates him for the whole thing:

And Two-Face is literally so far gone that he simply cannot grasp the idea that a woman who likes other women does not like men, including him.

We could talk about any story in any of the books in some detail. We could talk about the very first arc, and how it establishes Marcus Driver's character, the goodness and compassion of the MCU, and their relationship with Batman and how a police force would respond to an illegal vigilante that they nonetheless need for their cases. Or Soft Targets which has an absolutely terrifying vision of the Joker coming only a year or two after the Beltway Snipers in the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area. Dead Robin is singularly unsettling in its portrayal of media coverage hurting investigations and the desperate need people have to be involved with things that appear “above” them. All great stories, with great pacing, characterization, subtext...everything you need in a good, affecting story.

I obviously don't have time to go into them all, and I certainly don't want to ruin the stories for the one person reading this blog; I would, however, like to break down one of my absolute favorite arcs in the comics, which I will call the “Corrigan Arc.” So, I'm gonna go ahead and put up the SPOILER WARNING! for the one person who reads this and is interested in reading the comics without the story getting ruined.

I like to talk about the Corrigan Arc because of the issues they bring up and the themes it has about loyalty, integrity, kindness, and even revenge. Not to mention that the second half of the arc is the ending (more or less) to the series as a whole.

Corrigan is a corrupt C.S.U. toady whose racket is stealing evidence from crime scenes and selling it for extraordinarily high prices on the DC Comics version of Ebay. Also, he’s not very bright.

So part one of the Corrigan arc (aptly named Corrigan I) comprises of Gotham Central #23-24. In it, Crispus Allen and Renee Montoya are enjoying a nice dinner together, discussing a family gathering they are going to have at Renee’s and Daria’s place. Right away we understand how deep the relationship between these two has become, and how much they care about each other.

On the way out from the restaurant they spot a few thugs from local gang B.T.M. heading into a decrepit old building, and they follow after calling for backup, in the end arresting two of the attacking gang members and killing the leader of the enemy gang, Johnny Lamonica, a.k.a. “Black Spider.”

This leads to the normal Police protocols: CSU investigates the scene, IAD takes Allen's duty weapon until the matter is confirmed, and both detectives have to make their statements. It looks pretty open and shut until a) one of the two arrested gang members claims to have been shot by Allen while in handcuffs, a charge that his ambulance-chasing lawyer is gleeful to jump all over, and b) there is no way to deny this, because as it happens there's a bullet missing from the crime scene: the scene Corrigan was charged with investigating.

To keep Allen from coming under suspicion, IAD detective Esperanza—er, hints to Renee that Corrigan might be at this seedy joint where most of the corrupt Gotham officers go. Renee goes there, finds him, and pretty much beats the information out of him. Turns out he did sell the bullet for a cool 10 grand to an old biddy out in the country that has an obsession with crime memorabilia. Renee and Esperanza head out there and convince the old woman to trade for the bullet; this puts Crispus in the clear. But there's a price: Esperanza had been building a case against Corrigan for a while; but because a fellow officer beat him up and coerced information out of him, Corrigan now has a legal defense against any sort of internal probe—meaning there's no real way, now, to get him off the force.

Corrigan I is not the best couple of stories in GC. Really good mind you, but so are all of the others. There are some moments, however, that I would like to bring to the forefront, the first being the core of Allen's and Montoya's relationship. I simply love how great of friends and confidantes they have become. As Simon Lippman says in another story, they can basically finish each other’s sentences. As such, Crispus and his family's acceptance of Renee and her lifestyle is very real without hitting us over the head with poignancy and sap. The dialogue really shines through here—I like the moment where Crispus jokingly chides Renee for having videogames:

I also like the scene where Daria tries to visit Renee in the hospital; but she's denied doing so because since they are in a homosexual relationship she doesn't “count” as family and therefore has no visiting rights. It's GC commentary on social issues at its best: layered, nuanced, and subtle, not dropping an anvil on you or preaching a message, but getting its point across just the same. In that same scene, we see a pause panel of Esperanza watching the interaction between Renee and Daria:

This occurs just after Esperanza gets Daria beyond the first desk. I like it because of what it says about forbearance and Esperanza's character. Here we have a man whose entire job is devoted to investigating other cops: he's not very popular to begin with, with anybody. Good cop, bad cop, no matter how corrupt or honorable you are you dislike Esperanza simply by what it means to see him walking towards you. But Rucka/Brubaker unexpectedly make him a very good, honorable person who legitimately cares about his job and about doing the right thing. We see this in his attitude and actions towards Daria and Montoya, and I love the pause panel selection here: it just says so much about Esperanza. You can tell he's not a fan of Montoya and Daria's lifestyle. It's so plain on his face. But he lets Daria come back to visit Renee anyway, because he knows it's the right thing to do. In one panel GC makes a hard-hitting commentary about moral rectitude sometimes superseding personal opinion, and Esperanza is a walking personification of this, right down to his decision to set Renee loose on Corrigan at the cost of his own investigation. He sacrifices the chance to kick Corrigan out of GCPD forever in order to save Allen's reputation, the embarrassment of a lawsuit, and possibly his career. And mind you, he's doing this for a detective he barely knows and has no personal connection to. But keeping a lousy CSU tech in exchange for holding onto a truly good cop? Is it the right thing, the wrong thing? GC doesn't tell us.

But decision does come back to bite
them.

And that leads us to Corrigan II. And Corrigan II is, quite simply, one of the finest comic book tales I have ever read. If Gotham Central is one big pile of rubies, then Corrigan II is one of the diamonds sitting on top. It's a fantastically depressing and haunting way to end such a gritty, realistic series that prided itself on holding nothing back.

So Renee Montoya has been crumbling slowly but surely throughout the series, partly due to stress from her parents, and partly due to stress from the job; but things really come to a head after the stories “Keystone Cops” and “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” the latter taking place in the span of DC’s Infinite Crisis. At the beginning of Corrigan II, Renee’s already staying out all night, getting wasted at a gay bar and fighting just about anyone who wants to take up the challenge:

Meanwhile, Allen, finally having found out how Renee and Esperanza gave up their case against Corrigan to save his job, is investigating Corrigan on his own, trying to dig up enough information to reopen the case with hard evidence that is untainted by either Esperanza’s or Montoya’s hands:

What this culminates in is some hard words between Renee and Cris. Cris is worried about his partner, so worried that he threatens to find a new partner if she doesn’t get help. Near about the same time, Renee finds out that Cris is investigating Corrigan without support of the GCPD. Renee confronts Allen about it, and Allen reminds Renee that he couldn’t tell her because bringing her in the loop on this would taint the investigation since she was involved in the previous coercion of Corrigan in Corrigan I. 

Cris goes to talk to an informant who’s working with Corrigan, but little does he know that Corrigan has already rooted out the informant and has beaten him to death with a wrench; Corrigan and his cronies are lying in wait for him, and Corrigan shoots Cris through his body armor five times in the back.

This leads to the beginning of the next part, with one of the must gut-wrenching scenes I’ve seen in a comic—again, all based on Rucka/Brubaker using the silent power of comics and their great characterizations to their advantage:

What makes Maggie Sawyer's reaction her so heartbreaking is her character setup as a tough and implacable leader who can’t be shaken by anything. Her hiding in her car, unable to hold back tears, not only lets us get a glimpse into the heart of her character, and how much she actually cares about her detectives, but just how traumatizing this is to the MCU: if it breaks Maggie Sawyer, it’s bad. Real bad.

Sawyer breaks the news to Renee and Daria:

And Renee is understandably distraught. She digs the file Allen was working on from his desk, and the others agree to work on it. Meanwhile, Corrigan and his cronies work out a story to tell the police, as Josie Macdonald and Marcus Driver track down the weapon Corrigan used to blast through Allen’s body armor. They bring him in, but their story is ironclad, and the murder weapon ballistics come back saying the bullets were from a rifle and not the Kevlar-piercing GCPD pistols they thought (due to ballistics having another crooked cop in Corrigan’s pocket). They have to let him go. Maggie promises that they will nail the bastard, but it’s not enough for Renee, who slips out before they notice. She visits the Allen family, then says goodbye to Daria before going off to the bar to get drunk.

