Second Post: The Dark Knight (2008)

My wife often likes to say that a single shot can justify an entire film. Because of this, I have dubbed her a formalist. She is OK with this, even though I make this comment as a fairly committed historicist.

That being said, there is a shot in The Dark Knight that would justify the film, if of course the film needed it. Let the gushing and the spoilers commence:

At the end of the film, the Joker falls off the side of a building after battling with the Batman. Unlike "the poetry" of Batman (1989), Nolan's Dark Knight does not leave the clown prince of crime to fall to his death. Instead, Batman rescues Joker from his demise by pulling him up with a grappling hook. Hoisted upside down from his leg and flapping in the wind, the Joker explains his philosophy of life. However, tellingly, the image that the audience sessis not of the Joker hanging upside down. The image has been inverted so that he appears right side up, with his jacket floating up behind him and flapping eerily in the wind. For the audience, this simple trick of inverting the negative's direction produces a certain amount of estrangement. The Joker appears at once normal, but the world appears strange. More tellingly though, is that the shot is from Batman's point of view. As I discussed in my last post and over here, the real tragedy in the film comes when Batman accepts the Joker's view of society. This shot is brilliant, and again would justify the film if it needed it, because it manages to formally suggest the thematic circumstances of that part of the film.

I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight. . . .

Very Serious: Batusi vs. Bat Dance

This year is an election year and America faces a very important decision. Will we choose between something that is tried and true or something that is a flash in the pan? Will you be doing the Batusi or the Bad Dance? The choice is yours. But remember, the safety of our nation is in your hands.



THE BATUSI

THE BATDANCE



VOTE NOW!

And T. S. Eliot once had the audacity to say that art never improves. Humph.

The Dark Knight (2008)

I.

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, critic David Denby states that the latest installment of the Batman franchise, The Dark Knight (2008), is little bit more than a ponderous excuse for "thunderous violence." For Denby, watching The Dark Knight is to see the Batman franchise polluted. The new film, Denby writes, "continue[s] to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton's original conception for Batman (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle" (92).

There are a number of problems with this statement, and we would be good to point out the most blatant of these first. Batman was just as much a summer action spectacle as the current film. While time may have shrouded Denby's memory, I distinctly remember that the film came out in late June, which is very much a part of the summer. Furthermore, while The Dark Knight promises to be a commercial success and does have its fair share of crass merchandising, this latest production does not seem nearly as coarse or "un-poetic" as this nation's second wave of Bat-Mania.

More importantly, we must note that, while it is true that Tim Burton had a conception for Batman in the late 1980s, it would be false to say that he ever had the"original conception" for Gotham's protector or that his should be held up before all others. In 1989, the character was some 50 years old, and while Burton's take on the caped crusader had its own idiosyncrasies, much like director Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight, Burton's Batman drew its inspiration from equal parts Bob Kane and Frank Miller.

Denby's true critical sin lies, however, elsewhere. The fact that he credits Batman with greater artistic purity and Burton as the prime Batman artiste is not the true problem of his evaluation.
Denby's ultimate fault is that his review commits the ultimate failure of criticism: he fails to see the aesthetic object for what it truly is and instead critiques it against the object that he truly desires. In doing so, Denby commits the same error that all bad fan-criticism does: he demands that the film bend to the needs of his aggressive nostalgia. Many readers of superhero texts do this because our first introduction to a character usually strikes us as the truest. For me, the original Green Lantern will always be Gerard Jones's Hal Jordan, but Showcase Presents: Green Lantern more than illustrates that this version of the character is as deviant from Jordan's 1959 first appearance as Nolan's Batman is from Burton's. However, I do recognize that Jones's interpretation is just as valid as the original and just as valid as the contemporary version of the character. The later writers have surveyed the history of GL stories and have taken those parts of the character's history that seems most useful and speaks most to them and their age.

