Recommended Reading for 10/16: Tales of the Multiverse- Batman: Vampire

Batman can trace  his literary roots back to a lot of different sources. The pulps are a major source, especially The Shadow and Zorro. But going deeper in, there are two Victorian characters who are hugely influential: Sherlock Holmes and Dracula. I discussed Batman's meeting with Holmes nearly three years ago to this very day. And Batman has met Dracula as well, in the fist of a trio of original graphic novels we'll be discussing today.

The three volumes, Batman/Dracula: Red Rain, Batman: Bloodstorm, and Batman: Crimson Mist were all written by then Batman writer Doug Moench, with art by Kelly Jones, who had been doing covers for Batman for some time, and during the years the trilogy would be released over, would spend some time as regular penciler on the title. It's a tale of horror and superheroics mixed and about the downfall of a good man to the curse of the vampire, as we watch Batman fall into the trap Nietzsche laid out, about those who fight  monsters being careful to not become monsters in the process.

The Batman: Vampire trilogy came out at the height of Elseworlds, DC's tales of heroes in unfamiliar circumstances, and is by far one of the most popular and successful, having spawned one of the 52 Earths of the current DC Multiverse. And while these stories take place in a Gotham nearer to the one we're familiar with in monthly comics, one not as removed as the Victorian Gotham of Gotham By Gaslight or the church-ruled one of Holy Terror, it is a Gotham of even darker corners, and of a constant red rain falling from the sky, pollution run rampant that now portends the coming evil.

Batman/Dracula: Red Rain, the first in the series, seemed to be written to be a stand alone novel. In it, Batman finds Gotham's homeless being murdered, and their throats slashed, and learns that the cut throats are to mask the telltale vampire bites. He comes into conflict with the hordes of the undead and their leader, Dracula, and is aided by a group of reformed vampires, those who drink a serum that satisfies their bloodlust, led by the beautiful Tanya, who had been turned by Dracula himself and after years of being his consort, realized the horror of what she was doing and vowed to stop him. Tanya gifted Batman with her blood, giving him vampire powers without the weaknesses, but at the story's end, Dracula's bite finishes the transformation, and a vampire Batman is born. 

The story is itself a wonderful horror yarn, with the vampires mostly monstrous bloodsucking creatures with no mind or soul, with the traditional weaknesses to sunlight, stakes, crosses, etc. Batman is himself at a loss at the beginning of the story, outmatched by the vampires' powers, and only through becoming more like them is he finally able to stop them. It's a gorgeously gothic landscape as only Kelly Jones could craft, but I'll spend more time on the art later.

The world of this book is interesting in the slight differences between it and the Gotham we are accustomed to. There seems to be no Robin or other superheroes of any kind in the world, making it a world of a more lonely Batman. This is a Batman who, as committed to his principles as he is, is somewhat darker, not having that grounding in his humanity. While Alfred and Jim Gordon are still there, this Batman seems less emotionally involved with either of them, but whether that is his nature or a part of his vampiric transformation remains a question left to the reader.

Moench's Dracula isn't the cape and amulet wearing Bela Lugosi version, or sympathetic either. His Dracula is a mad, monstrous creature who knows nothing but his hunger for blood. Not as mindless as his spawn, his goal is simply to build an army of vampires and feed. While there aren't a lot of levels there, it works very well with Dracula as a character; he is bloodlust incarnate. Tanya is a character with an... interesting design. No traditional vampire wife of Dracula, she's in a one piece purple bathing suit with knee-high purple boots for much of the story; how very '90s. But she's a sympathetic character; she is completely driven to destroy Dracula, even at the cost of her own life, but does it to prevent anyone else from falling to his curse, making her an interesting parallel to Batman, who reacts the same way to his traumatic experience; he is willing to sacrifice himself to stop crime in the same way she is to stop vampirism.

Red Rain also spends some of its time pursuing far more real world issues than either of its successors. The fact that he victims are all homeless, and that the mayor actively tells Gordon to keep a lid on it because he doesn't want to start a panic and who cares about these people anyway is an indictment on society in general's treatment of the homeless. Also, signs throughout the issue in the background of scenes are for vaccinations, and so the idea of vampirism as a disease is eased out; published in 1991, at the beginning of the time when AIDS was coming into the forefront of social consciousness, it's not hard to link vampirism and blood borne illness either, and also to hear Dracula ant about how mankind has poisoned its blood with disease and drugs adds to this elemen.