Wasted and mad with grief, she then goes after Corrigan, in a scene that has to be seen to be believed:

But she can’t do it. She can’t do it because at her very core, she’s not a murderer; but at this moment, she wants to be. And haunted by this weakness, her inability to avenge the death of her closest friend, and the overall corruption of the police and city in which she lives, she’s had enough, and she leaves the force behind:

What Corrigan II does most of all is leave you with a sad, bitter feeling of futility. I know that’s not a very good way to make a recommendation of the series, but there it is. But it mirrors the whole series, really: the entire run was populated by darkness, with very little points of life and hope shining through. The series is dark, and it highlights the state of Gotham City and the nature of Batman, and it ends on that same note.

Really, I appreciate the ways by which Corrigan II illustrates the camaraderie and familial atmosphere of MCU, an us-against-the-world mentality. Everyone is working this case in the very end, because it’s one of their own that’s dead and that…that is almost unimaginable.

I also like the way Renee reacts. It just feels slightly mad, slightly disillusioned, and entirely grief filled. Her frantic search through Allen’s desk, desperately searching for the file on Corrigan oscillating between wild anger and almost childlike happiness when she finds it and shows it to Marcus is just so well done, written and illustrated. This loss hurts Renee, and because we have grown to care for her, we are hurting too.

Probably the best scene in the entire arc is the assault on Corrigan and his girlfriend. It provides a nice contrast between the two people, and what makes them intrinsically different. Corrigan sees Renee as merely “self-righteous,” (Corrigan I), but in this story Renee proves that she’s more than just a selfish do-gooder who’s merely trying to put herself above everyone else. The story provides a nice, circular contrast between what Corrigan is, and what Renee is. Corrigan kills a cop in cold blood, with no guilt or regret, by shooting him in the back. Renee, in a fit of drunk rage, assaults Corrigan, in a spirit of revenge, face to face, even puts a gun to his head…

But she just. Can’t. Do it.

She cannot murder a man.

And while Renee herself, it’s implied, thinks this makes her weak, the way the comic is set up, it lets us know that, far from being weak, she is truly honorable, and as far from the filth that Corrigan is that she can possibly be. In this way Gotham Central makes a comment on humanity, and what makes a person have or lack integrity. It would have been very easy for Renee Montoya to be a Corrigan. What stopped her? Was it an intrinsic difference, an inescapable fate? Are we all doomed by genetics or the products of our birth? Is Corrigan at fault, or was he born that way? What was different in Montoya’s life? How was she able to resist the corruption that Corrigan gave himself to?

And was she right, not to kill Corrigan? Certainly the bastard deserves to be shot in the head, but for whatever reason Renee can’t go through with it. Maybe it’s cowardice. Maybe it’s courage. Who is to know? Who is to know.

(Fortunately (or unfortunately, in some cases, but not this one) Renee’s story doesn’t end here. She goes on to become a leading role in the absolutely awesome weekly series 52, which deserves its own article, and provides some closure for certain people (like yours truly) who so wanted to know where Renee turned out –E)

V. AND ON THAT DEPRESSING NOTE...

Comic books are really just beginning to be taken seriously in mainstream media. It started with such high-concept works as The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, and now, with the birth of the superhero movie, where it has been made apparent that superheroes can have pathos and say things about society to the mainstream (The Dark Knight), the momentum of all comics is growing in leaps and bounds. People are starting, slowly but surely to see their worth—maybe they don’t read them, but at the very least, they don’t make fun of people who do anymore.

So in that light it’s a travesty that GC has not gotten the respect and attention it deserves. It never cracked the top 100 during its run, and though the trade books have grown its popularity and solidified a loyal fanbase, it’s barely a tenth of what something of its quality deserves. This deserves a television series. This deserves action figures. This deserves a rabid base that would foam at the mouth when news about it
came out. This deserves a webforum with 100,000 members who gripe and complain about every little coloring error.

Comics are a unique medium, singular in all their own, and Rucka and Brubaker and all the artists and colorists and panelist and editors have created a group of stories that take advantage of every single aspect of them. This is a comic to be proud of. This is a comic to show people. This a comic to illustrate everything that comics can do…so please, please, won’t you read Gotham Central? And tell all your friends! And maybe one day, one day, I can let my love of comics be known in the bowels of the coffee shops and bookstores, and we will all rejoice in our unity and love for comics books!

(Note to self: might have taken that a little too far. –E)

Until next time,

Mr. E

1. Lark left the series after issue 25, but the illustrators succeeding him kept the same design aesthetic.

A Love Letter to Stephen King (complete with jabs at the literary elite)

I made a small mention last week about what is considered anathema to those who wish to be good and true English Majors or intellectuals. Namely, that those who would portend to be one and be a part of all the good societies which come with the territory cannot, cannot mind you, like something as mainstream and immature as video games. The activity is far beneath the intellectual might of the avant-garde liberal arts milieu. But that’s not the only activity blatantly disregarded by the culture police and the Society of Pretentious Douchebags. Oh no.

Now, odds are you’re familiar with these paragons of analytical might. There’s a certain—feel to them, as it were. Oh, they might dress differently than one another. Live differently. Have different careers and hopes and methodologies. They might be at the local bar, the hole in the wall where anything that’s not a microbrew is verboten, wearing black and puffing away at cigarettes far too expensive for their quality. They might be in coffee shops, banging away at netbooks, sucking down drinks with Italian names that have nothing in common with the actual drinks in Italy, and airily wafting on about the brilliance of their derivative, hackneyed short story. They might be in the offices of great universities, their wooden bookshelves crammed in every conceivable inch by obscure novels that nobody’s read, and books of criticism on the novels nobody’s read, and books of criticism about the criticism of the novels that nobody’s reach. They might wear tweed jackets with suede elbow patches and bemoan the tastes of the populace while trumping up the undeniable brilliance of Dead White Men. (1)

Yes, my friends. I am talking of the Literary Elite. That shadowy, sinister, and tacit organization that has been the bane of the mainstream for, quite literally, centuries. You don’t have to become a member of the Literary Elite. There’s no indoctrination course, monthly dues, newsletter or yearly picnic. You simply, if you let yourself, become one at some point. No one can pinpoint exactly where. But the Literary Elite instinctually know each other. The flock together. And they will put to the (intellectual) death and supposed English Major, Art Major, or hipster indie music fan who dares violate their implicit bylaws. It’s why I can’t use my real name on these posts: they’re always out there, and they can practically sense when they are being betrayed by one that is ostensibly their own. I say this so you can truly grasp the risk I take by even thinking this next statement, much less writing it out for all the world to see:

Stephen King is my favorite author.

Yikes, right?

If I hesitate and cogitate, I usually come up with someone a bit more widely respected in the realms of criticism and academia. Well, I really appreciate Hemingway and his minimalism. Or, I love Virginia Woolf’s use of stream-of-consciousness and her subtle symbolism for patriarchy and its disadvantages. And while both those things are true, the fact remains: when I am asked the question, but gut my heart speaks towards the King.

So I write this sloppy juvenile love sonnet by saying that it is meant to inform a lot of posts to come. King has been a major force in my life after all, certainly the first mature reader I read, and he remains the author I have read most voraciously. As such, his name in inevitably going to come up in this blog. A lot. So I thought it prudent to go ahead and outline right now why I think of him the way I do, and so when I begin reviewing every single one of his works, or his name pops up a half a dozen times in every single post on literature or writing that I do, you will, at the very least, know why.

 A MARRIAGE PROPOSAL RESPECTFUL AND BRIEF EXAMINATION OF STEPHEN KING: SPECIFICALLY IN REGARDS TO HIS EARLY WORKS, ENDURING POPULARITY, AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO AMERICAN LITERATURE

It's weird when your popularity transcends the meager bounds of this good Earth and flirts with legendary status. And it’s weird for this simple reason: when everyone knows you, less people pay attention to you. You become a fixture, like the sky or a building or that oak tree you walked by every morning and never noticed. That’s basically what King has become. He is an icon, and as an icon, his presence is so pervasive in the subconscious of the mind that, counterintuitively, his books are not as popular as they used to be.
Oh, they still sell in the millions. And there are other reasons why King’s sales have fallen from their 80’s/early 90’s peek: devolution of style, trying to appease a different type of crowd, etcetera. But I really believe a large part of it can be attributed to simply the fact that King has broken the boundary between eager anticipation and cultural iconography. You know how Mark Twain said a classic is a book that everyone praises and nobody reads? Yeah, that’s basically the status of King these days. Everyone knows who he is, and that ubiquity has made him just part of the everyday lexicon of American life. Which is quite an achievement, don’t get me wrong, something few people can ever aspire to, but there’s not that same kind of—drive, I guess, to his popularity. No one can “discover” King anymore, and be blown away by his freshness and his unique attributes. Everyone knows him. Everyone knows his unique attributes. His horror stories and his possibly insane mind have become such mundanities that it’s easy to forget that King basically brought horror to the mainstream and legitimized it, the way Star Wars did with science fiction in 1977.20^th century writers.

