Review: Nightwing, Vol. 1: Traps and Trapezes

Writer: Kyle Higgins
Artists: Eddy Barrows, Eduardo Pansica, Trevor McCarthy, Geraldo Borges
Collects: Nightwing #1-7 (2011-12)
Published: DC, 2012; $14.99

If Scott Snyder’s aim in Batman, Vol. 1: The Court of Owls was to revise Batman franchise history at the macro level – by introducing the idea that Gotham City could be controlled for decades, without Batman’s knowledge, by a secret society of criminals – then Nightwing, Vol. 1: Traps and Trapezes operates at the opposite extreme. It revises franchise history at the micro level, by exploring the relationships between Nightwing (Dick Grayson) and several new characters with ties to his circus roots. The book’s strength lies not in its revelation of major “secrets,” but rather in its supporting cast members and the catalyzing effect they have on the main character.

The most interesting of the new characters is Raya, a redheaded woman who looks strikingly like Dick’s on-again/off-again love interest, Barbara Gordon. When Haly’s Circus returns to Gotham City and Dick sees Raya for the first time since his parents’ death, sparks fly between them instantly. (The book insists, ridiculously, that Dick’s parents were killed five years ago, which would make Dick around 19 or 20 years old – despite the fact that he and Raya are clearly portrayed as being in their mid- to late twenties, at the youngest.) In this respect, Traps and Trapezes is the polar opposite of a book like Batman: The Dark Knight – Golden Dawn, which does a comparatively poor job of retrofitting a new character into the history of an established one. Golden Dawn’s greatest flaw was that, for all its efforts to play up Dawn Golden’s importance to Bruce Wayne in scenes set during their childhood, her characterization in the story’s present was positively nonexistent. Where Traps and Trapezes succeeds, by contrast, is in its making Raya an integral part of the story’s forward momentum, rather than dwelling on her and Dick’s past relationship.

The fact that Raya has little in common with Barbara Gordon, apart from her looks, is an important element to the story. Their differences are underscored when Barbara guest-stars (as Batgirl) in the book’s fourth issue; whereas Raya teases Dick about fairly mundane topics (his never having seen The Godfather, for example), Barbara is more interested in Dick’s feelings and emotional well-being. Although Dick seems to think he’s happy with Raya, there’s an obvious distance behind her beauty – even before the story’s reveal that she is reluctantly helping Saiko, a mysterious assassin who serves as the book’s primary antagonist. The story’s focus on Dick, rather than his superhero alter ego, is underlined by the fact that Saiko is trying to kill the former; at first, he fails to even realize that Dick and Nightwing are the same person. In this sense Saiko is fairly analogous to the antagonist of Court of Owls, who initially hunts Bruce Wayne, not Batman.

The similarity of the threats Batman and Nightwing face in these two books is revealing in regard to both characters. The most compelling element of Court of Owls is its protagonist’s stubborn hubris – despite mounting evidence, Batman refuses to believe that there could possibly be a secret society at work in “his” city – and that element is largely absent from Traps and Trapezes. Dick whiles away weeks of story time without investigating either Saiko’s attempts on his life or the secret history of Haly’s Circus, despite its being hinted at by several other characters – a very un-Batman-like mode of operations. This is perhaps most surprising because Dick actually took up the role of Batman for a number of recent issues, some of which are collected in Batman: The Black Mirror (which, this book explicitly reminds us, remains within post-New 52 continuity).

In fact, the very point of this story seems to be to differentiate Dick’s crime-fighting methods from Batman’s, and in that respect the characters’ vastly different approaches to problem-solving accomplish the task. Traps and Trapezes ends with Dick’s repudiation of the nostalgia that fuels the very ethos of Batman’s mission: “We’re not defined by our tragedies or our turning points,” he thinks as he speeds away from the Batcave on his motorcycle, “we’re defined by the choices we make in the face of them.” If Batman’s war on crime is motivated by revenge, then, it would seem that Dick’s isn’t so much “motivated” at all as it is simply reactionary.

Although writer Kyle Higgins establishes Batman’s fixation on the past as problematic, he resists portraying Dick’s approach as faultless by comparison. It’s the character’s inattention to the past, in fact, which brings about so many problems in the present and keeps him relatively in the dark until Saiko conveniently explains himself in an expository info-dump near the story’s end. And then there’s the final scene, in which Dick angrily confronts Bruce Wayne in the Batcave only for Bruce to lay him out with a single punch. (The same scene also appears, from Bruce’s perspective, at the end of Court of Owls.) There’s more to Bruce’s actions than a lack of anger management – by punching Dick, he knocks out a tooth embedded with an alloy which would have transformed Dick into a mindless killer – but his methodology is disturbing, and Dick’s unquestioning acceptance of it is enough to indicate that he has yet to separate himself fully from the ways in which Batman traditionally operates.

The fact that this is the only scene in the book in which Bruce Wayne actually appears doesn’t help; more interaction between Dick and Bruce throughout could have given the scene more impact for both characters and made for a more thematically coherent climax. It’s not the plot’s only misstep, either – about halfway through the book, the story comes to a grinding halt with a ridiculously out-of-place issue about a rhyming demon who comes for the soul of a circus clown. It’s unclear at this early point in the series whether plot developments like this one are actually laying the seeds for future stories, just as it’s hard to tell whether the shakiness of Dick’s outlook toward his crime-fighting career is a character flaw Higgins plans for him to work through in future volumes, or just the result of lazy writing. Traps and Trapezes has enough strengths, though, that I look forward to searching out the answers to those questions in the next volume.

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.