Review: Batman: Arkham Asylum 15th Anniversary Edition

Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Dave McKean
Collects: Batman: Arkham Asylum OGN (1989)
Published: DC, 2004; $17.99

The subtitle of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is quoted from the English poet Philip Larkin: “A serious house on serious earth it is, / In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, / Are recognized, and robed as destinies.” Larkin was writing about churches – serious places where serious questions might be asked about man’s place in the universe – and the reference seems fitting for a tale so rife with religious imagery and which outwardly appears to interrogate the nature of its hero’s existence.

The subtitle also suggests Arkham Asylum’s conscious opposition to what DC had in years past called “Imaginary Stories.” Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, such stories were typically one-off tales about possible realities (such as one comic in which Superman revealed his secret identity to and subsequently married Lois Lane), stories that would have no bearing on the ongoing continuity of the DC universe. By contrast, the supposedly “serious” Arkham Asylum fashions itself, as it does its version of the Joker, as “super-sane” – that is, as a serious, sober reflection of what the Joker’s psychotherapist calls “the world as a theatre of the absurd.”

In selecting Batman as the book’s hero, however, Morrison attempts a narrative sleight of hand. The introduction via flashbacks of Amadeus Arkham – founder of the asylum where Batman’s most disturbed (and most disturbing) nemeses are interred – is yet another red herring, distracting readers from the realization that Morrison’s tale is far from some universal parable about the nature of madness; nor is it an attempt to plumb the depths of the everyman’s soul. Indeed, Arkham Asylum evinces not so much the monomythic Hero’s Journey as it does a highly specific character assassination of what Morrison would later call “the ’80s interpretation of Batman as violent, driven and borderline psychopathic.”

Morrison’s outright contempt for the 1980s version of Batman is just one of many fascinating insights yielded by the annotated script included with the book’s 15th Anniversary Edition. The script goes a long way toward explaining some of Arkham Asylum’s more bewildering moments, among them Batman’s bizarre reaction to the Joker pinching his butt (“Filthy degenerate!,” Batman screams rather than simply punching him in the face) and an odd reference to the Joker wearing heels despite appearing in totally conventional attire. As it turns out, Morrison originally intended for the Joker to appear dressed as the singer Madonna, “in a black basque, seamed tights and lace-up stilettos.” In this early version of the story the Joker “projects an absolute confidence that confers upon him a bizarre kind of attractiveness and sexuality,” which throws into sharp relief Batman’s lack of sexual maturity. Of Batman, Morrison writes:

His body is a fortress of flesh, bulwarked against the ravages of a merciless world. Consequently, he stands perfectly straight to the point of stiffness. We can imagine him walking with his buttocks clenched. His is the posture of an obsessive, anal personality. . . . He is completely incapable of any kind of sexual relationship.

But if Morrison’s goal is to recuperate Batman from a sexually impotent failure and into a Christ figure capable of “physically demonstrating his new-found dominance” (as Morrison writes at the script’s conclusion), then he does so to often uncomfortable effect.

The Joker’s previously mentioned feminization – in combination with Arkham Asylum’s most disturbed male characters all donning dresses by the end, and with the text’s frequent allusions to the murderer Norman Bates’s transvestism in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho – constantly threatens to push the story into the realm of transphobia. Morrison adds notes of homophobia to the list of concerns as well, as in the script’s description of the villain Clayface: “an avatar of filth and corruption, the personification of pestilence and infection, whose impure touch carries instant contagion. Alert readers will perceive him as AIDS on two legs.” Batman proceeds to brutally break those legs in response to Clayface’s expressed desire to “share my disease.”