Because if there’s one thing with which you can describe Stephen King, it’s that he is definitely hard to define. A man who routinely tops the bestseller lists, but also has the talent and the ability to be considered a good, if not great writer and whose works are worthy of academic review and study. A man who transcends the very genre he’s writing in while he’s writing in it. A man who understands horror in such a completely human way that it hits at something deep inside the human psyche. You see, King has a knack for psychology. He understands fear. And his contributions to the psychology of fear in his works alone should gain him access to the ranks of all-time great writers. King takes the deep, emotional, character driven studies of a Hemingway or Faulkner or even an Updike, and transplants them to H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares.

What makes this so fascinating is that in many of his stories, with often Lovecraftian elements, the scariest portions are not the haunted hotel or the psychopathic clown or the unbreakable dome that has fallen over the city, but the people themselves.

Personally, I think that’s how King really broke the bonds of the horror genre’s relativity small fan base, and turned into the phenomenon that he became. Whereas other great writers like Lovecraft or Matheson or Bradbury dealt with the fantastic in a very grounded way, King deals with the grounded in a very fantastic way.

Just look at his average main characters: they’re often alcoholics, often disenfranchised, or bitter, or lonely. They talk dirty and smoke Pall Malls, and by the time the novel starts the world has usually defeated them. They are written in stakes that allow no compromise: every facet of their existence is often exposed and explored. King’s characters are undeniably real and undeniably human, and that, in essence, is what draws those who wouldn’t normally have tried horror into King’s vision.

To illustrate this, let’s look at King’s first novel, and the one that really jump started his fame and career: Carrie. Now, Carrie was an average-at-best seller in the market upon its initial release. It did pretty well, got King some recognition, at the very least ensured his second novel would be published...quite possibly, it could have been the beginning of a career that many writers attain, of middling success that is just enough to live off of without a secondary career, but never beyond the bounds of a few thousand dedicated fans.

But then something happened that changed King’s life forever.


A movie was made.

PICTURED: CREEPY EYES

A wunderkind movie made by a wunderkind director, that just happened to become one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Suddenly his name is everywhere, and the paperback of his book is selling like hotcakes. He was blasted into the realm of fame, and more importantly? He kept it.

How did he keep it? It’s a point worth examining. Other writers have had movies made of their books before, had that one time where their novel topped the million-mark, then settled into the aforementioned middling success that comes from the leftovers of said feelings. But King? King just got bigger. And bigger, and bigger. And I think all of that can be traced back to King’s treatment of his main characters.

Because what is Carrie, after all, but a revenge fantasy? And what’s more chilling, a deconstruction of a revenge fantasy. What makes Carrie work, and what set it apart from other novels of its genre was its primary focus, a seventeen year old girl living a seventeen year old life; it felt real, visceral even, and its more-or-less accurate rendition of the trials of high school, in my opinion, was what really brought people in. To put it more bluntly, the movie and book did as well as they did not because of the scene girl with telekinetic prowess kills everyone, but the scene where she has her first period and the other kids tease her mercilessly for it. I'm not saying that the elements of the book aren't exaggerated to a point, for the sake of drama or tension, but at its emotional core there is something that resonates with readers that makes its genre much more palatable to a mainstream, wider audience. We may not be able to relate to telekinesis. But high school drama, bullying, outright viciousness by peers and classmates? That weird neighbor who never talks to you except to remind you you're going to burn in hell? Those are all very real, emotional themes to the novel that the audience can latch on to; this allows them to more readily accept the fantastic elements that might have driven that same audience away at an earlier juncture.

So now that I have completely solved the reasons behind Carrie's success, let's move onto King's second published novel, Salem's Lot. Don't worry, this isn't going to be an analysis of every one of his works--that's pretty well impossible in thirty posts, much less one--but it marks a turning point in his fledgling career, signaling that his popularity was not going to wane. Oftentimes writers have something of a sophomore slump, where the second novel that comes out isn't as good as the first, or as financially successful. And just as often, they never entirely recover from it. You only have to look at The Time Traveler's Wife author Audrey Nifenegger for a recent example. Building an audience is tricky, and to maintain and even grow that audience at the rate that King accomplished is nothing short of amazing. The second novel not only has to be good, it has to absolutely blow people away. I think it could be argued that Salem's Lot was what really solidified King's popularity and demonstrated his staying power.

PICTURED: ONE OF TWO OWNED COPIES

 Again, the driving force behind Salem's Lot is not the vampires themselves--though they are, to a one, quintessentially creepy. But what really sells the book and grabs the audience is its eerily truthful rendering of the inner workings of small town America. By 1975, when the novel was published, the idealistic community set up that had been part of the American cultural psyche since the end of WWII was in its last dying spasms. The trauma of Vietnam and the approaching city boom times of the 1980's had made the old-fashioned vision of happy American middle classes living in harmony not only hopelessly outdated, but entirely exposed as a facade of wholesomeness that had never truly existed.

I doubt King meant Salem’s Lot to be taken this way—the best authors rarely, with few exceptions, ever really do—but Salem’s Lot really works well as an honest-take of the state of the American zeitgeist immediately after Watergate and Vietnam and just before the Reagan years. America was undergoing a cultural shift, and Salem’s Lot is a nuanced reflection of that. It says something about its culture and its time. The vampires in it represent nothing less than a fundamental invasion of the small-town ideal and the inevitable destruction of it.

It really spoke to people. It came out in the right place at the right time and benefited from it, simultaneously mirroring American cultural attitudes, and functioning as a deconstruction of the whole idea of the cute, placid, homey communities that the country believed, and still does to some extent, that it relied on. The citizens of Salem’s Lot are turned into vampires and their entire social construct destroyed, and that’s a tragedy, sure, but what sets Salem Lot apart is that the quaint, homey small town that it’s set in is populated with selfish greedy, and entirely non-quaint citizens. People cheat on their wives, gossip interminably, outright spy on their neighbors, beat up visitors on the street, stick shotgun’s in the mouths of youths…

King devotes entire sections of the novel to describing the town and its inhabitants. Like many of his other works--The Shining probably being the most famous—the location of the main characters is as much a fully-realized being than the characters themselves; and in these sections, King systematically goes about destroying small-town innocence and the public social masks that we wear in society to obscure our less savory aspects that manifest behind closed doors. It hit a lot of people in the gut. There’s a reason King is very popular in places other authors haven’t been able to touch. King’s writing is down to Earth, his characters are real, normal, everyday schlubs (except when they are writers, of course, but that’s another post --E), and his subjects are real to people and accessible to them and, in their hardest of hearts, maybe even a bit truthful.

So to boil it down, King is a writer after my own heart. He has a child-like glee for what he does, while understanding its importance. He holds nothing back, gives exactly zero damns what the public thinks about him, realizes that story is the most important aspect of a novel and that great writing is there to serve it, has remained humble and normal in the face of tremendous fame, has a house with an iron gate whose posts are topped with carved bats, and has an almost uncanny understanding of blue-collar America and how its individuals think, behave, and often, find courage. It makes no matter what that sad parody of what once was Harold Bloom thinks of King: the fact is, his place in the pantheon of American storytellers is inexorably set. Instead of bemoaning it, like my ilk is wont to do, we should celebrate it. Examine it. Critique it.

Because despite my unabashed love for him, King is far from perfect (and who isn't?). He is also magnificent. He is a truly fascinating writer, a nexus of all sorts of literary issues. Genre, tone, mainstream popularity, academic debate--even how quality can decrease and why. All of these King has in some small way been a part of. He is situated at a convergence, a rare combination of pulp populism and high art, and because of that, he is a lens through which we can examine the entire expanse of literature, publishing, writing, editing, critique and why all of it, in the end, matters.

Until next time,

Mr. E

PICTURED: MORE CREEPY EYES

(1) This is the Internet, so of course I have to mention I'm exaggerating here...kind of. This attitude does exist, though, whether in part—I'm guilty of it, as, I'm sure, are the four people in Uzbekistan who actually read this thing—or in whole. And Harold Bloom is the Supreme Potentate.