For Denby, as far as film goes, Burton's vision of Batman is his prime model. It is the Batman that feels most genuine because it meets those expectations of what Batman should be; but of course these were established by Burton and no one else. We must be aware that Burton's Batman is not the Batman, just as it would be impossible to say that Bob Kayne's Batman is the only Batman, even though Kane was the originator of the character. By this point in time, Batman has become a piece of industrial folklore. He is not the common property of the folk, although many people may feel or think that he has become legendary. Indeed, in many ways he has. The character is a legend, but he is also a copyrighted piece of intellectual property owned by a major media corporation. Nonetheless, while there are an infinite amount of Batman's running a long the rooftops of our collective imagination, there are also many different official versions of Batman that DC Comics and its parent corporation Warner Brothers have propagated. Each of these visions are equally valid. All that defines Batman in his purest form is his origin story (a boy swears to rid the world of crime after his parents are murdered before his eyes) and certain costume elements (the cape, the cowl, and some type of bat insignia). All other elements, including Alfred, Robin, Commissioner Gordon, and even Gotham City are superfluous. As a character, Batman has survived without them at various times in his publishing history and it is likely that one or more of these elements will disappear briefly in the future, although probably not for long.

Burton's Batman is, of course, a Batman that we can all recognize, and which a great many of us delighted in when it first came to theaters. It has all of the essential features of Batman, and has a great many of the secondary ones as well. Furthermore, unlike many comic movies that seem principally ashamed of their source material, Batman does not run from its comic origins or even what we might call their own internal logic. Much like those GL scribes listed above, it takes what it needs from the larger history of Batman and Burton makes it his own. It is this action, making Batman one's own, which allows the 1989 production to fit almost perfectly within Burton's larger oeuvre. Batman is principally concerned with outcasts, moodiness, and masquerade. And while, Nolan's Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight are interested in these themes to a certain degree, I am more than happy to see them moved to the background than have them dominate the foreground. For Nolan's preoccupation with Batman is not with the Dark Knight's personal pain - although his mission does drive the plot - but with how cities function and how they need good people to function properly. Much as I find Burton's Batman to produce its own brand of poetry, I am less drawn to its aesthetic and its message, than I am to Nolan's more useful depiction of Bruce Wayne and his effect on Gotham. For while Burton and later Joel Schumacher were preoccupied with Wayne's pain and demons, and while this can make for interesting storytelling, not many of us are going to find ourselves avenging our parents as masked vigilantes. In contrast, Nolan's Batman series, like a heightened, more fantastic vision of David Simon's The Wire might actually teach us something about our present condition more generally.

II.

If we are going to compare The Dark Knight to a superhero film a more profitable comparison exists between The Dark Knight and the last (and hopefully final) installment of the X-Men franchise, X3: The Last Stand. At the core of the Brian Singer/Brett Ratner trilogy is a political meditation, much in the same way that Nolan's Batman films are preoccupied with the politics and corruption of a single American city. As in the latest Batman installment, X3: The Last Stand also considers what happens when the conception of politics is undermined by something more primal.

In Ratner's production, political issues are mapped along multicultural conceptions of identity. Viewing difference as sacrosanct, many of the X-Men and all of Magneto's terrorist vanguard feel that the newly manufactured mutant "cure" is tantamount to genocide. In many ways, they are right if they limit their claims to cultural genocide, but that is a more complicated matter and deserves a separate post of its own. What is important for our purposes is that amidst the hullabaloo of a mutant cure, is the resurrection of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) as a primal psychic force known as the Phoenix. Unlike sensible Jean Grey, who is dedicated to Xavier's dream of peaceable coexistence between humans and mutants, the Phoenix is overcome with desire for powerful sensations. Represented as pure and nearly omnipotent id, she wants to experience life unrestricted by societal and political constraints; nearly invulnerable, and thus living without consequence, the Phoenix wants to experience "bare life."