Dave McKean’s artwork, all the while, is an abstract phantasmagoria of squalor and darkness. He eschews the realism of Morrison’s script in favor of more impressionistic renderings that suggest the characters’ feelings by way of their shadowy environments rather than through conventional framing, composition, or coloring. His artwork functions as yet another narrative sleight of hand, in that it papers over some of the more embarrassingly self-important moments of Morrison’s script. For example:

The recurring Fish motif – which relates to Pisces, the astrological attribution of the Moon card – also relates to Christ, who in turn can be linked to the Egyptian God Osiris, whose life and descent into the underworld parallels with the story of Amadeus Arkham. We also see later that the Asylum is built upon a Vescica Piscis – this symbol . . . forms the ground plan of much religious architecture and is used in the construction of most of the major buildings of antiquity, like Stonehenge and Avebury in England. It is a development of the Greek symbol for Christ.

Morrison supplements such totalizing descriptions with, among other things, Freudian childhood anecdotes and lengthy quotations from Aleister Crowley. Captured here is a young Morrison at perhaps the most hubristic point of his career; in short, he writes, “everything in this story reflects and comments upon everything else.”

Conceived in the immediate aftermath of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, Arkham Asylum represents an extreme response to the grimdark aesthetic pioneered by those comics: one that ironically adopts that aesthetic in order to repudiate it. But whereas later responses to Watchmen (like DC’s recent DC Universe: Rebirth) would attempt to rise above the pervasive darkness of that comic with more uncomplicated tales of good’s triumph over evil, Morrison and McKean’s tale is arguably the victim of its own attempted seriousness. Weighed down by its more problematic themes and the pretension of its young writer, Arkham Asylum is simply, ultimately trapped in a quagmire of its own making: one of inescapable darkness, madness, violence, and death.

Review: Batman: Gates of Gotham

Writers: Scott Snyder, Kyle Higgins, and Ryan Parrott
Artists: Trevor McCarthy, Graham Nolan, and Dustin Nguyen
Collects: Batman: Gates of Gotham #1-5, Detective Comics Annual #12 (2011)
Published: DC, 2012; $14.99

Batman: Gates of Gotham, originally published by DC Comics as a five-issue miniseries in 2011, may be the most flagrant attack on creator rights that I have ever seen in a mainstream superhero comic. From beginning to end, its cast of characters enacts a corporate-fantasy version of the struggles over creative ownership that have rocked the comic book industry in recent years, with creators and their supporters effectively condemned, in the end, as mentally unstable individuals whose actions are tantamount to ideological terrorism.

Gates’ story is partially told through flashbacks to the 19th century narrated via the diary of Nicholas Gate, an architect who, along with his brother Bradley, designed and built much of Gotham City. The story of the Gate brothers bears striking resemblance to the well-known partnership of comic book writer-artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (who together created Captain America), as well as to that of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman. Not only are the Gates, like those real-life writer-artists, the impoverished sons of immigrants, but their initial place of work, with its crowded artists hunched over drawing boards, visually recalls the Eisner-Iger comic book studio in which Simon and Kirby began their careers. Furthermore, just as Simon/Kirby and Siegel/Shuster saw their creations come to life through the financial backing of Timely Comics and National Comics, respectively, so the Gates aspire to work for the individual whose wealth will facilitate the achievement of their artistic vision: “we approached Mr. Wayne with several drawings – drawings for our Gotham. Which we proposed to make his Gotham,” Nicholas says.

Also like Simon/Kirby and Siegel/Shuster, Nicholas Gate eventually has a falling out with the men who have thus far commissioned his work. The difference is that, in Gate’s case, this falling out occurs not over an employer’s refusal to return original artwork or to give financial compensation where creative credit is due, but over the mysterious death of his brother, which Nicholas believes to have been murder. He accuses one of his wealthy patrons, Cameron Kane, of being behind Bradley’s death, and as a result he loses the financial support of his employers. Gate’s suspicions are never confirmed and are therefore cast into permanent doubt – unlike in Kirby’s case, for example, in which Marvel's refusal to return original artwork was admitted openly by the company.

