So Batman #50 hit this week, and boy there were some unhappy people. I don’t care enough about whatever nonsense Tom King is doing to get worked up in the first place, but if I was invested in reading it, I’m sure I’d be pissed. Everyone on the face of the planet knows what happens by now, but just in case, “spoiler alert.” I say, much like a peeping tom, look at your own peril!
Batman #50 hit comics stores today, and was supposed to feature The Wedding of Batman and Catwoman- that was even the title! And it was advertised as such up the wazoo for months, leaving fans frothing at the mouth and buying fifty variants for this landmark issue. But in the Sunday NY Times, DC spoiled the events of the comic ahead of time. You can read it here. This enraged fans for a couple big reasons. Number one, it was such an unceremonious way to not only ruin the surprise, but in doing so it let the air out of the room; a negative surprise. It confirmed that Catwoman leaves Bats at the alter, and the marriage does not, in fact, take place at all. This is a big problem because of all the endless promotion DC did where they flat-out guaranteed it would happen. And also, it says THE WEDDING on the cover! Now that’s just hurtful! They had a big midnight release for it, and some stores even had a “wedding reception” and cake. Oh dear.
Presumably DC spoiled it because they didn’t want people to find out at the store when they pick up the comic, and recreate a geek version of the Rodney King riots where they burn down funny book shops. But still, they absolutely killed any outside reader interest. Why would anyone be interested in the comic, when they hear that the only selling point doesn’t actually happen? It was disingenuous. It creates anti-interest. I’ve heard the argument made several times that writer Tom King “is in the middle of the story, it’s not over yet,” to which I say- I’m sorry, I don’t care about Tom King. I don’t care for his writing and he seems to be a bit of a pompous dude. Of course, everyone who ever worked in comics is probably a little pompous, but still. For all the grief it caused them, they might as well have just married them anyway. I say Tom King has no right to build it up like that if NOT marrying them is the story he apparently wanted to tell; I don’t think Bruce should’ve proposed in the first place, but we went through a year’s worth of build up for nothing but disappointment.
Which brings us to Point 2: people WERE invested in his story, and really, really wanted the pair to be married. They wanted Batman to find happiness, they wanted to shake up the same stagnant status quo that’s been in place since Denny O’Neill’s editorial reign of terror in the ’90s (“I am darkness, I am the night,” etc). It just would’ve been something different. We could’ve seen a honeymoon, how the rest of the characters react to Batman being wed, married life with the couple and the complications that come from balancing it, and the villains using this new dynamic against him. The possibilities were endless, and they could’ve taken it away any time later. Instead, it never even happened, for the most insulting of reasons. Basically, King asserts Batman can’t get married because he can’t be happy, as he can’t be Batman if he’s not miserable. Well, we really needed you to waste a year’s worth of stories getting to this same conclusion everybody already knew anyway! It reeks of taking us for idiots, like he knows better than us or thinks he’s the first one to ever come up with this overplayed trope. This has been the predominant theme of the Batman books for 30 years now! We’re tired of it, it’s stale. If you really believe he can never be married, then don’t string us along and certainly don’t go ahead with an engagement. I thought Batman even proposing to Selina (the thief) in the first place was the out-of-character part! They walk on opposite sides of the law, we already knew it wouldn’t last, but still… it would’ve been fun to try.
I waited this long to get a post up because I wanted to read the issue itself first, and man, all those protests that we needed to read the issue before rushing to judgment were off-base. It’s even worse than I imagined! The writing is so extremely poor, and the art consists of about 30 pin-ups by various Batman artists juxtaposed against two letters Bruce and Selina write to each other. But boy, are they long, pointless and stupid letters. They basically consist of the pair calling each other “Bat. Cat. Bat. Cat. Bat. Cat.” four hundred times, and then talking about the color of each other’s eyes ad nauseam. Get on with it! It was just darn weird, with Bruce waxing endlessly about Selina’s green eyes being like scattered daggers of color or some horse shit; and Selina praising Bruce’s manly, steel blue eyes. That pure blue. That unwavering blue. Strong Aryan undertones? But anyway, we get a few pages in between of the two preparing for the wedding- a rooftop ceremony at dawn presided over by a drunk priest- and then it just doesn’t happen as Selina gets cold feet. And as if that weren’t enough, it was all part of a plan!