This desire causes her to reject the stern political doctrines of Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), and in a fit of excessive rage, to tear him apart atom from atom. From the rest of the film the Phoenix travels with Magneto (Ian McKellen) and his acolytes. However, she does not do this because she has had a political change of heart or because she shares Magneto's desire to exterminate the human race. She travels with him merely as a means to seek out new experiences. The central problem with X3's thematic construction is that Magneto never recognizes that Phoenix is not interested in his political machinations and that he never pays for this lack of recognition. Of course, Magento is defeated, made into a normal human being by the X-Man Beast (Kelsey Grammer), but Jean Grey plays only a little part in this. The film's identity politics are not challenged at all by the presence of the Phoenix, and this makes the whole plot point superfluous to the film's overall action.

In comparison Nolan's Dark Knight presents us with a Joker (Heath Ledger) who is a self-described "agent of chaos." Much like the Phoenix, Nolan and Ledger's Joker imagines himself as outside the bounds of political order and rule. However, it should be noted whereas Phoneix is depicted as being pure id, Joker's disorder is portrayed more as a Hobbesian in nature. It is the Joker who sees beyond the facile lies society tells itself in order to constitute itself.

It is into Gotham City that Nolan drops this vision of the Joker. Although Athenian in its conception of publicity, Nolan's Gotham is very much that vision of the city that the great Naturalist writers of the late 19th and early 20th century taught us to see. Gotham City, corrupt and dangerous, lives by pumping money in and out of its coffers. While its economy and geography are based around the virtuous model of corporate responsibility, Wayne Enterprises, for too long the city was corrupt and violent. Into this mess, the Batman (Christian Bale) came to rid the city of the mob, to clean up corruption, and most of all to inspire other people to action. Batman's ability to inspire is what makes up the action of the film. For while Batman inspires the virtuous District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) to take action, he also inspires a group of unfortunate copycat vigilantes, and of course, he inspires the mob to hire the Joker to kill Batman. What the mob doesn't realize is that despite the fact that the Joker offers to work for money, his passions are not economic but sadistic in their nature. What the Joker wants is to spread chaos and fear, to show society through sadism, that underneath the thin bedrock of society is a mess of chaos and animal urges. The mob pays for this lack of recognition, but so do many Gothamites, police officers, not to mention Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), Harvey Dent, and the Batman.

In wanting to spread fear, many commentators (Denby included) have wanted to read the Joker's action against our current political climate and declare him a terrorist. Scipio over at The Absorbascon has gone so far as to state that the film makes a real comment on terrorism. What this comment is, he does not tell us, but then again, to be fair, that is not the purpose of his post. These comments are of course not made erroneously. Although they do not elaborate much, their writer's may very well be on to something. There are at least two points in the film, when the Joker is explicitly called a terrorist. But as much as the film wants him to be one, the Joker is not really a terrorist, at least not as we understand the term conventionally to denote. Yes, the Joker spreads terror, but he does so to no political end. His murder and mayhem serve no other purpose than their own ends. Besides his point about society's delusions about itself, Joker is violent for the sake of being violent.

This extra-political activity seems to be rooted in Joker's own familial background. While in keeping with his various origin stories from the comics, Nolan's Joker has no definite origin or motivational incident. However, the one commonality in all of Joker's own given explanations for his behavior lies in a twisted family dynamic, which is essentially, outside the bounds of what we normally consider politics (although it certainly is not untouched by it). Indeed, the political world, even the political world of Batman, rests on top of this uncertain structure: the individual mind which is molded both by society and uncertain forces.

[SPOILERS!]