If Nicholas Gate at first seems to represent the archetypal “wronged creator,” though, then the second half of Gates of Gotham is a character assassination of that archetype. Following his brother’s death, Gate is portrayed first as hopelessly naive when he tries to convince Alan Wayne that foul play is involved, and later as a madman when he attempts to murder Cameron Kane in revenge; he ends up killing Kane’s son Robert instead. At the end of the story it is revealed that Nicholas was subsequently locked away at Arkham Asylum. Thus, for questioning the way he is treated by his employers and expressing his anger towards them, the book declares him insane.

There is metonymic significance, too, in the names of Gate’s antagonists. Although it may be tempting to dismiss the naming of one character after Batman “creator” Bob Kane as merely an in-joke, in view of the rest of the book’s position toward comic book creators it can hardly be overlooked. Nicholas’s murder of Gates’ Robert Kane is the act that “proves” the book’s argument: that creators who retaliate against their employers do so carelessly, vindictively, and without legitimate basis. That argument is made even more troubling by its invoking of the real-life Bob Kane – a man who continues to receive sole credit for Batman’s creation, despite the fact that the most familiar elements of the Batman mythos (apart from the name) were created by Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson. In Gates’ corporate-fantasy characterization of comic book creators, the murder of Robert Kane marks an “end of the innocence” not unlike that which took place after the death of the real-life Bob Kane: in the years since the truth of Batman’s creative origins became common knowledge, moral and legal questions about the way publishers treat creators have become significantly more complicated. It is not hard to imagine the leadership at a company like DC yearning for simpler times, but the way that sentiment is transcoded in Gates of Gotham, whether intentionally or not, is deeply troubling.

The same themes pervade Gates’ present, in which a terrorist calling himself the Architect is attacking bridges and skyscrapers built by the Gate brothers and owned by the prominent families that had supported their work. The Architect wears a steampunk-influenced diving suit, which Batman discovers had been worn by the Gate brothers and their employees during the underwater construction of their largest bridges. Based on this connection, it requires no great leap to understand the Architect’s actions as “revenge” for the wrongs perpetrated against Nicholas Gate over a century earlier. The Architect’s rhetoric is filled with hatred for Gotham and its wealthiest citizens, who he calls “liars and thieves,” and he accuses Batman of being a “traitor” even as he tries to blow up Gotham’s bridges with Semtex. If, as I have argued, Nicholas represents the archetypal “wronged creator” reimagined as an angry lunatic, then the Architect is the struggle for creator rights reimagined as literal terrorism.

The story’s only real mysteries are who the Architect is and whether Bradley Gate was actually murdered. While the latter question is never answered, the Architect is revealed to be a character named Dillon May. May is identified at first simply as a “collector” (what he “collects” is never explained), but in the final issue he is also exposed as a descendant of Nicholas Gate. With this move, Gates effectively conflates the two groups most prominently involved in the struggle for creator rights – longtime comic book readers (“collectors”) and the families/heirs of those creators – into an undifferentiated, self-deluded mass. The fact that Batman declares he will defeat the Architect “by proving everything he believes is a lie” underscores the book’s argument and positions its protagonist as an obvious stand-in for companies like DC and Marvel, which have made it their mission to refute even the smallest allegations of wrongdoing made by former employees and their heirs.

But Gates does not stop there, giving Batman these lines at its conclusion: “There are reasons and there are excuses. If it wasn’t his family, he would have found something else to rage over.” There is merit, certainly, to the argument that the most dedicated of comic book fanboys will always be angry about something, but to equate the arbitrary whims of fanboys with the dedicated positions of those who advocate fair terms for writers and artists is insulting. If anything, supporters of creator rights are defined by qualities that directly oppose those of most fanboys: the questions they ask are not “would this or that superhero win in a fight,” but “have Marvel and DC adequately compensated their writers and artists for the fruits of their creations? If not, what is to be done about it?” Batman: Gates of Gotham is little more than an ad hominem attack on the people who would ask these questions, made with as much mean-spirited “rage” as the antagonist it so doggedly seeks to vilify.

