I’ll probably pick up the last few weeks’ books later this
week, and get some reviews going early next week. In the meantime, it’s been
awhile since I’ve done a post where I just rambled on in a series of vaguely
interconnected points. No time like the present, and that's what this one ended up as.
Something I probably ought to have figured out before now is it's dangerous to buy a series based on the concept. Based on the writer or artist, sure. I know their past work, I have some idea of their strengths and weaknesses, their tics and preferred themes, I know what to expect. Even based on the characters isn't bad, if I feel confident the things I like about them will be touched on by the creative team. But the concept, the setting, the hook, whatever you want to call it, that seems to be a mistake. The comic is the product of
minds that aren’t mine own, with their own goals, interests, and influences.
The odds they’re going to produce exactly what I’m looking for are pretty
small, assuming I even know exactly what I’m looking for.
When I first heard about the current Batman Beyond, I was
intrigued. I pictured Terry (because I didn’t know it was Tim Drake in the
suit) in one of DC’s post-apocalyptic locales. Kamandi’s, the Atomic Knight’s,
OMAC, that future Jonah Hex went to for awhile back in the ‘80s, some amalgamation of those and more, whatever. He’d
be in the middle of nowhere, scattered settlements (if that), possible hostile
locals, alien territory to a city boy like McGinnis. He’d have the
suit, but the suit has limits. Only so much power, only so many Batarangs, even
if Terry had the Batcave he probably couldn’t fix every problem, and he
wouldn’t have the Batcave (unless he found it eventually, since yeah, Bruce
would probably design the lair to survive the end of humanity). He’d have to
save it for critical moments, and get by on everything else he’d learned up to
then. He is more than the suit, he's been trained, but how much, and how far he could get by on that in a strange setting would be up in the air. He’d likely run afoul of some local bandit or self-appointed Big Man, and
dealing with that would probably bring him to the attention of some bigger
fish, who might or might not have the solution to Terry’s being stranded there.
Thinking about it, it’s a bit like Fallout 3, or maybe
Samurai Jack, but we’ll stick with the video game for the moment. I didn’t love
everything about that game, but I did like the very real sense the first time I exited the Vault that I was stepping into a world neither I nor the
character know anything about. Usually your character at least understands the
rules of the world they’re in, even if you don’t, because they already live there. We meet them with their life already in progress. But the Wanderer was so
sheltered he’s as in the dark as the player controlling him. He doesn’t really
know what kind of threats are out there, or what he’ll find to work with. So
you have to decide when you can afford to challenge someone directly, when you
can afford to use that rocket launcher, and when you can’t.
I know resource management is maybe not the hot thing to
draw in readers, and it’s kind of an artificial story construct to drive conflict (though considering the whole thing is the product of a writer's mind, could you say that about everything. None of the challenges exist until the writer decides they do), but I think it
could be an effective tool. Really play up the idea of there being consequences
to Terry’s decisions one way or the other. Does using the suit make him more
terrifying to people he’s trying to help, or do they more readily rally to him
because they think he’s more than human? Does using it for one fight come back
to bite him down the line? How do his enemies respond? What happens if he tries to get by being sneaky on
his own, does he wind up hurt, or fail to save the day? Can he cobble together
some substitute? If you wanted to convey that this is a world where survival is
difficult, showing just how hard it is to find anything useful could be part of
that. Maybe Terry has to use the suit’s flight capabilities just to find some
water before he dies of thirst. It’s a moot point, because I
don’t think that’s what Jurgens and Chang have planned for the series. I might
be surprised. Tim could escape from Brother Eye’s clutches and end up in the
middle of nowhere, confronted with what’s happened to the rest of the world
outside Gotham. There have been a couple of references to the state of things outside Gotham
already, but we’ll see.
Batman Beyond isn’t my first try at a series I thought would
roughly be about the hero being stranded in an unknown wasteland sort of
location. It’s what I was hoping for from Rick Remender’s Captain America, with
the whole Dimension Z thing. That turned out to be entirely too much about
Steve and his adopted son, and we only got glimpses of the world he was in.
It’s why I hunted down Bishop: The Last X-Man in back issues. That was closer,
but still didn’t quite work for me. Not entirely sure why, possibly because
I’ve never exactly been a huge Bishop fan (although I really thought a
different sort of post-apocalyptic world would be a good setting to put him in).
There’s something theoretically cool to me about taking these
characters and putting them in largely new landscapes where they don’t
understand the rules. It’s a good way to look at the core of the
character. When you take away what’s familiar to them, place them on uncertain
footing where they have to rely on themselves, and any connections they make
have to be built from the ground up, what do they hold on to? What shines
through about them? Remender tried this, but I think he narrowed the focus a little too much. There were hints of things besides "always get up, never stop fighting", like the few scenes showing him and Ian settling in with the group they'd met.
Steve Rogers as someone who builds bridges with others, doesn't isolate himself, that's good, but it didn't get touched on much. With Bishop, he sort of seized on twin duties: As a cop, to
bring in Fitzroy once and for all, and as an X-Men, to carry that name and what it stands for
forward into a new generation. The more I think about, the more I feel like I
should have a better opinion of Bishop: The Last X-Man. I wasn’t expecting that
when I started typing this.
