Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 1

In 1986, DC Comics unleashed two of the most important series in comics history, broaching the possibility of mainstream superhero comics as literature. The stories are packed with all the accoutrements of what supposedly makes for good books: symbolism, philosophy, thought-provoking commentary on the human condition. One of those two series, Watchmen, has recently been made into a movie, attempting to take 12 issues and condense the images and words into something like a feature length movie. Audiences who didn’t know the story were put off by the storytelling, in part because of the denseness that faithfulness to the original required. They were also put off by its darkness: people with power are not any better than those without, they just have more ability to do the things they want to do. This is not the stereotypical view of superheroes, supposed paragons of virtue.

While Watchmen has garnered acclaim from mainstream audiences, it actually was the second of the seminal series to come out in 1986. The first, Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, was also groundbreaking and arguably had more impact on the comic industry than even Watchmen. I’m not aware that there has ever been any conversation about making a live action movie out the series, but DC has been quietly animating their best storylines of the past 30 years or so, and their latest project is an adaptation of this story of a retired Batman coming back to the service of his city.

Part of what makes The Dark Knight Returns so innovative is its setting; superheroes generally seem to live in the eternal now, always youthful and in fighting trim. But Frank Miller and this adaptation posits a time when Batman has been retired for a decade and the effect this has both on Gotham City and the people who interacted with him. Commissioner Gordon is on the verge of retirement, Harvey Dent (Two Face) has been rehabilitated and is returning to society, and the Joker sits wordlessly and catatonically in a ward in Arkham Asylum, destitute with no Batman to fight. But Gotham City is not at peace—a new gang called the Mutants has risen, and their only interests seem to be anarchy and mayhem. Batman himself is merely a legend, and the criminals in Gotham City have very few fears. Bruce Wayne really is the idle rich now, a powerful figure in the community, gray-haired but still possessing a presence, racing cars for sport in his leisure time.

After the Mutants murder the parents of a young boy in the streets and their leader openly targets Gordon for assassination before his retirement, Wayne feels the urge to put on the Batman costume again, to return to his city and fulfill the promise he made when he first put it on, “Never again.” The narrative dances along a tenuously thin line here: does Batman exist because of some altruistic desire to serve his city or is he ill, emotionally crippled when not in the costume and compelled by delusions into taking on the role of a messiah? The story also does not answer the question; instead it hangs there as a backdrop as a ruthless Batman sets about saving the things he cares about. The story also plays with the question of the violence that Batman uses to fight crime; while he doesn’t kill, he is not beyond a little torture or temporary maiming to get what he wants.

To fully bring these questions into the foreground, the story uses the device of interspersing news reports from television as segues into scenes. Those reports tend to focus on the average citizens’ response to what is taking place in the city with some people calling Batman a hero for his actions while others think he exacerbates and perhaps causes any problems that may occur. The TV segments come to a sharp focus with an ongoing debate between Bartholomew Wolper, a psychologist who believes that anyone can be rehabilitated but that the Batman is sick and provokes sick responses from his villains, and Lana Lang, a reporter who praises Batman’s efforts to clean up the city, arguing that the hero is a symbol to the people, that anyone can rise up against those who oppress them. It’s important to note that Miller’s original story is decidedly a product of its time, an exploration of the attitudes of the Reagan years in American history and of the idea that certain moral positions demand to be acted upon no matter the cost, and its corollary that might makes right. But these topics do not feel dated at all and have just as much potency as they did when Miller first brought them up.

Peter Weller’s voice jars in Batman’s mouth, especially for animated fans who have had years of Kevin Conroy playing the Dark Knight. But Weller is able to add a tone of weariness to Wayne and Batman, a note that is generally missing from Conroy’s portrayal. To be honest, the other voice actors are okay (even though the talent used is generally of the highest quality), but they are meant to be more complementary to Weller’s Batman and they serve that role well. The animation is a fine dance between the highly stylized artwork of Frank Miller’s original, and the more mainstream animation style that DC Entertainment has developed over the years, based on a mixture of anime sensibilities with Western lines. So, while there is nothing so dramatic as Miller’s figures, there are echoes of his lines in everything. And of course, the animators know their source material, so famous panels are used to send chills up the spines of longtime fans.

Of particular note is the soundtrack by Christopher Drake. The work is at least as compelling as Hans Zimmer’s work on Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and I pine for the soundtrack much as I do for those of Hans Zimmer. Even after the movie is over and your mind works over the implications and questions raised by the movie, the soundtrack remains in the background, an integral part of the story that this movie tells.