Review: Batman: The Black Mirror

Writer: Scott Snyder
Artists: Jock, Francesco Francavilla
Collects: Detective Comics #871-881 (2011)
Published: DC, 2011; $29.99 (HC), $16.99 (TPB)

Batman: The Black Mirror collects the entirety of writer Scott Snyder’s run on Detective Comics (first published just prior to DC’s line-wide “New 52” relaunch in 2011) with artists Jock and Francesco Francavilla. As such, it is one of the longest – and, I believe, the final – creative run to feature former sidekick Dick Grayson, and not Bruce Wayne, as Batman.

The book’s main plotline has to do with James Gordon (the murderous son of Commissioner Jim Gordon), who returns to Gotham with shadowy intentions after several years’ stay in a mental institution. Despite the fact that the series these stories were published in is titled Detective Comics, there is fairly little detective-work, or even mystery, involved in exposing James’s true motives. In fact, The Black Mirror is more a horror story than anything else, and it trades on a theme that has characterized some of the best works of the horror genre since the late 1960s: the notion that today’s monsters emerge not from somewhere “out there,” but from within the apparently normal, all-American family unit. Furthermore, James conforms to this archetype by specifically targeting his own family for destruction. His father and his sister Barbara, in turn, come to view James as an irredeemable force of evil that must be stopped at all costs.

Less interesting than this plotline are the several shorter ones that precede it, which involve the daughter of the man who killed Dick Grayson’s parents and a criminal organization that auctions super-villain paraphernalia. These issues are drawn by the artist Jock, and while his linework is perfectly competent, it pales in comparison to the colorful energy of Francavilla, who illustrates most of the material featuring James Gordon. Still, there is something at least a bit refreshing about the pace of the book’s plot development, which hearkens back to an era before “writing for the trade” was as prevalent as it is today. Elements of the James Gordon story are intermittently seeded throughout the other arcs, building suspense for Snyder’s big finale.

It would be inaccurate, though, to say that all of the smaller stories come together neatly in the end. Snyder tries to have it both ways by having James reveal himself, in a long-winded final monologue, not just as the psychopath his family has suspected him of being all along, but also as the mastermind behind all the conflicts Batman has faced in the previous ten issues. The reveal falls particularly flat when Snyder attempts to position James and Dick as dramatic foils, with James having somehow known, all along, that it was Dick under Batman’s cowl. Although James has appeared in Batman comics before, Snyder essentially treats him as a new character here, leaving any history that might justify his malice toward Dick unexplained.

The book also tries, but fails, to make the argument that Gotham is a “city of nightmares” which corrupts everything (and everyone) it touches. The trouble is not just the fact that this theme is never quite addressed head-on – there are only a few narrative captions and exchanges between Dick and Commissioner Gordon that allude to it – but that it directly clashes with the one theme the book develops most fully. For the James Gordon subplot to work (and it mostly does, up until his final monologue), James’s “evilness” must emerge from that unlikeliest of places: a loving, “normal” home. But for his evil also to be the cause, somehow, of Gotham itself (and for his ultimate plan to be the poisoning of Gotham’s infants with a drug that will supposedly make them sociopaths like him) totally confuses the book’s message. The Gotham-as-excremental-city theme is one Snyder will return to, in both Batman: Gates of Gotham and Batman, Vol. 1: The Court of Owls, but here it remains under-developed and at odds with the rest of the book.

Dick’s starring role makes for a few narrative innovations, the major one being that Batman now works with a support team composed of Tim Drake (Red Robin) and Barbara Gordon (the former Batgirl). However, this turns out to be little more than a slight cosmetic change. Dick’s radio contact with the others always seems to drop out at the first sign of danger – making him as much a loner, when it really comes down to it, as Bruce Wayne ever was. Dick is also Bruce’s preternatural equal in matters of technology and forensics, removing much of the naiveté we might expect from a young, inexperienced Batman.