Why Batman: Arkham City Disappointed Me

-->

 Shhh.

I'm about to tell you a secret. And you cannot, cannot tell anybody else, understood?

…

…

I like video games.

Quiet! Don't gasp so loud! If anybody in the Pretentious Liberal Arts Majors Society learns about my affection for video games I'll be kicked out for sure, and I just paid this year’s dues! (Note: Seventy five dollars and a scathing critique of anything remotely popular, and or and gushing review of a work no one has ever heard of, in case you were wondering. But you do get a free mug out of it. --E)

But it is true. For a long time, I tried to hide it. To deny. Surely an English Major, whose entire existence revolves around dithering on about high works of literature, could not possibly like video games? Or even should like video games? Surely it's a hobby way below the tastes of such impressive intellects and keen insights as our own?

But I finally could deny it no longer. I like video games. And comics. And all sorts of lowbrow nerd obsessions that even the most destitute artiste would dismiss as beneath their considerations. If you ever wonder why I don't post my real name on this blog, that's why. Cause if anyone found out, I would never be allowed at a roundtable discussing the Christian symbolism in Moby Dick ever again.

Still, at my heart I am a penniless and pretentious holder of a B.A. Degree. And as such, it does take quite a bit for me to purchase a video game. One, because I'm penniless, and games are sixty bucks hot off the presses. And two, because I'm pretentious, so I need a video game to fulfill something deeper than a waste of a few hours. I need it to mean something. I need it to say something. And I need it to understand what it says, and at the very least, take it seriously.

I need it to be art.

PREFACE: A WORD ABOUT ART AND VIDEO GAMES

Boy, this little discussion has gotten really tiring over the past years, hasn't it? Both the stalwart proponents of a higher evolution of video game artistry and the steadfast defenders of the industry's current state have both bitten back and forth at each other ad nauseum. Literally. I'm almost to the point that even I, who spent the entirety of college debating works of art, don't want to hear it anymore. But if we're going to discuss the ramifications and thematic issues of something like Batman: Arkham City, then this interminable argument is inevitably going to come up, so I just wanted to get it out of the way here and now.

Of course, video games are art. Even if you have to go by the most basic, rudimentary form of the word (that is, art=craft), then video games are art. They are constructed visual pieces designed to, on some level, emote a reaction from the viewer. They're art. And some of them are pretty close to “high art,” whatever that means.

But honestly, The Game Overthinkersays everything that I personally think about this whole debate, and does it much more stylistically and eloquently, so if you really want to delve into this subject, then go ahead and click on this link: Game Overthinker: Response to Roger Ebert.

Mainly, I bring up this whole issue because this post is going to discuss Batman: Arkham City on a more traditionally artistic level than you would normally review a game. Specifically, we're going to focus a lot on the game's narrative, as well as decisions made that impacted the games effectiveness at both fulfilling its purpose as a game and as a work of art.

Mind you, this is not a thesis, or a carefully documented essay on the flaws of Arkham City's structure, tone, and methodology. These are just a few thoughts I bounced around in this crazy brain of mine until I came to conclusions about what I was thinking. But I think these points do speak to issues with Arkham City's place as a work of art, and of a problem that many video games might have if they aspire to the realm of high art, whatever that means.

Just an FYI.

So without further ado:

WHY ARKHAM CITY REALLY DISAPPOINTED ME

It's not because it's not a good game, because it is. In fact, it's a very good game. But in this case that just makes it worse, because it highlights what exactly this game could have been, and how it ultimately falls short of the mark.

Like I said, it usually takes a lot for me to buy a game. A. Lot. I'm talking sometimes years of good attention and press and general circulation through the interwebz. As such, I'm not one to usually buy at game when it's at its primary $60 price tag. For example, I bought Batman: Arkham Asylum about a year after it came out, when it was the GOTY edition and thirty bucks cheaper. Saves me money and by that point I know I'm purchasing a spectacular experience. But there are exceptions, usually coming when the game is a sequel a well-known property, i.e., Metal Gear Solid 4, which I have loved in the past and expect to love again. Batman: Arkham City falls into this latter category. I loved, loved, loved (Note: Loved. --E) Arkham Asylum, and so I eagerly awaited Arkham City with all of the excitement of a child waiting for Santa on Christmas Eve (a fitting metaphor as I got the game for Christmas).

And let me say again: I liked the game! I definitely had fun playing it, and as a game in and of itself, it functions perfectly. The graphics are fantastic, the voice acting beyond commendable, the controls intuitive, the fighting satisfying, the stealth complex and the bone-breaking almost inspiring in its gory beauty. There are a lot of people who would defend it on that merit alone: it's fun, it's a good time, why does it have to be anything more? Why can't we just enjoy things, and not have to worry about such things as tone and theme and implications? And while I do agree that a lot of properties can be enjoyed on that superficial, look-at-the-pretty fireworks level, there are a two main problems with this sentiment that make it inapplicable, to my mind, when it pertains to Arkham City:

1. Arkham City has to live in the shadow of its predecessor.

It’s not exactly ideal to fail to live up to the first in line in whatever you create. The human instinct is to make things better, to improve or at the very least add a new paradigm to a project that they continually work on, and this game is no exception. No one at Rocksteady wanted any consumers to say, “Well…it’s decent, I guess, but it’s nowhere near Arkham Asylum.” And certainly no one who bought the game wanted to end it feeling that way. So simply because of what Arkham Asylum did with its portrayal of characters, its story, and its atmosphere, Rocksteady couldn’t make the game a purely superficial, fun experience, because its predecessor wasn’t that way.

More importantly:

2. It tells a story.

And this is the main crux of why Arkham City can’t be enjoyed on its merits alone. It’s the great burden of all narrative forms of art, and anything that tells a story, really: a story implies things. People are going to be invested in it. It’s going to cause emotions. It’s going to matter, whether the reaction to it is virulent hatred or fawning love. When you tell a story, of any form, you take on a certain burden. Sure, part of that burden is to be entertaining. But another part of that burden is that you are going to be saying some things, things that you may not know that you’re saying until the work is completed. It behooves you, then, to go back and make sure you know what you’re saying it, whether you mean to say it, and at the very least, understand what it is your saying.

This is true of all narratives. All of them. From the schlockiest waste of DVDs at the bargain bin in Wal-Mart to every single print in the National Film Registry, all narratives say something. It may be simplistic. It may be stupid. It may go way over your head, and you may not understand it. It may be offensive, or ignorant. It may be affirming, or ironic. It may just be half-assed and not thought out at all. But all stories say something.

So this truth holds with all video games with a narrative. Let’s jump back in time for a second, and look at this through the eyes of a truly great game, Resident Evil 4.

PICTURED: RESIDENT EEEEVIL....FOOOUR.

In my opinion, Resident Evil 4 is tremendous. It’s fun to play, with good controls, legitimately creepy elements, and fantastic settings. It also has the one of the most simplistic stories you’ll see outside of a first grader's creative writing assignment.

The story of Resident Evil 4 is as follows: an agent named Leon Kennedy has to rescue the President’s daughter and fight through a crazy cult somewhere in the boonies of Spain to do it.

That’s it. Seriously. That’s the whole frigging story. It literally gets no more complicated. Sure, you learn a lot about the Las Plagas (the parasite that’s keeping the villagers under control), and how they were discovered and “weaponized,” so to speak. Sure you learn some backstory about the characters. You know Leon worked for the RCPD, and has a relationship with Ada Wong having to do with Umbrella, and that he knew Wesker from RCPD as well—but it’s all just details, and has no impact on the main story; nor do we really learn about Leon, or Ada, or the President’s daughter. Their hopes and fears and dreams and why they are the way they are? Nothing.

Now, I want to be clear: this isn’t any sort of problem. RE4 is not a character study, and wasn’t meant to be. And the game does a great job in making you care for these characters despite the sparse details surrounding them. But I’m saying all this to illustrate that RE4’s story is one of the basic, most simplistic kinds you could ever put on paper.

And yet, the story says things.

It says things about religion. It says things about the manipulation of people. It says things about the nature of humanity: are those controlled by the Las Plagas still human? Should we feel anything at all about blowing them away? It speaks to fear, and how to manipulate the player into a sense of anxiety and paranoia. It speaks to the precarious facade of human civilization. It even speaks to the idea of consciousness, and whether or not we are really in control of ourselves as we like to think we are. RE4 says all this, and it has a story that, as Yahtzee says, could be scrawled on the snow with one real good piss.