Quite frankly, this is the best Batman movie of the year, multi-layered and complex, with ideas that are impactful after the movie is over. It is much closer to the power of the brilliant The Dark Knight than the actual sequel from this summer, The Dark Knight Rises. It is also the best of DC Entertainment’s animated movies, which is also saying a great deal since the quality of those has generally been excellent. Unfortunately, the storytelling is so lush and dense that the full adaptation has been broken in two, and fans will have to wait a few months to get Part 2. I don’t know if there are any plans to eventually make it into a single package, but if so I don’t know if I can recommend waiting that long to see the brilliant work that DC has done.

Empire State

I keep a list of books that I want to read, mostly gathering it from reviews from all over, including the Internet and magazines. I also look at forthcoming book lists to see what my favorite authors are doing, usually putting their next offerings on my to-read list. The list is fairly large, so it sometimes takes me a while to get to things on it, and when I come to a first book by a new author, I’m generally hard-pressed to remember what it is that attracted me to the book in the first place. Was it a review, an advertisement? Did I like the cover art? Such was not the case with Adam Christopher’s Empire State. Just looking at the blurbs, I had no difficulty remembering what had grabbed my attention about this book. Alternate history 1930s New York City with superheroes? I’m there!

It starts out promising enough, a small-time gangster named Rex, on the run from a rival mob, crashes his car and escapes into a crowd watching New York’s two superheroes, the Skyguard and the Science Pirate duking it out against the backdrop of an uncompleted Empire State Building. Both heroes use rocket suits (a la The Rocketeer) and their battle lights up the sky. One hero wins decidedly and the crowd’s mixed reaction allows Rex to slip away unnoticed. But the events have consequences that nobody on the scene could have imagined. The story jumps to detective Rad Bradbury, a fairly stereotypical private eye from the period—living out of the back room of his office and avoiding divorce papers from his wife—who takes on an attractive female client, looking for her missing partner.

The novel becomes even more noir, as Rad’s narrative reveals that his city, which he refers to as the Empire State, is in perpetual Wartime with an unseen enemy, forcing rationing and prohibition laws. It’s always raining in the Empire State, and fog and clouds restrict sight of anything more than a few miles away from the island city. And for some reason, it’s almost always night. The phone in Rad’s office rings often but he is never able to get to it before it stops. Christopher evokes the same suspenseful texturing as the underrated movie Dark City, with something just as disturbing at its core. However, Christopher begins to lose control of that texturing, building convoluted level after level that eventually confuses even his characters, so that while the action is thrilling and the ideas interesting, the reader really has no idea what’s going on. We just have to trust that the private dick with the heart of gold is going to work it out.

In some ways this is no different from the best noir stories, which seem to involve a number of characters whose real goals and purposes remain obscure to the reader. And somehow the detective can piece them all together due to his innate, nearly supernatural, ability to read character and motivation in the people he meets. But Empire State suffers because the characters and their motivations are complicated by the revelation of an alternate dimension with doppelgangers of dubious motivation who apparently move back and forth across the dimensional divide with less difficulty than what might be imagined. And every time the characters provide a rule set for how something works, whether it be the culture of the Empire State or the physics of the dimensions, that rule set ends up being broken. And of course, like the best noir stories, characters perform double- and triple-crosses, again made more complicated by the doppelgangery as well as the supposed motivation not being clear in the first place.

Some characters want the dimensional rift closed for reasons that are never made completely clear. Other characters want to keep the rift open because they feel that destroying it will destroy the cities on both sides of the rift. And then some characters do contradictory things, working at their own purposes and which only seem somewhat tangential to the existence of the rift in the first place. Of course, there are allusions to the world that we know as well, further clouding the circumstances as the import of those allusions is never played out—there’s a cult based on a book entitled Seduction of the Innocent, but why that book and its hysteria regarding comic books is never made clear (let alone why people would follow it).

One of the most defining traits of noir fiction is that the detective doesn’t move from clue to clue as in true detective fiction, like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. Instead, the detective is led around by the nose, getting kidnapped or beat up and following leads down blind alleys, somehow gleaning scraps of important information from the people he interacts with. I’ve always felt that the detective is a surrogate from the reader, making manifest the reader’s role in most detective fiction—being led from place to place without any real control over direction and picking up what clues they can through observation. But with Empire State, the framework is precarious and the reader is especially aware that they are being led about without much real hope of figuring out what is going on. None of the characters are given very much depth, usually another hallmark of noir fiction, so after a while I felt like I was being batted back and forth by characters I didn’t care much about one way or another. This ended up making a book that began with potential and strong ideas become a trudge, a tedious quest to find out how it all gets resolved, in the hopes of it getting better.