Franchises as big as this one must always revert to square one eventually – in fact, Gates of Gotham, published concurrently with The Black Mirror, ends with Bruce telling Dick that he will soon be returning to Gotham – so it’s too bad that Snyder passes up the opportunity to do something significantly different with Batman here. In the end, Dick doesn’t have any adventures that Bruce couldn’t have had, and he doesn’t go about resolving conflicts much differently either; even the conflict with his primary antagonist is weighed down by run-of-the-mill super-villainy and a genuinely incoherent combination of themes. Although the artwork, especially Francavilla’s, often seems to leap off the page, this is a story that could otherwise probably best be classified as “business as usual.”

Review: Batman – The Dark Knight: Golden Dawn

Writers: David Finch, Paul Jenkins, Grant Morrison
Artists: David Finch, Jason Fabok
Collects: Batman: The Dark Knight #1-5, Batman: The Return #1, Superman/Batman #75 (2010-11)
Published: DC, 2012; $24.99 (HC), $14.99 (TPB)

Batman – The Dark Knight: Golden Dawn is one of the latest entries in the seemingly endless parade of comic book stories that rely on inserting new characters into the “never-before-told” pasts of established ones. In this case, as in most others, the new character makes a surprising return in the hero’s present, dredging up old memories and inevitably involving the hero in some conflict which is further complicated by the nature of the characters’ past relationship.

The dilemma faced by all such stories, of course, is how to make the reader interested in the new character and his or her relationship to the protagonist. Unfortunately, writer/artist David Finch fails spectacularly in addressing this issue in Golden Dawn. In this book the new character is named, without any detectable irony, “Dawn Golden.” Finch tells us that she was Bruce Wayne’s best friend before the death of his parents as well as his first romantic interest, and that now she is a young socialite in Gotham City who has gotten herself into some trouble. (As far as I can tell, we’re not supposed to wonder why she seems to be at least a decade younger than Batman in the present, despite the two appearing to be roughly the same age in flashbacks.)

Since Dawn spends most of her time on-panel either unconscious or with her mouth agape in wordless terror as Batman attempts to save her from peril, there’s little space for the most crucial aspects of this sort of plot: making the new character matter to the plot and to the reader. Dawn is little more than a cardboard cut-out of a damsel in distress, a role that could have been filled just as well without any of the murky backstory. Furthermore, she and Bruce Wayne never even meet in the present – her only interactions are with Batman. The fact that she and Bruce were childhood friends is entirely irrelevant to the story.

The paper-thin plot is perhaps to be expected – the series these issues come from, Batman: The Dark Knight, was created for Finch so that he could write and draw whatever Batman stories he wanted, regardless of what was happening in other Batman comics at the time – but that does not make its faults any more excusable. The comic doesn’t even succeed as a vehicle for Finch; apparently unable to keep up with his deadlines after just three issues (which were released over the course of eight months), Finch is replaced in issues four and five by Jason Fabok and a team of no less than six different inkers. It’s around this time, as well, that Paul Jenkins comes aboard as Finch’s much-needed co-writer (although he goes completely uncredited in the collected edition).

The issues Finch does manage to draw are filled mostly with splash pages of monsters and demons drawn in the dark, neo-Image style that he’s become famous for. More than anything, in fact, the story seems a fairly blatant re-writing of Spider-Man: Torment, the first story arc in Todd McFarlane’s early ’90s Spider-Man series. Both stories attempt to equate philosophical questions about life, death, and memory with uninspired (if not necessarily ugly) drawings of the supernatural; both also feature giant reptiles as major villains: the Lizard in Torment, and Killer Croc in Golden Dawn. The irony of these similarities is that Torment was itself an attempt to transplant the dark-and-gritty essence of late-’80s Batman comics into the Spider-Man franchise (the cover of Spider-Man #1 even sported a nonsensical caption that read “The Legend of the Arachknight”).

But for whatever other problems Golden Dawn has, its treatment of Dawn Golden is by far the most troublesome. Even worse than the book’s failure to characterize Dawn in any but the shallowest of ways (she’s extremely beautiful, in case you hadn’t guessed) is its “resolution” of her “character arc” (note the quotation marks); in the end, she is strapped to a table, tortured, and murdered by demon-worshipers. Etrigan (a “good” demon, apparently) shows up in a deus ex machina plot twist to defeat the bad guys, and his absurd, rhyming eulogy for Dawn is reflective of the blasé attitude the book has held towards her all along: “The spirit is gone, you must let her go. Know that you saved her, even so.” And then poof, he vanishes.