Bloodstorm, the second volume of the trilogy, begins bringing in figures from the established Batman mythos, as the Joker uses his wiles to become leader of the remaining vampires and begins a war to take over Gotham's mobs. Batman, now a full vampire, must fight the call to drink blood, instead subsisting on Tanya's blood substitute formula as the hunger increases. But his mind is put at ease when he meets Selina Kyle, in this reality a were-cat after being bitten by Creach, Joker's right hand vampire who was in a wolf form at the time, and he two hunt together until Joker kills Catwoman, and Batman finally breaks, killing Joker and drinking his blood, leaving it up to Gordon and Alfred to do what must be done, giving us one of the book's indelible images, of them driving a stake through Batman's heart, reciting the mantra Tanya introduced in volume one, "To death... in peace."

While the plot seems very similar to the first volume, with Joker taking Dracula's place and Selina taking Tanya's, they are very different stories. Most importantly, this story is not about Batman discovering and coming to terms with the existence of vampires, and about being haunted by visions of Tanya until he realizes the truth, but about him fighting the beast inside him. Much of Batman's internal narrative is about how hard it is to resist the urge to drink blood. It shows Batman's strength of will, and more how insidious the vampire disease/curse is, and makes it all the more tragic when he finally submits to it.

Joker and Catwoman work well as deepening the connection between this world and the prime DCU while also pointing out how different they are. Joker is, well, pretty much Joker, mad and cunning, using the vampires to turn mobsters instead of the homeless, while still staying human. It's interesting that Joker does not seem to desire the immortality of the vampire, but instead simply uses them as a means to an end. Keeping him human establishes him even more as a counterpoint to the vampiric Batman. Meanwhile, the Selina Kyle of this world seems to bear little resemblance to her traditional counterpart, other than her affection for cats. There is no indication that she is a thief, but instead just a woman who wound up on the wrong side of a vampire. She is also tremendously noble, often addressed as an innocent woman, since it is the love of an innocent woman that is said to hold off the curse. More than that, it is her nobility that leads to her downfall, as she takes a crossbow bolt meant for Batman.

This second volume takes the horror of the first volume and amps it up to eleven. There's almost a black comedy vibe, appropriate for a Joker story, as the vampire deaths and murders seem more grotesque, from Creah tearing himself open to expose his internal organs to a mobster before tearing ones face off with his fangs (that vampire is later seen with his face stitched on) to a vampire who was shot in the head before being turned having a small Band-Aid to cover up the wound. Also, Batman gets a new weapon that is just so cool I have to call it out, these silver-cored wooden throwing knives with bat-tooled hilts; even when he's slaying vampires, Batman does it in style.

You'd think that being staked would put an end to Batman's problems, but you would be wrong. In this vampire mythos, a stake just immobilizes a vampire, and only beheading or sunlight seems to make he undead permanently dead. And when the costumed criminals of Gotham run completely amok, Alfred makes the hard decision and pulls the stake. Batman rises from the dead, more monstrous than ever, and begins to hunt down and slay Gotham's criminals unrepentantly, but still enough of himself to behead each one to not spawn more vampires. Finally, after a series of atrocities, it comes down to an unholy alliance between Jim Gordon, Alfred, Two-Face, and Killer Croc to put an end to the vampire Batman. And in a final battle with a body count straight out of a Shakespearean tragedy, Batman is given his final rest, along with everyone else.

By this point in the series, the vampire Batman has become nearly entirely a monster. He hangs onto his humanity by barely a thread, and its only there in that he only kills the guilty, but he is constantly tempted to give in and just drink from anyone else he runs across. Still, the haunting narration has Batman almost as a passenger in a body driven by his hunger. I say almost because even he acknowledges that it's still him in there, just with the hunger pushing him. One of the major differences between this volume and the former two is that Batman is the only vampire in the story, and while not the only monster, he is by far the scariest.

The other monsters in the story are pretty much all of Batman's remaining major rogues, who pop up to mostly be victims of Batman's insatiable thirst. Some appear as they traditionally have: Penguin, Poison Ivy, Black Mask, Scarecrow, Killer Croc, and Two-Face all look like you'd expect. Riddler, though, gets a creepy resdesign, with question marks etched into his face and chest with stitching. I also seems that the timeline is different than what we're used to, as both Two-Face and Scarecrow are just being introduced to the world, with no previous history with Batman. It's Two-Face who is the most used of the villains, as most fall pretty quickly. Two-Face, with Croc as his henchman, is the one planning on finding a way to eliminate Batman and ascend o king of Gotham, and its a Two-Face similar to the one Moench wrote when he was writing Batman, whose personality is far more split than he's often portrayed, referring to himself as "we."