What Empire State needed more than anything else was a good edit, a tightening up. Noir stories generally move fast, but this one gets bogged down in its own complexity. The potential for a strong story was there but was never met. Adam Christopher shows promise—and has several more books on the way, including a sequel to Empire State—and he clearly knows comics and science fiction tradition. I look forward to the growth from this flawed start.

The Quantum Thief

I'm not sure there is such a thing as bibliographic karma, but there are moments when the right book appears at exactly the right time. I've long been a fan of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series, and I was saddened by Harrison's death this last 15 August. That series details the antics of Slippery Jim DiGriz, the eponymous Stainless Steel Rat and the galaxy's best thief. The Quantum Thief is a proud follower on the trail that Harrison blazed; Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean de Flambeur is a worthy successor to Slippery Jim now that his stories have ended.

This first novel by Hannu Rajaniemi, a Finn living in Scotland, is both a challenge and a delight. The delight comes from following the exploits of a thief just rescued from prison and obliged to help his benefactress, Mieli, on a mission/quest of a dubious nature: one does not break a thief out of prison without usually desiring his talents. Unfortunately, de Flambeur's memories of his felonious ways have been carefully locked up in a Martian city called the Oubliette, so he has to steal his own memories back from a city that is walking across the Martian desert. The challenge comes from the far future setting that Rajaniemi creates; his world-building is elaborate and immersive, and his narrative throws the reader into the action without any guidance whatsoever. Much as in Steven Erikson's Malazan books, exotic names and ideas are bandied about without explanation, forcing the reader to glean meaning from context and repetition.

The world Rajaniemi has created is chock full of the big ideas that are the stereotype of speculative fiction. Especially fascinating is the culture of the Oubliette, hinging as it does on dual axes of time and privacy. On the one hand, the citizens of the Oubliette use a currency of time, paying for items with seconds counted out from their personal Watches. Anyone who has seen the movie In Time (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2012/02/in-time.html) or read Harlan Ellison's "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman" will recognize this conceit, but Rajaniemi changes it somewhat so that when a citizen's time runs out, instead of dying he serves a stint as a Quiet, a cyborg unit doing menial labor for the city. The citizen retains all his memories but performs service for a period of time before being allowed to be reborn into a new body with all his memories intact. The process takes for granted the ability to communicate consciousness and thought from body to body, and sometimes to machine. 

The second fundamental concept of the Oubliette also takes advantage of this capability: privacy is paramount to all the Oubliette's citizens, and every interaction includes a contract that details the extent of how much can be revealed or even remembered by the participants. Imagine a night on the town with the contract that stipulates that you could only remember that you had a good time but can remember no details of what you did or who you did it with. Such manipulation requires a monstrous computer that works on a quantum scale with interfaces to each and every citizen and a security protocol that guides how much can and cannot be remembered. People also share messages via co-memories—you receive a message from a friend that is actually a memory; you remember a conversation that you never had, because you have agreed that messages from the sender will allow the security program to shape your memory that you had it all along. The concept raises all sorts of fascinating philosophical questions, but Rajaniemi only touches on them in passing, allowing the reader to wander into that labyrinth on their own. Instead, The Quantum Thief focuses on how such a system could be manipulated by artists and thieves, both of which describe Jean de Flambeur. As is the tradition with the great literary thieves, de Flambeur is also something of a trickster, and so recovering his own memories is a task made more complicated by a sense of humor he doesn't entirely remember having. 

Rajaniemi deftly interweaves de Flambeur's story with that of Isidore, a young Martian architectural student whose daily life provides a great deal of the explanation of how the Oubliette culture works. The story follows him as he tries to work out his relationship with Pixil, a member of a culture based on 20^th and 21^st century gaming culture. Pixil's people are supreme crafters and technicians who are the most adept at the quantum computing required by the Oubliette, but they are just barely trusted, treated much like gypsies. Isidore is also getting something of a reputation as an amateur detective which is the source of his conflict with Pixil, who wants him to devote more time to her. But Isidore suspects he is being groomed by the Oubliette's tzaddikim, superheroes who act as voluntary police for the city and beloved by its citizens. And of course, if Isidore is a detective, then his path must somehow eventually cross de Flambeur's. But instead of being clichéd, Rajaniemi surprises the reader by letting their stories run parallel for a good bit before winding them together in unexpected ways. There are also outside forces that appear to be guiding the lives of the characters in the story; Rajaniemi fortunately only mentions them, letting them appear only very briefly—just hinting that their roles will be much bigger in future books before assuring it in the final chapter.

All the pieces come together in a whirlwind of storytelling, pushing the reader pell-mell across exotic locales and big ideas. Rajaniemi is an exciting new voice in speculative fiction, and The Quantum Thief promises more excitement and big ideas in future installments.