I don’t know how many readers became regulars as a result of last year’s “Dark Knight” awards march, but I do know there are quite a few who share my enthusiasm for comics and Batman comics in particular. This post is certainly aimed at that crowd, but anyone eager to get their hands on a great story, in any medium, this is for you, too.
With the 70th anniversary of the character coming next month, author, screenwriter and comics scribe Neil Gaiman has been charged with writing up the final chapter of Batman’s existence in the books as we’ve known them throughout that history. “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” is his “love letter” to the Bat, fashioned after Alan Moore’s similar send-off to Superman 20 years ago: “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”
Wired recently posted an in-depth interview with Gaiman, already high off the successful adaptation of his novel “Coraline” this year, and you get some great insight into his off-the-wall graphic denouement, which culminates with a sequence at once touching and unsettling, an homage of sorts to the finale of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Asked whether the character has lived in his heart for a while, given the deep attention and appreciation for his history in just two swift volumes, Gaiman had this to say:
When I was 5, I was in a car with my dad and he mentioned that there was this Batman TV show in America about a man who dressed up in a costume and fought crime. The only bat I ever knew was a cricket bat, so what I thought he looked like was rather odd, based on that. Months later, the series hit the U.K., and I remember watching and being affected by it. Really worrying, genuinely worrying, on a deep primal level, “Will he be OK?” That is the way it was with every deathtrap. If I missed the end of an episode, I’d get my friends to tell me he was OK.
Because of the Batman TV show, my dad picked up Smash! comics for me, which reprinted a Batman cartoon strip, which were much more about continuity than the television program. Those were my gateway drugs into Batman. Even when batman went twee in the ’60s, Neal Adams reinvented him as a long-eared, shadowy character. And when I was in my 20s, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns came out and I found myself writing my first piece of academic criticism on it.
I wanted my comic to contain all of that, from the story to the art. I wanted it to have that love in there. I wanted to write the last Batman with honor and love.
If you haven’t read these two books, I encourage you to do so, even if you aren’t up to snuff on what’s going on in the series at the moment. It reads as an independent study of the Dark Knight’s final hour. You can find “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” in the pages of “Batman” (#686) and “Detective Comics” (#853). And catch the rest of that Wired interview here.
(I was going to hold onto this and some more stuff until the beginning of the week, but we’re ready to go so let’s hit it during the weekend.)
(Read the official “Dark Knight” review