This volume also spends considerably more time developing both Jim Gordon and Alfred's character arcs. While both have had parts in the first two volumes, it is here they not only come into their own, but in the final battle show their defining characteristics. Alfred sacrifices himself to Batman's thirst after Batman is struck by a crossbow bolt so Batman can stop Two-Face from killing Gordon, showing his intense loyalty, and Gordon finally hits a detonator that opens to cavern ceiling above the Batcave, showing his resolve by being willing to not only kill his one-time friend but in the end dying to stop him. The last page, spotlighting the three fallen friends and heroes, is another one of the series highlights.

While Moench's story is excellent and haunting, I don't think this story would stick out as one of the greatest Batman Elseworlds stories if not for the art by Kelly Jones. Jones is a master of horror, his art very stylized and exaggerated to almost the point of the grotesque, with many great horror comics in his past, one of the most notable being the legendary Sandman: A Season of Mists. Gotham, though, seems to be a place he was meant to draw. His Gotham is one of the most haunting versions out there, with gargoyles and creepy buildings at every turn. The red rain and he general atmosphere gives the already horror filled story an extra edge.

And even if Gotham wasn't at it's darkest, Batman most assuredly is. Jones is most famous for how he portrays Batman's cape, competing with Todd Macfarlane for artist who draws the biggest, most billowy, most almost alive cape award, but here he adds Batman's slow descent into monsterdom; it is perfectly shown in the art. Batman starts out looking exactly like you're used to seeing him, and over the course of the first volume, he changes slowly, but even at the end he's pretty much the same, only with wings and fangs. By the second, he is slightly more grotesque, broader and more haunted looking, with he fangs ever evident. By volume three, Batman is a revenant, basically a walking corpse, with ribs evident, his vertebrae appearing almost as spikes down his back, sallow skin, and regularly shifting into a form similar to Man-Bat and to the titular crimson mist. It's Batman as the biggest, scariest monster in the series, and that makes it all the worse, as he is the guy you want to root for now transformed into the terror of the night.

Of the other monsters and villains, the designs are similarly spectacular. The were-cat Selina is lithe and sexy, while still being a terrifying monster when she is in combat. The various vampires are all hideous and scary, and I really like the design for Creach as a werewolf; he's a massive hulking brute. Oh, and the Joker has crazy long hair, almost pushing mullet levels. Nowhere else will you see a mullet Joker.

Before I close up, I want to toss in a few other interesting Batman Elsworlds and vampire stories. Sadly not as well known or in print as these ones, Moench and Jones did another Elseworld Batman original graphic novel, Dark Joker: The Wild, set in a fantasy world with Joker as an evil sorcerer. Also, for a very different take on Baman fighting Dracula, there's the direct to DVD Batman Vs. Dracula, the one feature length animated film from the continuity of the oft-forgotten animated Batman series, The Batman. Its probably the best part of that series, with some really atmospheric moments, and is well worth watching if you have the time.

Elseworlds stories range from the sublime to the, well, the stuff I don't talk about on this blog, and as there were more Batman Elseworlds than any other character, you would expect a mix of both. The Batman: Vampire trilogy falls in the sublime category, mixing the elements of Batman with some great horror elements to create a vision of Batman like no other.

All three books in the Batman: Vampire series are in print and available as one volume, whose name I used for the title of this post, Tales of the Multiverse: Batman-Vampire.

The Dark Knight Rises Primer: Bane

With The Dark Knight Rises less than a week away, I thought I would spend some time talking about that film's most misunderstood character: Bane. Bane has popped up in comics and other media since he was first introduced back in 1993. He has become, in the comics at least, a layered character with a complex web of emotions and motivations. In other media, Bane's motivations and background tend to be simplified, so I am very curious to see how he is handled in The Dark Knight Rises. But before the movie, let's talk about the character as he has come to be in the comics.

Bane was created by Chuck Dixon, Doug Moench, and Graham Nolan for the one-shot Batman: The Vengeance of Bane in 1993. In the issue, readers meet the child who will grow into Bane. Bane was born on the island of Santa Prisca, a Caribbean hellhole that is home to terrorists and criminals, with little to no law. Bane's father was part of an attempted revolt against the reigning government, and since he escaped, his pregnant lover was locked up in his stead. When the baby was born a boy, the father's sentence was passed on to him: life in prison in Pena Duro, the hardest prison in the world.  We watch Bane grow from a young boy into a man who is the pinnacle of human achievement, and pushed beyond that by the super steroid Venom, a drug that vastly increased his size and strength. Bane is one of a group of characters introduced over the years to serve as Batman's equal and opposite number; not the Joker, who serves as Batman's opposite, but as a cracked mirror version of the Dark Knight. Specifically, though, Bane was introduced to be the centerpiece villain of Knightfall, the upcoming Batman family event.