Where this film truly succeeds is that it concedes some of the argument to the Joker. Unlike Phoenix who is sentimentally dispatched by a tearful Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), the legacy of the Joker is dubious. His mission was not only to kill Batman, but to show that both the high and the low could easily be brought down to their most bestial. At the film's climax he arranges a type of prisoner's delima between Gotham's criminals and its regular citizens. One boat is filled with criminals, the other everyday decent people; both have detonators to the others' boat. If they do not act, the Joker will blow up both ships. Both groups manage to survive the other and the Joker. They are not corrupted. On the other hand, the Joker has also attempted and succeeded in corrupting Harvey Dent, bringing down the city's "white knight" and turning him into the crazed madman Two-Face. Aware of the city's ability to produce publicity, both Gordon and Batman agree that the city cannot sustain the shock of knowing the truth of Dent's fall. It would ruin all the work that the three of them have done to inspire and unify the city against crime and corruption. After Dent's death, Gordon and Batman agree that Batman should receive the blame for Dent's crimes in order to hold the city together. Batman will continue to act for good, but he will be chased and hunted actively by the police in the memory of a Harvey Dent who never truly existed.

In the end, the Joker wins half of the argument, but one hopes not the better half. While the people on the boats never act, Gordon and Batman are persuaded that Dent's fall would undermine the city. It is only through producing an elaborate lie that the city and by extension society is able to hold itself together. Underneath all the political order, rests a falsity we tell ourselves. How we constitute a just society and a political frame work in spite of this, is the problem the film sets forth for us. For in the end, we might acknowledge that society is held together with little more than a series of linguistic acts, but this does not make the bonds, bounds, or rules of a society any less significant. Indeed, the real question of morality will always be one of action, but we ought to think back upon what linguistic acts we make which thus set the boundaries of our actions, and we might want to question the necessity of Gordon and Batman's ruse. After all, while the film implies the consequences of their actions are successful, we will never learn what would have happened if the linguistic act Gordon and Batman rebuilt Gotham society had been less duplicitous and more honest.

Final Crisis #1 & #2

Two issues into Final Crisis and I can say without hesitation that Grant Morrison and J. G. Jones have - despite the better efforts of DC Corporate - managed to craft a compelling tale.

Previously, I had expressed my conflicted anticipation for the series. Grant Morrison I like; DC's latest endless cycle of EARTH-SHATTERING extravaganzas have often been exhausting and frequently nonsensical. Of course, Morrison and Jones have not entirely avoided the problems of DC Corporate, but read as a self-contained textual artifact, Final Crisis holds together as well as any comic with sixty years of stories behind it can.* Readers of Countdown to Final Crisis and Death to the New Gods did encounter several contradictions and major plot holes which were essentially the product of editorial fiat and failure. The most flagrant gaff so far is that they had to see the the soldier god of New Genesis, Orion, die twice and in different ways. Morrison explained the situation to the comics website, Newsarama thusly:

Although the 52 writing team was asked to contribute to Countdown, we were all seriously burned-out by the demands of the weekly schedule and I think we all wanted to concentrate on our own monthly titles for a while, so when Countdown was originally being discussed, it was just a case of me saying ‘Here’s issue 1 of Final Crisis and a rough breakdown of the following six issues. As long as you guys leave things off where Final Crisis begins, we‘ll be fine.’ Obviously, I would have preferred it if the New Gods hadn’'t been spotlighted at all, let alone quite so intensively before I got a chance to bring them back but I don’t run DC and don’t make the decisions as to how and where the characters are deployed.

However, seeing as I read neither Countdown or Death of the New Gods (both had the stink of surplus crossover on them), none of this has actually impended on my enjoyment of Morrison's script or Jones pencils.

What Morrison and Jones are striving for - and accomplishing with a good deal of success - is to tell the story of when evil finally defeated good in the ultimate battle. The catch to the series relies on the fact that the battle has already been won by the forces of evil, but the good guys just don't know it. In order to tell this story, Morrison and Jones need to establish a darker mood than the DCU normally accommodates. On this account, they are more than successful. Martian Manhunter is inglorious slaughtered and Batman is brutally, and yet casually, tortured. With these narrative acts, Morrison and Jones establish that the age of heroes is over. Indeed, the only betrayal of this tone might be in the fact that Jones's heroes remain too heroic looking. Chris Weston, who worked with Morrison on the absolutely depressing and revolting The Filth, might have been a better choice. His figures, like Jones's, tend towards the photo-realistic, but Weston's spandex-wearing warriors always have a seedy awkwardness to them that would have really captured the tone of the series.