To see a female character developed so poorly and treated with such contempt (by her own creator, no less) is both sad and disturbing, especially in a comic as high-profile as this one. If art has just one obligation, it’s not that it need be entirely original or even technically well-crafted; it’s that it be created with good intentions – because if the aim of art is not to make the world a better place, then why bother? I’ve tried, but I see little that is good in Golden Dawn – only a book far uglier at its core than its glossy artwork would have us believe.

Review: Batman: Cacophony

Writer: Kevin Smith
Artist: Walt Flanagan
Collects: Batman: Cacophony #1-3 (2009)
Published: DC, 2009; $19.99 (HC), $14.99 (TPB)

Kevin Smith would probably be the first to tell you that his comics are just as controversial and divisive as his movies. Well, maybe not the comics themselves – more like the pace at which he writes them (if, indeed, he bothers to finish writing them at all; his first issue of Daredevil: The Target, published in late 2002, remains the only issue of that miniseries published to date). Before Batman: Cacophony, Smith hadn’t written a comic book for either Marvel or DC in three or four years, having been effectively booed out of the industry by impatient and hyper-critical fanboys. He asked for that kind of reaction, though, and he owns up to it in the introduction to Cacophony. I respect him for that, personally, although I can’t help but wonder if his words will fall on deaf ears. The naysayers seem to have already made up their minds on Smith’s comics work, and I doubt many of them are exactly clamoring to read anything new by him.

Walt Flanagan, on the other hand, is a virtual unknown in the comics industry (although fans of Kevin Smith’s movies may be more familiar with him, by way of his incredibly fast dog). The two are longtime friends; Smith credits Flanagan with introducing him to comics in the first place, and the two actually run a New Jersey comic book store together. Smith makes no secret of the fact that Flanagan got the job because of their friendship, and that he wouldn’t have even entertained the thought of working with anyone else. I doubt statements like that are going to get him back into comic fandom’s good graces anytime soon, but again, I appreciate the honesty.

I start by writing about the personalities behind Cacophony, rather than diving straight into the actual meat of the comic, because it’s obvious that Smith expects the reader to go into the book with all of these things in mind. In fact, I’d argue it’s the mentality he wants you to have as you read the book. Why else would he ruminate on his shortcomings in the book’s introduction? Why else would he preface his story by explaining that it’s not the best Batman story he can write, nor the best one that Flanagan can draw – that the series they’re currently working on together, Batman: The Widening Gyre, will be their definitive work on the character?

To my mind, there can be only one answer: by going out of his way to dampen the reader’s expectations before the story has even begun, Smith is challenging the reader to proceed with an extremely close and discriminating eye. In doing so, however, he seems confident that his story will hold up to that discrimination and surpass the reader’s expectations. Maybe I’m simply giving him too much credit, but intentionally or not, Smith’s belittling of himself and the story is a rhetorical device that clearly works: I enjoyed Cacophony quite a bit, despite going into it fairly confident that I would hate it.

So, with all of that said…I imagine it’s well past time to talk about the comic itself. Cacophony is a Joker story in the same sense that The Killing Joke and The Man Who Laughs are Joker stories – it explores the relationship between Batman and the Joker from an angle that’s just different enough from previous stories to make it something unique and interesting. Of course, Kevin Smith “unique” is different than, say, Alan Moore “unique,” and as anyone who’s seen one of Smith’s movies might expect, a lot of emphasis in Cacophony is placed on humorous dialogue and frequent references to pop culture. There are times when Smith takes his signature potty humor a bit too far, especially in the first issue, but for the most part he reigns in his nastier side and does a pretty amusing job.