PICTURED: BLOWING THEM AWAY

I mean, hell, let’s look at Mario for one second. You could literally argue that Mario has no story in the traditional sense of narrative (SAVE THE PRINCESS!). You may not be right, but you could argue it. Mario's story is three words long, and what we really know about him barely more than that. And even from that, even from that, we have had debates about gender and gender roles in the Mario games.

So what was the point of this digression? To hammer home that the second Rocksteady included a story in Batman: Arkham City, (and really, it’s not like they had a choice), they consigned it to be taken on a level more than that of a mere fireworks display. Because the game was now burdened with the task of narrative, and that’s a burden that a lot of people take for granted.

Now that we got that out of the way, here are the reasons that Arkham City disappointed me. No, they don’t make it a bad game. In fact, it’s the game’s quality in other areas that really highlight them. But I do think it prudent to bring them up, simply because it seems to be, in large part, where the industry is heading at the moment, and if games really do want to be considered high art, or at least, high narrative, I’m honestly not sure that this is the way to go.

REASON I: The DLC Problem.

You know, DLC really bothers me. Not because I think it’s basically taking advantage of customers who own a game (though in some cases I don’t doubt that’s the case), and not because I think it doesn’t have good add-ons or features. It just seems…incomplete, somehow.

The thing about art is art has to be finished. George Lucas might tell you otherwise, but I won't. Art can’t change. It has to be completed, then shared. Now, art might evolve. Stories might become more complex, events might be a bit different, things might get added that weren’t there before—you can see this a lot in folk tales, or, for a nerdier example, look at the comic book industry. But evolution in the artistic realm can pretty much only occur when something that is already done is taken and changed somewhat. For art to be appreciated, understood, or impactful, it has to be finished—not perfect, perhaps not what the creator wanted, but finished, then shared. The thing about DLC is that it guarantees a game is never “done” or “over.” There’s always something changing and made new, often slightly transforming the entirety of a game as a whole—meaning that it’s hard to take the work as a standalone piece if it could be even a little different at any moment. It’s impossible to get any sort of real perspective on it, or fit it in history, or parse out a meaning in it, or use it to reflect the culture around it at the time of its creation, a few of the many things that make art important. (1)

So let’s talk about this Catwoman thing.

PICTURED: GOD NO. NOT THIS ONE.

Ostensibly, it’s really not that important. It’s really not. It’s not like the game breaks without Catwoman. Or that you need her to…understand what’s going on, I guess. And if you bought the game new, she doesn’t even cost money! Not to mention that completing her missions is an effective 0% of the total story percentage.

And it didn’t really bother me. It didn’t. Then I read this quote:

Wired.com spoke with Arkham City director Sefton Hill at the New York Comic Con in Manhattan last weekend, where he defended this decision, calling Catwoman a “guest star” and emphasizing that her segments make up less than 10% of the game’s total content.

“I certainly understand and appreciate the concerns of the DLC issue, but that was the decision that was made,” Hill said, noting that developer Rocksteady Studios had specifically created the Catwoman content with an eye towards distributing it in this manner.

Source: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2011/10/arkham-city-catwoman/

Something about this irked me. And just developing it “with an eye towards distributing it” in this manner really doesn’t make up for it.

Let me be clear here, as well: it’s not like Mr. Hill is some bad guy, or the people at Rocksteady are some kind of greedy, evil, bloodsucking company that rubs their palms together at the idea of a steady influx of DLC cash. It was a business decision, and not a bad one, gameplay wise.

Story/narrative/art-wise? I don’t know.

Games are in a weird state of being where they can actively reward their players ancillary to the overall story. Movies can’t do that, books can’t do that. You can have something like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which sort of “fills in” parts of Hamlet in the same sort of manner that the Catwoman sections “fill in” parts of Arkham City, but in the case of the play, it has to be its own contained work of art. In games, it doesn’t really. The Catwoman sections make little sense out of context of the game, and that wouldn’t pass in other mediums.

PICTURED: HILARITY

It’s just that…if you’re going to make this content, and you’re going to loop it into the structure of the narrative itself, I am simply not sure that it’s a prudent course of action if a game is going to be taken seriously as a work of art, or narrative.

As such, it’s the 10% part of the quote above that really makes me furrow my brows at this—I mean, what if instead of a video game, the quote read like this:

Wired.com spoke with Raiders of the Lost Ark director Steven Spielberg at his Los Angeles home, where he defended this decision, calling Salla a “guest star” and emphasizing that his segments make up less than 10% of the movie’s total content.

See the issue here? Not one of quality, or monetary considerations, but completion, and closure. If you don’t have a good internet connection or didn’t buy the game new, you miss out on 10% of the content, sorry. And yes, you could say that the Catwoman sections have nothing to do with the story, and you miss out on nothing if you don’t play as her, but if that’s the case, why did Rocksteady design her sections to begin with? They obviously wanted her to have some impact, even if it was just a bonus to unlock or a way to see the narrative in a different light.

And the fact her sections have no real bearing on the story doesn’t hold much weight either. Just because something has no bearing on the story doesn’t mean it has no meaning. You want to know a famous part of another medium that has no bearing on its overall story? Here, take a gander:

Yep, that’s right. One of the most famous, harrowing scenes in the history of cinema has nothing to do with its story. You could argue it sets the tone and the hell that the characters are getting into, and you’d be right. But as a story point? You could literally excise it from the movie and the movie would hardly change. Yet most people would feel cheated if it was removed.

Just because Catwoman has no bearing on the overall story doesn’t mean that it’s good she’s stored on Rocksteady’s server space somewhere, waiting for an input code or, if you're broke enough to have to buy used, a ten-spot.

Really, this is a facet of the modern generation of games that I just don’t get. What happened to the days when content like this would be on the very disk that you were playing? The stealth camouflage and unlimited ammo items you get in Metal Gear Solid upon completion, and the tuxedo you get to wear if you beat the game twice, are famous bonus features that are parts of the game. They've really gone down in history as the perfect type of reward for good play. In today's market? You could probably get the Stealth and Bandanna for a few bucks, but they might let you have the tuxedo skin for free, or if you bought it from a certain store or something.

Why does this content has to be DLC in the first place? Are you really going to tell me that Rocksteady spent probably hundreds of thousands of dollars and maybe in the hundreds of man hours detailing, writing, and rendering the Catwoman sections and missions, all in some strange effort to get people to buy the game new? (Note: Even that might be preferable to the alternative option, which is Rocksteady just trying to scam a few bucks out of people—but I don't want to be that cynical. --E)

Gaming is in a situation where they can actively reward their participants while still being a complete, artistic whole. It's one of the unique things, in a meta-sense, about the entire industry. Books can't do it. A book doesn't give you another book for free if you finish the first one. But games can do so; and it sucks that, if people are going to have bonus content on their games, that this advantage isn't, well, taken advantage of.

I think this might be another case where limitation breeds more fully-realized artistic vision. Resident Evil 4 didn't have the option of putting their extras as DLC. They had to put it all on the disc. And RE4's bonus content is very comparable to Arkham City's: both have challenge maps, and both have bonus levels and sections seen through the eyes of a minor supporting character. But RE4's execution of said bonus levels is inherently better than Arkham City's simply because of the manner in which it's garnered. It's won. It's earned. It's literally a reward for playing the game; this bestows a sense of accomplishment, no matter how small. Not to mention that Ada Wong's sections are every bit as fleshed out as Leon's, even though she's in the main game for, what, seven or eight minutes?

Likewise, Wong's sections also fill us in on other parts of the story, give us more info about a lot of characters, and act as a means to hint at the sequel which at that point no one knew was going to be a disappointment. It fits into the narrative of the story well while telling its own, and it really makes the player feel like they've gotten something out of finishing they game. Plus, and I can't hammer this down hard enough, the very fact that extra content on RE4 is on the same disc as the main game keeps the game as a functioning whole; if you don't wish to play the extra features, it's entirely up to you. Nothing is withheld. It is...it is an organic unity.

Yeah, I went there.

Look, maybe I'm overreacting about this. Maybe it doesn't matter at all. Maybe it's just a lot of overanalysis and nitpicking for no good reason. It certainly didn't affect my enjoyment of the main game—but then again, I had the technological capabilities to get Catwoman. And the game was bought new, so she was free. If I had gotten it used? And had to lay down some green just to get her sections? I might be a little more than disappointed; I might be outraged.

