Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Aging Gracefully

Imagine a 110 year old Batman, running around in a futuristic Gotham, now part of a giant Police State.  Why imagine this?  Because that seems to have been the start of Paul Pope’s Batman: Year 100.  But, then a funny thing happened between conception and implementation.  A 110 year old Batman would be, well, feeble.  So, while we never learn the age of the titular character, he is at best an insanely well-preserved man in his late-50s.  But, and the problems just keep on compounding, this story is set in 2039, and Batman’s parents were still killed in 1939 in this story, so he must be over a 100.  And, this isn’t just some time shift.  Everyone else from the 1960s is long gone.  Batman interacts with Jim Gordon’s grandson, who is an adult.  Not only that, but Frank Miller’s story, The Dark Knight Returns, in which Batman is already old, is part of the background for Pope’s story, meaning this story is set 50 years after Miller’s tale.  How is this possible?  And, just so you don’t think that such grousing is simply beside the point, the whole point of this entire story is that it has been a very long time since Batman has made himself visible, so long, in fact, that everyone (everyone including Gordon’s grandson, by the way) assumes he never existed and is just some sort of bizarre legendary fictional character.  In other words, this story is literally incoherent.  It’s nice enough if you can ignore the fact that it makes no sense, but it was really hard to ignore the fact that it makes no sense.

All of which prompts me to wonder:  if you want to write a Batman story in which Batman is over 100 years old, why not simply provide a plausible excuse? After all, simply noting that Batman has some accident in a Lazarus Pit would have been enough.  Indeed, since Pope wanted to write, in his own telling, a very physical Batman story, having a Batman rejuvenated by the Lazarus Pits would have allowed him to do what he really wanted to do.  But, it seems he wanted it both ways:  an old Batman when it was convenient, but a young one the rest of the time.

Here is an even better story: make Batman 110 years old.  Now that would be an interesting story.  What happens to a superhero like Batman when he is extremely physically frail.  Imagine he still has the wealth and the intellect, but simply can’t run around Gotham anymore and maybe his memory isn’t quite as good as it used to be.  Now, create a story in which there is a new villain—say some punk who is obsessed with the Joker, and decides to imitate him in minute detail.  Create a large series of puzzles and problems which only Batman could master because only Batman was ever able to fight the Joker.  But, Batman is old, so what worked in the past will no longer work.  There is a fascinating reflection on age in that story.

However, a story like that would, I am afraid, not be terribly popular.  People don’t like to think about aging in general, and an aging superhero is particularly sad.  (See, the Incredibles, well at least the beginning of that movie, since over the course of the movie we find out that being old doesn’t really mean being, you know, old.)  Is this Cult of Youth simply a product of fear of dying?  I’ve never been sure.    

But, to return to the Pope book (and I am well aware that the Reader was pining for just such a thing), the strangest part of all in Batman: Year 100 was the short story at the end, “Berlin Batman,” an earlier work by Pope.  This one is a reinventing of Batman as a guy who lived in Nazi Germany.  Interesting idea.  Sort of like Red Son, which was a pretty good book.  In this story, Batman has to act quickly to prevent the Nazis from destroying some really important papers.  And what papers?  The works of…Ludwig von Mises.  I kid you not.  How many readers of comic books know who Ludwig von Mises is?  How many even bothered to look him up after reading the comic book?  I really want to assign this comic book in an economics class…well, except that none of my students know who Mises is either. 

In the end, is this book worth reading?  I suppose.  Just don’t expect too much.

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