Probably the biggest comic of next week will be Batman #686, the first over-sized issue of a two-part story written by Neil Gaiman and bearing the charged title of “Whatever Happened
to the Caped Crusader?”
Gaiman, one of the handful of creators that one can easily trace the current graphic novel boom back to, returning to do any comics work of any kind is a pretty exciting prospect, for both the readers and the company publishing him, particularly since he’s become more and more a prose a writer and less and less of a comics writer over the past few years.
He’s also coming off a huge week personally, in which one of his latest prose works won the Newbery award—DC couldn’t have asked for a better time to release a new Gaiman project.
That he’s working on a perennially hot character (Batman), that he’s working with a fairly hot artist (Andy Kubert), that he’s following the work of another hot and critically acclaimed writer (Grant Morrison) and that his story is being positioned as a spiritual sequel to a classic superhero comic by the man who’s probably most widely recognized as the greatest living comics writer (Alan Moore)…well, like I said, this should be a pretty exciting comic book release.
Whatever it actually ends up being about. The solicitation is a little vague: “[A] captivating and mysterious tale the likes of which Batman and friends have never experienced before. Delving into the realms of life, death and the afterlife, Gaiman leaves no stone unturned as he explores every facet and era of Bruce Wayne’s life.” The safe assumption is that it will be a final chapter type story for Batman, as Moore’s Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow? was for Superman.
While looking forward to this week’s first half of the story, which is set to conclude in March’s Detective Comics #853, I thought it would be a good time to pull out and dust off some old longboxes and revisit Gaiman’s previous Batman comics.
In 1988, shortly before the launch of 1989’s Sandman, there was the three-part Black Orchid miniseries, which was illustrated by frequent Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean. A reinvention of the the old, silly flower-themed superhero of the same name, Gaiman and McKean’s miniseries was of the same spirit and aesthetic of Alan Moore and company’s Swamp Thing stories; in fact, Swamp Thing played a role in the series.
As did the subject of this post, Batman. His role was pretty minor, all told, but he appears on a few pages.
Here’s a pretty typical Batman panel from the series:
This was back when DC was heavily accentuating the Batman-as-urban-myth angle, and he’s drawn by McKean as a silhouette with bat-like angles here and there, speaking in a Morpheus-esque white-on-black font (the series was lettered by Todd Klein, who would also letter Sandman).
The story followed the kinda sorta sister of the original Black Orchid as she went about conducting an investigation about her own origins and her own death. She’s aided by Batman, who helps her get in to Arkham to meet with Pamela “Poison Ivy” Isley, and Batman later suggests she meet with Alec Holland. It’s since been collected into a trade, which has gone through several printings (There’s a brief preview available at DC’s site here).
In 1989, Gaiman wrote his biggest Batman story, the framing sequence and one of the three origin stories in Secret Origins Special #1, which focused on the Bat-villains.
This was one of my first DC comics, and is still one of my favorite—looking back on it today, not only was it a great introduction to Batman’s rogues gallery, but also to a lot of great talent who would go on to do some pretty incredible things. Starting with the cover, by Brian Bolland.
Gaiman’s framing story, “Original Sins,” is penciled by Mike Hoffman and inked by Kevin Nowlan, and focuses on a sleazy TV news magazine producer who’s come to Gotham City for the purposes of a documentary of sorts showing the human sides of Batman’s criminal foes.
Batman tries to warn him off, and then disappears, while the producer and his crew spend the rest of the 68-page special (and it only cost $2.00 back then…! Sigh…) trying to land an interview with The Joker and settling for whatever henchmen, ex-wife or B-Lister they can get. These attempts lead into each of the three origin stories.
The first is by writer Alan Grant and artist Sam Kieth, still a few years away from the weirdness he’d embrace with The Maxx, and it focused on The Penguin. The third is by Mark Verheiden, Pat Broderick and Dick Giordano, and focused on Two-Face.
And the middle one was by Gaiman himself, and a pretty peculiar art team—Bernie Mireault on pencils, Matt Wagner on inks and Joe Matt on colors (This Joe Matt?). God bless you, then-editor Mark Waid; that is a creative team.
Entitled “When Is a Door?”, the story opened with a pretty clever page lay out, in which the panels are wood panels in a locked door upon a white wall formed by the page. The story follows the production crew down to “The Finger Yard,” a junkyard where Gotham stores all the giant typewriters and props that used to adorn its buildings (and which Dick Sprang and company used to draw Batman and Robin jumping around fighting on).
Ostensibly The Riddler’s origin, he doesn’t really answer any questions, and it serves as a sort of last Riddler story, as the old, washed-up villain reminisces about the good old days represented by the Silver Age and, most especially, the Batman TV show (prior to which The Riddler wasn’t an especially prominent rogue) and shaking his head about how dark and violent his world has gotten.
“The Joker’s killing people, for God’s sake!” he says incredulously at one point.
The Sandman occupied much of Gaiman’s attention through its end in 1996, and Batman only had a few tiny cameos in the series. He gets a visual cameo in the first story arc of the series, in a panel showing Batman and Hal Jordan busting Dr. Destiny, and he shows up with a few other DCU characters at Morpheus-Dream’s funeral in “The Wake” arc, sharing a panel with Clark Kent and J’onn J’onnz. This cameo’s a speaking part, and he gets a line, although it’s only two words long.
Gaiman was one of the many creators to contribute to four-part 1996 miniseries Batman: Black and White. The concept was pretty simple: The world’s greatest creators, including plenty you wouldn’t normally expect to be involved with a Batman comic, putting together short stories for an anthology series whose organizing principle was right there in the title.
For the series’ second issue, Gaiman contributed a nine-page story entitled “A Black and White World,” which was illustrated by Simon Bisley. It’s a one-joke story, but Gaiman’s gift for dialogue and Bisely’s super-exaggerated forms contrasting with the other half of that joke make it a pretty pleasant read.
In this story, Batman, The Joker and the characters are simply actors that appear in comic books instead of movies or television shows.
After a dramatic splash page of Batman stalking down a dark alley, he picks up his call sheet and is asked to wait in the green room, where he’s forced to read Time instead of Newsweek (”Company policy,” he’s told). There the Joker, wearing Nazi regalia and his hair spiked up into bat-ears, is also waiting. The pair decide to run through their scene together and complain about the job and craft services. When they’re on, we see the scene they read through played out, like a typical comic book story, and then they snap back to being co-workers again, Joker waxing enviously at Batman’s cool splash pages, and the Batman countering that The Joker gets to make all the speeches.
The story, like the rest of the miniseries, has since been collected.
And that’s all I can find in my long boxes. Am I missing any other Neil Gaiman penned Batman comics…? The Internet tells me Batman appeared in Swamp Thing Annual #5, written by Gaiman, but I’ve never been able to track that one down…
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Jul 4, 2010 
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Batman, David Baron, DC, Dennis O'Neil, Derek Fridolfs, Detective Comics, Dustin Nguyen, Harvey Dent, Joker, Robin, The Medallion, Todd Klein, Two-face