The overall arc of the story is fairly by-the-numbers, at least until the end. The Joker wants revenge on Maxie Zeus, a fellow criminal who has synthesized Joker Venom into a drug called “chuckles” – revenge, of course, being a euphemism for causing widespread death and destruction throughout Gotham City. Amidst the chaos appears Onomatopoeia, a villain who first appeared in Smith’s early-2000s run on Green Arrow and whose shtick is that he verbally imitates the sounds that occur around him (“Boom,” “Kapow,” etc.). The premise behind the character is probably less interesting than it initially sounds, but it’s fairly effective at its purpose: establishing him as a complete lunatic. Also working in the book’s favor are several integral appearances by Deadshot, a character I’ve had a soft spot for ever since I first read him in Steve Englehart’s Batman: Strange Apparitions. Less effective is an early encounter between Batman and Zsasz, a villain I’ve never much cared for and whose presence here doesn’t add anything worthwhile to the story other than a few good-looking action pages.

To briefly segue into the art, then, I have to say that I found it to be a pleasant surprise. For someone who’s drawn only a handful of comic books before, none of them involving major superheroes, Flanagan is quite good. He’s not perfect by any means – he has occasional problems drawing Batman’s mouth, and I’m not sure he ever quite settles on the size of the Joker’s chin – but he really does improve as the book goes on, and by the end his faces tell the story perhaps even better than Smith’s words do.

By far the most interesting part of Cacophony is the ending, when Batman and the Joker manage to have an actual, rational conversation with each other. This is made possible by the fact that the Joker has just awoken in the hospital from a five-month coma; accordingly, he’s been restrained and pumped full of anti-psychotics. While I can take or leave certain elements of Cacophony (like the aforementioned fight with Zsasz), this scene pushes the comic into “must-read” territory for me. Without spoiling too much, the crux of their conversation is essentially that the Joker doesn’t hate Batman because he’s crazy – he’s crazy because he hates Batman. This of course takes us back to an argument I’ve gotten rather sick of hearing over the last few years: that Batman’s very existence is what causes such a prolific number of freaks to terrorize Gotham, as opposed to Batman simply being the intercessor between them and the realization of their villainous plots. But Smith addresses the issue in a truly engaging way, one that I’ve never seen before, and in doing so I think he’s finally brought it to something of a peaceful rest.

I’ve read reviews of Cacophony on a variety of other sites which criticize Smith for being “out of touch,” primarily because his (admittedly old-school) portrayal of the Joker contradicts with how Grant Morrison was writing the character in other Batman comics at the time. This is a positively ludicrous argument, in my opinion, and represents exactly the kind of slavish devotion to plot minutiae (as opposed to good story-telling) that I think drove Smith away from mainstream comics in the first place. Cacophony makes no effort to tie itself down to a specific time in DC continuity, and as such it seems unfair to judge it not on its own merits, but on whether it adheres to the arbitrary expectations imposed on it by nitpickers and continuity junkies. This story is timeless, to use a rather clichéd term, in the sense that it’s accessible to just about anyone – fans of Batman, fans of the Joker, even fans of Kevin Smith. It breaks free of the most commonly held expectations of comic book fanboys, and I think that’s a big part of why I like it so much.

The collected edition of Cacophony is padded out with a cover gallery and the original script for the final issue. The script doesn’t really add any new insight to the story or even the creative process itself, so I don’t see much reason for its inclusion (other than DC wanting to boost the page count and, therefore, the price of the book). Furthermore, the script isn’t even actually complete; Smith writes that there was originally a page in which the Joker’s dialogue was so off-color, it wasn’t fit for print. Personally, I would have liked to see just that one page as opposed to what basically amounts to a text-only reprint of the last third of the book. I don’t like it when publishers attempt to artificially lengthen collections – it strikes me as a tacky money-grab, and if not for that, I probably would have rated Cacophony half a point higher. But even so I think it’s well worth reading, especially for people interested in a slightly different take on the Batman/Joker relationship.

Rating: 4 out of 5