And why shouldn't I be, when I'm missing out on what the director himself admits is ten percent of a work of art's content?

REASON II: The Sandbox problem.

There is one thing that drives any story, and that is tension.

Anyone who’s ever taken a creative writing class has heard this concept come up at some point, but more or less, tension is what keeps the audience interested. It gives a story stakes. Without something at stake, the audience doesn’t care what happens next. And when the audience doesn’t care what happens next, it loses interest, and that spells trouble for any type of narrative.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that “tension” should be the driving impetus behind what a filmmaker, author, or any narrative creator does. Everything in the story should serve to create tension. All that writerly stuff that moderately successful windbags go on about: character development, dialogue, setting, style, structure, editing, revising, every single bit of it is in the name of fostering, and just as importantly, maintaining tension. We develop good, complex characters because when we have good, complex characters the audience gives a damn what happens to them, and that creates stakes. Books rather need to have good writing because good writing puts the reader in a place where the can delve into the story without distraction or lack of clarity and can therefore focus on the story. Not to mention that really good writers have a few tricks up their sleeve to get the reader to feel a certain way. Movies, especially, are edited, lit and shot in ways entirely to put the audience in a certain emotional state. This emotional state creates tension. In a horror movie, it might be shadowy lighting and a building, torqued musical score, heightening the audience’s fear and apprehension to the payoff, the jump scare or whatever it is, where the tension is released and the process starts over again. It might be an action scene with lots of sweeping, grand shots complimented by grand musical score with our heroes riding at a forefront against their foes with the fate of the world on the table. It might simply be a guy wanting to be with a girl, and us caring enough about that guy to want to see him succeed. All of these work off tension. Some broader, some more focused, but all specifically designed attempts to keep the audience invested in the story.

And, not to go on a long digression here, but it’s a concept that a lot of storytellers just do not get. How much tension a story has is directly proportional to whether a piece of narrative is a superficial fireworks display, fun but by no means memorable, or an emotional involving work of art. It’s at the point of tension where actions in a story go from “stuff happening” to “moving the story forward.”

What this means is that the creation and maintaining of tension has nothing to do with action, loud explosions, guns, people screaming, or self-indulgent direction. Or, to put this point simply, let’s look at these two clips.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1zLJ45kyC4

Here’s a fight scene between robots we care nothing about and can’t really tell apart. This scene might be appreciated, it might even be liked, but I am willing to be a solid amount of money that the enjoyment of it is purely superficial. It's pretty, sure. Very pretty, in fact. It's "cool" too. But it’s a firework. Bright, shiny and just as fleeting. Enjoyable on a completely detached level.

By contrast, take a look at this scene, what is, in my opinion, one of the finest moments in cinema.

One of the greatest, tensest and most famous climaxes in the history of movies is three people staring at each other. But what makes this moment so great is everything I’ve just talked about. We’re emotionally involved with the characters, first of all. Second, look how everything builds—it’s almost like a horror movie in its careful crafting of tension, to the point where it’s almost unbearable, and you’re just begging someone to shoot. Notice how the music becomes more and more grand, and the way Leone cuts back and forth between the men’s eyes. And then, the release: one shot.

Bunch of robots nonsensically battling=pretty.

Three men looking at each other=one of the most famous moments in film.

So after all that, we’re finally going to get back to Arkham City! (Yay!)

…

Actually, we need to talk about sandbox games first.

The whole creation of sandbox games only really became practical in the PlayStation era where there was enough space on a disc to craft a fully-realized “world” as it were, with parts that one could, possibly, never even go to. Now, I will never portend to be an expert on video game history, but from what I can tell the modern version of sandbox started with GTA III. And that’s great. It was revolutionary, it was a world that felt about as real as anything could get at that time, and fundamentally changed the video game paradigm. I’m also not going to say anything ridiculously inaccurate like sandbox games don’t have merit or any game that’s a sandbox in automatically lowered in quality.

But.

What sandbox games can suffer from (if not very delicately handled) is a lack of tension.

Now, maybe this is a pretentious douchebag thing (I am a member of the Society, after all). But if I’m going to play a game that has a narrative, and I’m going to be invested in the narrative, it’s going to follow that I’m only going to be invested in the game as long as said narrative is going on.

It’s the reason why I never could bring myself to get into The Elder Scrolls games (Skyrim specifically, since it’s more current). It’s not that the game’s not great, but I knew, when I really thought about it, that it wouldn’t be worth my money because once I finished the main quest, the game would cease to hold my interest.

Is that a personal opinion? Of course. But I don't think it can be argued that a lot sandbox games lose quite a bit of the all-important narrative tension once the “main quest” or “major storyline” has reached its conclusion, even though you can still keep playing long after it.

This can be entirely traced back to what tension is: it's the driving force behind all stories. It's the very thing that keeps us interested. We want to find out what happens next and so we keep playing, or watching, or reading, and when the onus is removed...

Let me put it this way. I stayed up entire nights finishing Bioshock—and I am not one prone to that sort of behavior, mind you. It's warm milk and bedtime at 10:00 p.m. for the most part (don't judge me). But I was so enamored with the tale Bioshock was spinning that I risked sleep deprivation just to see it through. The same was true of Arkham Asylum, which spun a tale much less complex but just as worthy of its comic book origins, characters, and investment into the storyline.

Arkham City? Same thing. Stayed up late, was really excited to play it, wanted to see how the Joker related to Strange and what Protocol Ten was and where Ra's Al Ghul figured into everything. And then I finished it. It was entirely by accident too. I completed this one mission—I can't remember which—stepped outside the door and there were the Tyger helicopters blasting everything away in sight. You couldn't exactly go around completing the other side missions at the moment, so I carried it through and it took me, literally, to the end of the game. No deviation, no choice. The problem with that paradigm is that it left me with a situation where I had almost 40% of the game to complete, but no real onus to do it.

In other words, I had no problem putting down the controller after I defeated the Joker and the credits rolled.

Is that a problem? Maybe not on a basic, pragmatic level. It's not like the game suddenly goes all buggy and breaks after the credits. But from an artistic perspective? I think it might be. Not only because the lack of tension that results from “finishing” the story too early has the ability to take you out of the game, but that it also turns a game that I would stay up late pursuing completion of, into just another fireworks display that I could take or leave.

And that's the problem with sandbox games, of the type of Arkham City, in any case. It's not that it's an open world, and it's not that there are side missions ancillary to the main plot. It's that those side missions ancillary to the main plot work best when they are, you know, ancillary to the main plot. If the main plot ends, those sections are not strong enough to hold up the tension of the game, or any story, really, and they were never meant to be.

To bring this point home through another medium, I think the closest comparison you can have to a sandbox game in literature is the Harry Potter series of books. Surprisingly, the two things have same set-up: a large, overarching story (Harry's relationship and confrontation with Voldemort; Batman's investigation of Hugo Strange, the Joker, and Protocol Ten), peppered throughout by bits that serve no real purpose other than pumping up the veracity of the world they're in, or at the very least serving as self-contained supports to the overall story (the Quidditch world cup and Quidditch matches, the classes, the Triwizard Tournament in Harry Potter; the Deadshot, Freeze and Penguin storylines from Arkham City).

Now what makes the aforementioned parts in Harry Potter not mere pointless wastes of time is the way it builds Harry's character, the way it completes the world around, and, significantly, the way it feeds into the larger conflict as a whole.

The reason we're willing to read about the various activities in the wizarding world is because, no matter how mundane or random, there is always a shadow lurking over them, if you will; that shadow being Voldemort, and the inevitable confrontation we know is going to occur at some point. It's not always obvious, and very often it's understated, but it is there. What does that serve? It gives these sections, which would otherwise be non sequitur bits of puffery, an inherent, subtle but nonetheless very real tension. We know that the influence of Voldemort is there, even if it's in the form of a wrongly accused “cohort” (Prisoner of Azkaban) or a miracle stone required to bring Voldemort back to life (Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone).

I cannot overstate this enough. The lurking, omnipresent figure of Voldemort that hangs over every book is at the very least part of what makes these mundane little traipses into Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley have tension—even if it's in the most diagonal way (one of the myriad fights the kids have with Malfoy, for instance, on the surface seems to have little to do with Voldie. But then you think...well, Malfoy=Slytherin and Voldie is Slytherin, and Malfoy's father was one of Voldie's right hand men...). It gives them purpose, and depth. It helps build the world, the characters, and often, the very conflict that it ostensibly has nothing to do with.