Adding to the creepy mood of Final Crisis is that much of the series is told from the perspective of Dan Turpin, a retired Metropolis cop turned hardboiled investigator. Morrison uses Turpin to ground the series in the nitty-gritty of daily life and its his sullied view of the world that matches the tenor of much of the plot. Hot on the trail of some missing kids, Turpin discovers a far deeper mystery concerning the battle between good and evil. Running into the transformed evil gods of Apokolips in a kind of near dream-like logic, Turpin is told again and again that evil has won; however Turpin, like the apostles in the New Testament, seems unable to understand that the bad news has come no matter how clear the Bad Gods make it known.

Now, all of this has proven to be interesting, moody, and in many ways really quite disturbing. But the voice of doubt in the back of my head keeps on telling me that the series is going to hit the skids under editorial mandate. As of the first issue, and continuing on into the second, Morrison has established for himself four different plot threads for the series:

1) The transformation of the New Gods after their death and the victory of the evil gods.
2) The interference of the New God Metron in the development of human beings, and the necessity of such interference sometime at the end of time.
3) The re-establishment of the Society of Super-Villains by Libra (presumably working for the Darkseid the evil god supreme)
4) The mismanagement of the mutliverse by unscrupulous monitors.

Now presumably, 1-3 all go together easily enough. One imagines that Metron's involvement with the caveboy Anthro will help solve the plot complications that result from plot thread #1. Furthermore, its easy enough to see that Libra is in someway responsible for the events of plot thread #1. The events of #4 however seem like another attempt by DC Corporate to rearrange the byzantine architecture of their fictional nomos. As of yet it seems to have nothing to do with the other three plot threads.

Instead of expressing an interest in telling a Crisis-style story, Morrison seems to be using Final Crisis as an endcap for most of his DCU work to date. The connection between the Society of Super-Villains and Darkseid's victory over the earth resonates strongly with his "Rock of Ages" storyline in JLA ten years ago. Furthermore, the transformation of the New Gods hearkens directly back to Morrison's groundbreaking work in Seven Soldiers - elements of which seem to be in conflict with the plot points of #4.

Nevertheless, these are two solid issues and Morrison and Jones have me, presumably, until the end of this series.

* I realize that this is paradoxical.

Last Week in Comics #4: DC Universe 0

DC Universe 0
W: Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns
A: Various
I: Various
Ed: Dan Didio


DC Universe 0 is purported to be the kick-off point to DC Comics's summer miniseries and crossover Final Crisis. Like all of DC Comics' crises, this one promises to fix the complicated continuity of the DCU once and for all. As the captions in the page to your left summarizes:

The first crisis brought death to nearly all of creation. One lone universe was spared. A second crisis witnessed the violent resurrection of 52 new parallel universes. And so begins the final chapter in the sage of the multiple earths. The final crisis.

Why any one would believe that Final Crisis will solve the "problem" of the multiverse is beyond me. While the page to the left has a certain narrative economy, it actually ignores two other attempts to clean up continuity between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis: 1994's Zero Hour and 1999's Kingdom. By the end of the summer that means there will have been five attempts to clean things up since the mid-1980s. On average, there has been a "crisis" every four years with the duration between crises getting shorter and shorter. Either this means that the creators at DC Comics have managed to tell increasingly convoluted stories since the mid-1980s, or these crises have not adequately done their job, and/or these events are profitable and thus have a commercial worth that makes up for their artistic and functional demerits.