Which brings us to the “twist” of the issue. Selina’s junior partner from her prior series, Holly, ostensibly convinces her that she can’t marry Bruce because his happiness would mean the end of Batman. And when I say “convince,” you know I mean one off-handed comment on one page. But that’s not all! Apparently Holly incepted this idea to ruin the Bat-Cat marriage under orders from… Bane! And in the last page, she bows before Bane in Arkham, where he gleefully gloats that he’s broken the Bat again, and they’re surrounded by all the villains who have popped up in King’s run so far, including: Joker, Riddler, Gotham Girl, Puppethead and Dummy (I mean Ventriloquist and Scarface), Hugo Strange, Psycho Pirate, and… Skeets the robot, and the Thomas Wayne Flashpoint Batman? What?? It makes zero sense, and I have absolutely no desire to read further to have this explained. They couldn’t have the decency of giving us a full story and an ending point, because nothing makes me want to come back for more like a silly cliffhanger after my hopes for wedded bliss were dashed! I don’t know why Bane would do this, it seems too arbitrary and contrived to even make sense, and he’s veering dangerously close to Joe Quesada territory of stealing people’s marriages away for his own sinister amusement. Get Straczynski on the phone, stat! Maybe DC can pry him away from his fourth attempt at reviving The Twilight Zone, or whatever he’s up to these days?
My problem with it is that beyond being too goofy, Bane’s “scheme” hinges on that silly comic logic they always pull where people are broken philosophically, or some nonsense. This was my main problem with Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, where the second and third films proposed the weird idea that Batman had to take the blame for Harvey’s crimes because people would otherwise “lose hope,” and the symbol of the white knight had to be preserved. It’s a nice idea, but with absolutely no application in real life. It’s one of those comic booky ideas that makes sense on the printed page as a metaphor, but not at all in our world. I don’t even know who the D.A. of my city is, so I sure wouldn’t “lose hope” if he went nuts (Besides the fact that there was no proof Harvey killed anybody, so Batman was basically taking the blame for kidnapping Gordon’s family- awkward). People generally are selfish and don’t give a damn about symbols, so their hope is taken away in other ways- like, say, being lied to about a wedding between their favorite fictional characters happening and then having the rug pulled out from under them. I would argue it was especially hurtful to do this to the fanbase, for if you cared enough that Bats and Catty were getting married at all, you obviously were sensitive enough that these things mattered a lot to you, and could thus be wounded by that small enjoyment being taken away. It was just a big, big mistake, DC shot themselves in the foot and left the stores holding the bag, the readers felt betrayed- all in the name of Tom King wanting to write this absurd plot point. HE’S the one who set it up, and I can’t respect him for that- he knows very well he dragged it along and timed the event to hit with the round 50th issue, so he’s even more guilty of shameless baiting than anyone else. Boo!
Overall, yeah, not a good outcome. Judging by how pissed everyone is, it’ll be a long time before anyone forgives DC, let alone gives the Batman comic a chance again under King’s pen (He says he’s halfway through a 100 issue story- ugh). I just am not a fan of writing comics based on dragging it to a certain point, such as every arc of the Walking Dead forever being six issues exactly to fit into a nice even-numbered trade rather than just seeing how long some stories take. This is the worst kind of cheap phoniness that plays with reader emotion and investment, and smacks of the creators and company not giving a damn about the fans or what they want, in the quest for a quick sales bump. They know we care about these things more than the average Joe, so it truly wounds us when they do this. Bane would probably approve of DC’s manufactured misery! Like I said in the One More Day article, it points out the futility of the whole thing and how little any of it means anything, and you don’t want the reader to be aware of that. If they didn’t get married, if none of it matters, if he can never be happy in order to keep being Batman- why the hell would we keep reading the story of his romance to Catwoman at all?