One of the key factors that has made Bane an interesting comic book character has been one that has been ignored in most of his other media appearances: Bane is smart. Bane is really smart. Bane is a character who found his way out of prison, who took over Gotham's mobs, who deduced Batman's identity, and is almost entirely self taught. He trained his body to be as good as it could be even before the Venom started coursing through his system. That is what makes Bane a good nemesis for Batman: that he meets Batman on not just the physical plain, but the mental one as well.

After finally escaping Pena Duro, Bane went to Gotham because he had heard of Batman, and wanted to defeat him. As a child, his dreams had been haunted by one nightmare: a monstrous man-sized Bat creature (I don't know why he didn't go after the more accurate target of Man-Bat, but hey, supervillain logic isn't people logic). Bane believed he would be the king of men when he finally defeated his fear, symbolized now in his mind as Batman. Ater observing his target for some time, Bane decided on his moves, and he set his pan into action.

Knightfall was the event that ran through the Bat titles throughout summer and fall of 1993. In it, Bane broke open Arkham Asylum, and let Batman, already on the brink of complete exhaustian, run a gauntlet of his greatest foes, exhausting himself further. And when he was finally completely done in, Bane was waiting for him at Wayne Manor, where Bane took him... and broke him. Bane broke Batman's spine over his knee and left him for dead on the Gotham streets.

With Batman defeated, Bane set himself up as the new king of Gotham. But here's where Bane's plans fall apart: Venom eventually begins to effect the mind of the person taking it. Bane grew more impulsive, and his anger began to overwhelm him, leading to his confrontation with, and savage beating by, Jean-Paul Valley, aka Azrael, twho took Bruce Wayne's place as Batman while Wayne recovered. And this is where most people's knowledge of Bane ends. He was the villain of one of the seminal Batman stories of the past twenty years, but his porfile has been lower since, not taking part in most major stories. But that doesn't mean the stories he has taken part in haven't been interesting, and he hasn't grown as a character.

Bane's next full appearance is in Batman: The Vengeance of Bane II: The Redemption, and it's here where Bane's journey starts taking turns that are different and makes him more than just another Batman villain. After awakening from the coma Azrael put him in, Bane retrained his body to perfection and kicked the Venom habit, knowing it weakened his mind. Bane then declared himself, "Innocente," innocent of all his crimes, feeling they were a result of his ruthless upbringing and the Venom. After escaping Blackgate and stopping a group of street crooks who have been selling Venom on the streets, Bane confronts Batman, declares his innocence, and leaves Gotham, in search of the father who left him to suffer for what he had done.

Bane disappeared from comics for a year, and when he reappeared, he was in unusual company. Bane had become the new heir to Ra's al Ghul. Ra's al Ghul, the immortal international ecoterrorist, had spent years trying to convince Batman to marry his daughter, Talia, and become his heir, but Batman had refused and thwarted many of al Ghul's plans to cut the human population by 99% and create and Eden on Earth. It seems Bane had no such compunctions. This is another example where Bane and Batman were placed in the same situation and took very differing positions. Bane might not have found his father, but found a father figure; however, as one might imagine judging by Bane's luck with fathers, al Ghul simply viewed him as a means to an end, and when Bane failed in his mission, al Ghul didn't even look for him. Bane was once again out on his own.

Over the next six years, Bane only appeared in four different stories in the DC Universe. Three were minor; a one shot that was timed to be released with the unfortunate film Batman and Robin, where Bane appeared as a character unrecognizable to his comic counterpart, an arc in Azrael, where he confronted the man who once defeated him; and an issue where he exacts revenge of Ra's al Ghul by destroying his Lazarus Pits. The other appearance, more substantive, was working for Lex Luthor. Luthor sent Bane into an earthquake ravaged Gotham, to destroy documents and to pave the way for Luthor's expansion into Gotham. The price Bane was given was information, and once Bane received it, he left Gotham, not even confronting Batman in the end.