In a very real sense these projects are doomed to failure. None of the crises have been truly revolutionary acts as none of them have rolled back the clock to the year zero. They have tried to solve the problem of having a complex 40-year old narrative structure by telling another narrative. In a very real sense, they have tried to dig the DCU out of a hole by digging deeper. All that these crises do is to add an extra lawyer of narrative on what has come before. Nothing becomes streamlined; the ontological structures within the narratives themselves become increasingly more byzantine, more complex. The forms of the DC's Modern Age (1986 -present?) rests not on the supposed ashes of the Silver Age as the above page would make you believe, but on its very fertile and sprouting ground. Unless Final Crisis is preprepared to say goodbye to all the stories since the late 1930s than this crisis will only create a new, but temporary status quo. And even if it was willing to take this daring step it would only be a half-victory. As Kingdom's Hypertime revealed with some insight if not elegance: these are all just stories and we remember them even if they aren't "official" anymore.

If we cannot count of Final Crisis or its lead-in DC Universe 0 to make good on its mandate to rearrange the DCU in a more intelligible way, we should try and understand it on a more local level. We should instead ask, "How does it read as a story and only a story?"DC Universe 0 manages to be both an expression of Faulknerian modernism and nothing more than a shameless in-house ad for this summer's story lines. I suppose this might be the inevitable fate for any comic that is co-written by the inventive mind of Grant Morrison and the mainstream, nostalgic wasteland of Geoff Johns's talent.

Let's start with DC Universe 0 the commercial before we get to DC Universe 0 the modernist experiment. To be frank, there is no organic story to DC Universe 0. It consists of a host of fragmentary episodes that spotlight or foreshadow coming events in several DC books, most of which will probably have little to do with Final Crisis. Each section is then followed with a purposeful house ad in a unified style promoting said storyline. The difference between the house ads and the "content" comes down to little more than length. The connection between these storylines is of course never made clear and if Final Crisis does attempt to do so, it will probably do so unsuccessfully. This of course means that the narrative of DC Universe 0 is fragmentary and as any good student of modernism will tell you, fragments are part and parcel of the modernist aesthetic.

What holds together DC Universe 0 is a disembodied consciousness that slowly becomes self-aware as it narrates the issue's events. The first page of the issue features a splash page of a a galaxy with a small lightning bolt rushing across from it. Two captions collectively read, "This is everything. This is me." This disembodied consciousness who elides his identity with the totality of the universe allows Morrison and Johns to essentially link together this heap of unrelated images. As the issue continues the narrator becomes self-aware and the captions shift from black to red until the identity of the narrator, now separate from the universe, becomes apparent.

While this does show some formal inventiveness both on the part of Morrison and Johns, and on the part of letterer Nick Napolitano it does not mean that the issue's utter commercialism is mollified by its turn to stylistic modernism. Instead this stylistic turn in fact aggrandizes the very reader who would taken on the task of the disembodied consciousness. For the managers and editors of DC Comics are hoping that someone else will read the legion of comics that DC will put out this year. Reading all these titles, reading across the universe, subsuming oneself into this universe is at once the ultimate act of modernist self-effacement and at the same time the ultimate act of comic book consumption.

On the Latest Weekly Comics

cross-posted with Narrative Review

Up above DC Comics Editor-in-Chief Dan Didio discusses with Mike Carlin about the upcoming weekly series Trinity. Written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Mark Bagley this series will focus on DC Comics's Big Three: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

Over the past years DC has experimented with the weekly format in both 52 and Countdown to Final Crisis. Although they have been commercially successful, artistically and critically they have been failures. The disappointments of these series have come from the fact that both 52 and Countdown were written not with their own stories in mind, but as an explanation for a story to follow - a prequel before the original as it were. Thus, 52 was meant to set up the One Year Later time line that was already being told in DC's monthly output and Countdown was written to setup this summer's blockbuster miniseries Final Crisis. Unfortunately, 52 was written by a committee of overextended writers and artists and none of the various story-lines running through 52 adequately hung together, nor did it really set up the One Year Later time line effectively until the last two issues. The less said about Countdown the better.