So imagine, if you will, that the Harry Potter series, of seven books, has the ultimate confrontation and defeat of Voldemort, its Big Bad, in book 4. And the final three books are just Harry attending classes, getting into romantic faux pas, and having fun in Hogsmeade or at the Quidditch World Cup.

Sounds like bad fan fiction, right? The propulsion of the story is gone, and all we have left is “stuff happening.” There's neither context nor perspective. No reason, really, to be reading what we're reading. We have regular, unassuming, mundane days in real life. There's no point in reading about regular, unassuming days in a fictional life.

Would three books of Harry just doing stuff with no context, drive or tension be unbearable? Probably. But, you know, it's possible Rowling could have made it work. She's good writer, we like Harry, maybe we would be okay with seeing him just chilling out. But would the books still be page-turners that you stay up all night way past any logic or sense reading just to get to the end? I can pretty steadfastly say: no.

This is exactly what happens in Batman: Arkham City.

Yes, I still play it. Yes, I even have fun. The Riddler puzzles, for example—it's nice to outsmart the bastard, it really is. And I'm working on finishing off the side missions. But more out of a sense of duty—or maybe OCD—not really because I'm desperate to. The game has been relegated from something I run to do to something I goof around with whenever I'm bored for an hour. And entire sections of the game simply have no meaning. Why should I waste my time fighting anyone? Or spend twenty minutes stealthily taking out thugs with guns? What's the point? Why am I here? Why am I doing this? Why do I even exist?

I don't think it's the sandbox itself that's the cause of the problem, but how the game is structured. To illustrate this, I would like to point out one of the recent legendary games that has undergone critical backlash in the last few years: Final Fantasy VII.

PICTURED: EMO PROTAGONIST AND ALL HIS WACKY PALS

Say what you want about this game. Is it overrated? Is it dated? Is it the beginning of everything that went wrong with the FF series? Maybe all those things and more. But what cannot be denied is that FFVII is suitably epic in its scope, taking a full on, balls-to-the-wall advantage of the PS1's more sophisticated disc storage mechanic. It's also what I would consider to be the most famous prototype sandbox game that came out of that era.

FFVII isn't a sandbox game in the now understood meaning of the word—I think there were still too many technological limitations in that era to pull it off. But you can see the beginnings of it taking shape. After spending the first 20 or so hours in the corporate-controlled dystopia of Midgar you're thrust into a vast, open world where you can do anything, take the story at your own pace, and, at a certain point, gain the freedom to pursue fun but not imperative side quests. Now I know previous FF games had a more open-world idea...but I don't think it can be argued that FFVII took it to a bigger, more fully realized level. Here was a game with dozens of side quests. Weapons to be found, weapons to be killed, games at the Gold Saucer, special characters to unlock, side missions to go on, chocobos to raise, extremely powerful materia to locate, submarines to explore, etc. It's true you only get “true freedom” to explore the world once you get the airship, but the point is that the seeds of what would later come to be known as sandbox games were all there.

But God damn it, once Final Fantasy VII was over, it was over, man.

People might bitch and complain about FFVII's (in?)famous ending, but the fact remains that FFVII did an excellent job building up its Big Bad as the super-colossal-behemoth monstrosity that your entire game is working towards defeating. Like Voldemort in Harry Potter, the shadow of Sephiroth hangs over everything you do in FFVII. No matter how many times you here that ear-shattering doinky music in the Chocobo races, you know he is out there, waiting.

And once you defeat him? Game's over. What this does is not only lend credence to Sephiroth as the villain, but gives the story a focus and drive it would otherwise be lacking. I mean, let's be honest here: would defeating Emerald Weapon have been as satisfying if you could come back and do it whenever you wanted, before or after Sephiroth was defeated? I really don't think so. And would Sephiroth have become the be-all-end-all list topper of greatest video game villains if his ultimate defeat turned out to be just a routine action? A percentage of an overall game completion score? I don't think so. Having the game umbrella-ed under the final battle of Sephiroth gave him weight, the story weight, and the entire game weight. It gave it a narrative tension that, no matter the critical backlash that's sprung up against it the past few years, makes it a memorable work in video game history.

Can that same feel of epicness and tightness of story line apply to Arkham City? Can the intimidation of the main villain even approach Sephiroth's? Can it even approach the Joker from Arkham City's own predecessor?

No, it really can't. And it can all be traced back to the lack of tension, diminution of villains and discarding of storyline that comes simply from being able to dick around in Arkham City after the credits.

It doesn't make it a bad game. It doesn't mean the puzzles aren't interesting and the level design isn't fantastic and the side missions are useless. It doesn't mean that gamers shouldn't have the ability to make their own choices in a game, or should be forced to stay on a linear path throughout. No, what sandbox games that are handled like Arkham City do mean is that their entire narrative, the thing that they have worked to get us interested and invested in, becomes essentially meaningless because you can come back after the credits as if nothing has happened. If that's not the antithesis of narrative tension, I don't know what is. And I don't know if a game can be taken seriously as a narrative work if this is the type of sandbox game it chooses to be.

But when you get right down to it, all of these so-called “problems” are forgivable for a variety of means. You can chalk them up to a lot of things, including just simply being the nature of the medium as it is now. At the end of the day, both of these issues I’ve droned on (and on and on) about are really just personal opinions that a guy who admittedly barely buys video games has had with a game he chose to get. Gaming is a new medium, especially in the realm of narrative, and it’s quite possible that over the coming decades the whole understanding of the distribution and enjoyment of art might change, or at the very least, games will inherently be understood to follow a different set of rules than literature and film.

Yet if there’s one thing that I’m sure is a real issue for Batman: Arkham City, one that might hurt any attempt for it to be really examined critically, and the one that truly, deeply disappointed me as a player, it is this:

REASON III: Batman: Arkham City totally whiffs on its thematic responsibilities.

All narrative art has themes. Period. It cannot be avoided. As I mentioned waaaaaaaaay back up there are the beginning of this article, all pieces of art with a story are inherent going to imply something, and this is one of the overlooked burdens of narrative.

Why is it a burden? Because if you are responsible, you’re going to look back at the story you’ve crafted and understand what it’s saying beneath the surface—and this might lead you to places you weren’t expecting to go. Your story might say things you aren’t comfortable with it saying—things that you never intended it to say, which means you might have to change or scrap the whole project. Or, it might be saying something that you’re okay with, but which might be easily misinterpreted, meaning you have to go back and revise the piece until it functions wholly. And inevitably, no matter how careful and how much scrutiny you put a piece under, someone is, at some point, probably going to raise an objection to a concept or theme in your work that you never even spotted and still can’t even when pointed out to you, putting you in the rather disadvantageous position of defending your work. You think Shigeru Miyamoto ever expected his harmless little game about a plumber and a princess to ever be at the center of feminist debate? Probably not. Likewise, I doubt the creators and hardworking men and women of Rocksteady would ever expect some douchebag nobody on a new blog raise some possible concerns about their treatment of Batman and his relationship to the lower and criminal classes, but there you have it—when you put a narrative out there, weird shit is bound to occur.

You see, there’s an inherent—oh, let’s call it a problem with Batman, something that I think is coming more and more to light with the recent American collapse of the banking systems and repeated multi-billion dollar bailouts to large corporations. In this era, where the prevailing attitude is that corporations and CEO’s rake in millions of dollars while leaving the poor and disenfranchised to rot, the picture of Batman has become something a little more bleak than it was at the beginning of the decade.

Because when you boil it down to its essence, Batman is a story about a billionaire who goes around beating up lower classes citizens who are probably just trying to make their way in the world.

Is that overly simple and off-target? In a way, yeah. It completely lacks context, and doesn’t take into account the myriad missions where Batman has, say, fought corrupt scientific laboratories, the Mob, or greedy politicians. Yet there is some truth to this cut down, bare bones interpretation of Batman. The guy has unlimited access to money, and uses it to prowl the streets of Gotham and take out criminals, usually without perspective or understanding of those criminals as human beings. It’s this fact, among others, why Batman is not as popular as goody-goody Superman in high crime/poverty neighborhoods, and part of the reason I think Superman might see a resurgence in the next decade, in a time when everyone’s fed up with the rich and powerful—but that’s another post.

