Review: BATMAN #50

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BATMAN #50
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Greg Capullo, Danny Miki, and FCO Plascencia, with Yanick Paquette and Nathan Fairbairn
Published by DC Comics
Release Date: March 23, 2016

Jim Gordon is down. Bruce Wayne is gone. There is only the Batman. And all of Gotham City is in shambles at the hands of Mister Bloom. As the Dark Knight returns to a city that’s screaming for heroes, we get to see one final act of bravery against hopelessness, anger, and fear. But will it be enough?

With the final chapter of “Superheavy,” Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo reach the end of an epic story that caps a momentous run in the history of the world’s most famous and adored super-hero. And a more fitting conclusion couldn’t be had. Creators often say about corporately owned character that they need to put the toys back on the shelf as they found them. And most of them do. But this pair… they are leaving us with a legacy that may very well change the way we think about Batman forever.

It’s not just that Snyder and Capullo’s Batman is extraordinary in scope and excitement, delivering intricately constructed narratives month after month that read and reread masterfully over time. It’s not just that their Batman redefined his relationship with the Joker, with Gotham City, and forged an entirely new family of characters along the way. It’s that, at his root, Snyder and Capullo’s Dark Knight has something that not every Batman has — although some would argue the very best did.

Their Batman is intensely human.

It’s seemingly a contradiction when you take the narrative at its word. The book speaks: Batman isn’t real. He’s a ghost. And that certainly seems true. To the people of Gotham City, to the villains and police alike, he is a symbol that inspires, but not human in any true sense. They don’t know the sacrifice he made to be what he is. But, in truth, he also doesn’t know the sacrifices they make every day just to live in a world as living, flesh and blood people. He strikes fear and inspires courage precisely because he doesn’t need to make ends meet on minimum wage, or protect his children from gunfire, or deal with microagressions that seep their way into every interaction they have every day. He has the privilege of raising himself above all of that, protecting them in the abstract, but not in the flesh.

Batman gets to fight Mister Bloom. And the Joker. Poison Ivy and the Scarecrow. Abstracted concepts all, and none of them so scary as watching as a crowd of white men punch and kick a Black man while a candidate for President of the United States watches. And smiles.

Batman doesn’t have to fight at that level. His privilege, while used selflessly, ensures that he doesn’t. And so it’s fitting that Snyder moves Jim Gordon, the not-Batman, the Man-man, to be the hero Gotham needs after all. Gordon wields the killing blow against the grotesque menagerie of Mister Bloom’s creations that Capullo radicalizes on the page so horrifically. Gordon is the hero Gotham City needed — that we all needed — despite the fact that he had stopped believing in himself as Batman.

The thing is, Jim Gordon spent 10 issues believing that Batman could save the day. But all it really took was Batman spending one issue believing Gordon could. But not Batman the ghost. Batman the man. There’s a peculiar moment at the end of the story that’s quite telling. Jim nearly speaks Bruce’s name when apologizing to Batman, not for letting the city fall into darkness, but for needing him to come back from a life as strictly human.

But the thing is, Jim sees what the rest of Gotham can’t possibly see. That Batman isn’t just a two-dimensional, four-color exercise of bravado. He is human. He has failed. He has struggled. He has succeeded. But he’s given up failure and struggle and even success to be more than human. Not inhuman. Just more than.

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We see this in Snyder’s narrative in a few more ways, none so pronounced as that contrasted by Jim Gordon, the perfect foil to Bruce Wayne. If Batman is about timeless, porcelain perfection — human potential captured in amber — Jim is flesh that ages and wrinkles right before our eyes, bearing scars and worry lines, well-earned from a lifetime of fighting against institutions that just don’t budge, even to those who work inside them.

But we see it in other places, too. In Duke Thomas, who is everything Batman intellectually represents and purports to defend, but in the flesh and with his feet on the ground as a human hero. In Daryl Gutierrez, who tried desperately to become the apparition Batman is, but just didn’t have the privilege — call it luck or predestination — to become that untouchable super-hero. In the Joker, who can commit any atrocity or say anything he wants and the burden of responsibility will never be his to carry. And in Mister Bloom, who is faceless like the hatred all around us every day that purports to want to make our world better by razing everything but that which looks like itself.

Bloom isn’t just chilling for the glourious devastation he wrecks on the page, with Capullo and Miki’s tendrilled lines and Plascencia’s hyper-electric colors. He’s the very essence of decay disguised as nature, the true opposite of Batman in some ways. Because if Batman is human steeled by righteousness (however removed from everyday hardship), then Bloom is selfishness unraveling to appear reasonable, a stealth evil trying to convince you one seed or sound byte at a time he is the way to a better world.

It’s exhausting to think that we can’t look up in the sky and shine the bat signal to solve all of our problems. It took humanity to expose Bloom’s evil to blinding light, and so it always is. Batman is just a touchstone. And this Batman — the ghost Capullo and Snyder are putting back up onto the shelf soon enough — is the best touchstone we could ever hope for. Not because he’s seven decades strong. Not because he represents the best that we could ever hope to be. But because, in these pages, we’ve gotten to understand him more than we ever have before. We see him truly for what he is. And in doing so, we get a good glimpse at what we can be as well.

The Verdict: 10/10

 

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