Bane's next major confrontation with Batman, in the pages of Batman: Gotham Knights,  was more one of a deeply personal nature. Some of the information that Bane had received from Luthor allowed him to track down information on four men who might be his father. And one of those men was Thomas Wayne. Bane arrived back in Gotham to confront his 'brother." Batman of course has a test done, and discovers Bane is not his brother, but Bane has begun to attempt to make himself a better person, a hero of sorts. Bane leaves Gotham to hunt down the other men who might be his father, and tried to do some good along the way

Finally, in a Himalayan cave, he finds the man: Sir Edmund Dorrance, the international criminal and Batman rogue known as the King Snake. Dorrance and Bane fight, Batman arrives, and while Dorrance falls to his death, and Bane, nearly dead, in healed by one of the very Lazarus Pits of Ra's al Ghul. Bane walked out of the pit a changed man, swearing that he was now going out to be something better. The story of Bane's quest for his father was not a popular one among fans (or at least among fans who post on the internet). People said it was out of character, and that the revelation of Dorrance as King Snake's father was just not right, as writer Jo Duffy had hinted that Bane's father was El Jefe del Pais, the current dictator of Santa Prisca. A few years ago, I met Scott Beatty, the writer of that arc and regular collaborator with Bane co-creator Chuck Dixon, and he told me that Dixon had always intended for King Snake to be Bane's father.

Bane's next appearance is one of those odd cases that can only occur in a shared universe. Bane next appeared in an issue of the DC crossover Infinite Crisis, where he is seen as part of the Secret Society, a coalition of supervillains, where he kills the hero Judomaster. This might have been an attempt to return Bane to his villainous roots, but it seems to discard all the character growth that had occured over the past decade. When the collection of that story was released, they gave Bane new dialogue, a statement saying, "I finally know who I am. I am Bane. I break people." This seems to cement the idea that someone in the Powers That Be wanted Bane to be a villain again, but it seems many of the writers who would follow this up decided that Bane needed to continue to grow.

Bane's next few appearances dealt with him trying to bring some justice to Santa Prisca, his home. He overthrew the cartels that controlled it and set up democratic elections. Of course, even when at his most altruistic, Bane still works in a way that is violent and not exactly what one would call heroic. When he found the elections had been rigged, he declared martial law. He was next taken on as part of the US government's Suicide Squad, an organization that granted supervillains in jail a chance at reduced sentences in exchange for working covert ops that most would consider suicide. Bane seemed to have been hired to help run herd on the Squad, but when the government decided to exile all supercriminals to an alien world, Bane was betrayed and left on the planet, but returns with the others.

After his return, Bane joined the Secret Six, a team of semi-reformed supervillains, who had taken up lives as mercenaries. Secret Six was a quirky comic, at times hilarious, at times violent, and always driven by character. Bane served as the voice of reason on the team, which was made up of some of two other former Bat villains, Catman and Deadshot, Scandal Savage, mistress of blades, Ragdoll, the lunatic and contortionist, and Jeanette, a Banshee. Bane was often seen attepmting to temper the more unusual tastes and whims of his compatriots.

Bane developed a strange relationship with Scandal Savage. Bane had spent years searching for his father and trying to settle that particular relationship, and now that he seemingly had, he had developed paternal feelings for Scandal, someone who had a contentious relationship with her own father, the immortal villain Vandal Savage. Bane went out of his way to attempt to protect Scandal, even during the darkest of the Six's missions. Gail Simone, the writer of the series, also addressed Bane's addiction to Venom head on, with Bane always one moment of temptation away from taking the Venom again, always having the drug and the equipment he'd need to take it with him, always tempting himself.

At the end of their series, the Six went to hell to retrieve the soul of a fallen ally. While there, the demon Blaze, one of the most powerful evil forces in DC hell, told them that they were all damned, no matter what they would do. Having returned, and his chance at redemption taken away, Bane decided it was not worth it anymore. He made another run at batman, this time trying to break him psychologically. The attempt failed, and Bane was imprisoned again. This time, his return to villainy seemed permanent, and more developed. Bane's most recent appearance, after the massive changes caused by Flashpoint and the New 52, Bane was returned to his massive, Venom-using mastermind that he was in his beginnings, although his look is more like the one he had in the Batman: Arkham Asylum/City video games.

When Bane has appeared in other media, his personality and motivation have varied wildly. His appearances on Batman: The Animated Series and in Batman: Arkham Asylum/City was similar to his appearance in Knightfall. Unfortunately, the film Batman and Robin presented him as a mindless oaf, the thrall of Poison Ivy, and while the other recent cartoon versions of Batman, The Batman and Batman: The Brave and the Bold, have not made Bane as much of a simpleton, they have not quite gotten his cunning right either.

So, that's the story of Bane. How do I think he will be treated in The Dark Knight Rises? Well, I think we will get a Bane that is very much like the Bane from his earliest appearances, strong and smart, but probably without the more outlandish element of the Venom. I look forward to finding out in five days time.