Now over the intervening decades much has been done to make Bruce Wayne/Batman a more complex and compelling character than that little statement a couple of paragraphs above would make him out of there. His parents have been killed, he lives in the shadow of their memory, he only goes after truly horrible pricks, some versions even contemplate the notion that he’s a bit insane—that’s actually a good thing, mind, a very self-aware reading of the character that in turn makes the character stronger as he’s forced to make sure he doesn’t fall into a pit from which he cannot return (On a side note, this last is something that Arkham Asylum did almost to perfection. –E)

But then we get to Arkham City. And there are a few problems. They don’t leap out at you—they’re not brazen or obvious, which is why I’m sure that Rocksteady didn’t mean to imply what they are implying…

So follow along with me here. Arkham City is Quincy Sharp—secretly controlled by Hugo Strange—attempting to settle every single Gotham Criminal into one large sadistic prison camp. This means everyone from Arkham Asylum and the more general prison and Blackgate as well as the other prison in the Gotham Area are going to be emptied into this sector behind a high wall where they can basically just tear each other apart. You killed your whole family? You’re in Arkham City. You stole a popsicle from a convenience store? You’re in Arkham City.

Then in swoops Batman, entirely by accident, mind, mainly because Bruce Wayne was protesting the penitentiary and Hugo Strange tossed him in like a sack of mail. At which point Batman goes on a quest to put down the criminal elements in Arkham City and defeat Hugo Strange. What’s missing in this? What makes this story and its themes so disappointing to me? Only this: there is not one mention of the ethical or political ramifications of not only throwing all criminals into the same prison as if all levels of criminality are the same, but of treating criminals like dirt to begin with.

Yeah, really.

PICTURED: HE WAS JUST TRYING TO FEED HIS KIDS!

 

There is never a point in the game where Batman wonders if the guy he just broke the face of is really that bad of a person, or if he was a man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. What’s more, there are never any “lesser” criminals in Arkham City. There are only political prisoners, whom Batman makes it clear are innocent people wrongfully accused by Strange. There’s not, say, the guy who is completely out of his element in prison getting beaten up by a bunch of much more violent thugs. Or the youth that lifted a car to impress his friends and was thrown in with people who would own him in a second. And let me say again: the game makes it clear that all criminals in the Gotham district have been transferred to Arkham City.

Like I said above, I think this is a situation where Arkham City designers and writers just either missed the inherent complexities of the story they were raveling, or simply did not notice that this little implication was in there, lurking around for some obtrusive, overly sensitive lit major to stumble upon.

Yet it must be said: Arkham City implies that all criminals are the same, the rapist is in the same league as the shoplifter and the mugger is in the same league as the assaulter, and that they are all the same level of despicable and equally deserving of having a fist punched through their liver by Batman.

This...is sort of a problem.

Now whether or not Rocksteady intentionally took this stance, or whether anyone else noticed it, doesn't mean it's not there. As we like to say in English classes, the evidence is in the text. Meaning that whether they wanted to or not, Rocksteady has set up Arkham City to look like this:

a) That every criminal in the district is tossed into Arkham City.

b) That Batman can beat down every single criminal.

c) That every single criminal wants to beat down Batman.

d) That every single criminal in Arkham City deserves what they get.

This is a rather questionable stance to take to begin with. So how do you combat it? You take a very mature, nuanced approach to it, backing up this stance—however unintended—of undifferentiated levels of criminality. It would have to come through in the story, dialogue and Batman's interactions with the villains. It would have to be carefully crafted and well thought out to make sure that what is being said is not only intended but supported.

Instead, we get nothing.

The closest the game comes to addressing this issue at all is in a conversation Batman has with Oracle at the inception of Protocol Ten, when Babs asks Batman if killing off every criminal in Gotham wasn't, in fact, a good thing, I expected Batman to respond in one of the following ways:

1. No, Barbara, all human life deserves to be protected.
2. Remember, Barbara, most of the criminals in here have committed minor misdemeanors or less severe crimes. They certainly don't deserve to be shot to death by Tyger operatives.

Instead, Batman reiterates that there are innocent political prisoners in Arkham City.

It's all about implication and subtlety. No, Batman doesn't outright agree with Oracle that it's a good thing all the criminals in Arkham City are getting toasted. But he certainly doesn't disagree with it, and that's problematic when the game you're making is not thematically set up to dissect or at the very least address that implication. Which means that, however subtly or unintentionally, the game's implying that all criminals are not only the same, with no wiggle room whatsoever, but if they happen to be lumped together in the prison camp and then shot down by Gatling guns mounted on police helicopters, well, they were just criminals, right? Right?

So maybe I’m grasping, here. Well, that’d be no surprise. I spent three years of college writing twenty page papers based on grasping, I see no reason that I would have fallen out of the habit now. And perhaps you could convince me that the issue itself really isn’t that big, and that I’m just overanalyzing it because that’s my nature, and that everyone else who played this game was not going to notice such a pointless detail because they were actually, you know, playing the game. And it is possible I could be convinced of that.

But even if all that’s true, and I am sort of pushing it here with my interpretation of events based on clues Rocksteady didn’t even realize they were putting in, I could not be convinced that Rocksteady didn't drop the ball here as far as story and theme are concerned.

Arkham Asylum wasn’t the deepest game, and it didn’t need to be. It was a great game with fantastic play elements, a fun story, and great voice acting. The deep parts that did come through, specifically the Scarecrow sections where Batman’s character is sent through the ringer and examined thoroughly were the gooey caramel sections inside an already tasty chocolate bar. They gave the player a taste of a deeply thematic, visceral experience. So when Rocksteady made it known that they were intent on making the game bigger in every way, I honestly think a lot of folks were expecting a deeper, more nuanced and thoughtful game. And in that way? Rocksteady didn’t deliver.

It was a combination of expectations due to what occurred in their previous game, and what Rocksteady ostensibly was tackling in the current. Certainly not all Batman games, or even games period, need to have nuance and complex themes and major internal conflict and character development, but when your previous game had those elements, and the game you're currently building is, intentionally or not, a perfect set up for this type of complex, nuanced game, when such a thing does not occurs, it dampens the experience.

I mean, Rocksteady built an entire living breathing world with an absolutely gorgeous aesthetic design, realistic combat, interesting side missions, and a momentous story, and then hamstrung it by focusing only on those things just mentioned. They served us a prime rib with no fat on it. It’s neater, sure, but there’s no juice where there should be. Arkham City is an internment camp. You almost cannot escape without saying something profound about something…I almost wonder if Rocksteady didn’t try to not make the game with any thematic oomph.

Think of what could be said here. Think of what could be examined just by the setup that Rocksteady put in place. They could talk about the penal system, about the nature of criminals, about the inherent problems with putting major offenders in the same camp as minor ones. They could really dig inside Batman and get at not only the major good in his stances, but the bad as well. Maybe Batman encounters a character that seems to be an irreparable villain but was actually turned that way by Arkham City’s hardline stance. Maybe this allows Batman to think about what he is truly about. Does every criminal deserve to get swooped upon in the night? Maybe, maybe not, but what a fascinating thing to explore!

I mean, good Christ people, the place where Bruce's parents were murdered is right there in the city. And what do they do with it? Well…Strange says some things when you first encounter it…then if you go back there you can pay your respects while music plays in the background…does anyone else not see the missed opportunity here? I don’t know what they could have done, but for such a momentous occasion and place in the main character of the game’s life, you would think something more could be done.

And that’s what it boils down to, really. I mentioned up near the top about how great Arkham City was, and about how that’s what made me really disappointed in it. Do all video games “need” to be “high art” (whatever that means)? No. Do some “need” to be “high art” (whatever that means)? Maybe not. But I do think that games need to at least try. That’s the real rub for me here. Rocksteady set itself up with a great first game, a great premise, a cool aesthetic and beautiful gameplay…and then they didn’t do anything substantial with the materials that they themselves created. If games are ever to be taken seriously as art of any kind, they can’t shy away from tackling issues that are right in front of their faces, especially ones that are, intended or not, present in the game’s story and are just begging to be explored.

Expecting something that is not quite lived up to…that’s the definition of disappointment, I guess. And that’s what I got from Arkham City. A very good game that I was just expecting—maybe even merely hoping—would push just a little bit farther, confront just a little bit more, say something a bit more profound. Or even say anything at all.

Now if you excuse me, I have some Riddler trophies I still need to collect.

Until next time,

Mr. E

(1) Once again I found I was basically quoting a recent Game OverThinker episode in this section. He talks more in length about art and completeness here: http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/2011/12/episode-62-bells-whistles.html