So what can we expect of Trinity? I remain cautiously optimistic. Unlike the other efforts which were produced by multiple over-committed writers and artists, Trinity will at least have the benefit of a unified creative vision in Busiek and Bagley. As far as I know the series does not have to end some place that is mandated by a corporate crossover. Hopefully, this will allow Busiek to tell his own story which will actually have something of a resolution.

While my hopes are considerably higher for Trinity than they ever were for 52 or Countdown, I think that the weekly episodic format might just be too much for comics. Can one story really last a full year and have the necessary stopping points that the weekly format provides? I'm not so sure. Television manages the weekly format, but then again, the over all plotting of a sitcom or a television drama is a) never a full year and b) not usually totally dependent on an overarching plot structure. But who knows? Maybe I'll be surprised?

This Week in Comics #3: Catwoman 74

Catwoman #74
W: Will Pfeifer
A: David Lopez
I: Alvaro Lopez
Ed: Nachie Castro

Without a doubt Catwoman #74 was the best title that I read all week. Written by Will Pfeiffer and illustrated by David Lopez's beautifully expressive pencils, this title continues to provide high-caliber action sequences while grounding these within a relevant and affective emotional foreground. It is good to see the title this good again.

When the 2001 revamp of Catwoman first came out, I was initially nonplussed. In order to make Catwoman palatable as a protagonist, writer Ed Brubaker stripped her of her status of a thief and made her the reluctant protector of Gotham City's particularly seedy East End district. Although there's nothing wrong with this as a premise, the story took awhile to get going as Brubaker and collaborator Darwyn Cooke spent the first story arc having Catwoman (Selina Kyle) taking on a fairly disposable serial killer who preyed on prostitutes. However, the series progressed and I eventually became a devoted follower. Brubaker made Selina's connection to her side of Gotham palpable and I became generally interested in the bond Selina had with her sidekick Holly and her emotionally troubled connection with the down-on-his-luck PI Slam Bradley.

Ultimately, all the problems that faced Brubaker's tenure can be traced to a problem of momentum; he simply ran out of gas. It was good to see Catwoman rid the East End of its crime lord and heart-wrenching to see her relationship with Slam Bradley sizzle and then fizzle. But this can only happen once or twice. Catwoman can only break a man's heart so many times and introducing Bradley's son for her to have an affair with instead of Slam only feels icky as opposed to morally complicated.

Similarly, Catwoman can only free the East End so many times and new crime lords can only
try to fill the power vacuum before Catwoman really just looks inefficient. Really, all of this should happen once. After all, it's not like people are being under served in their need for crime. Are they? No, the real missed opportunity of Brubaker's tenure on Catwoman is that he did not show the problems that would have come with a successful limited crusade on crime. The logical outcome of cleaning up a small area of town is not a limitless waves of crime, but in fact gentrification. How would Catwoman have felt when the rents went up in her small part of town and the down-and-outers that she identified with and swore to protect got driven out of town because yuppies and Bruce Wayne's dinner guests started to move in? But perhaps this is too much to ask of any DC Comics's writer outside of James Robinson, and only then when he was writing Starman. No one has developed a "contexutalizing city" (to borrow Scipio's terms) to the degree that Robinson did when he wrote Starman, although Brubaker tried with some success when he had Selina and Holly go on a road trip through the various burgs of the DCU.

While the return to greatness that I mentioned at the beginning of my review has been building for quite some time, I think this issue in particular manages to serve as the highpoint for Pfeifer and Lopez's run, just as the title character is at her lowest. The depths of Selina's situation is nearly summed up at the beginning of this issue with the following recap: "Apartment? Robbed. Building? Burned. Me? Desperate. Calculator? Weasel. Coffee? Drugged? Trap? You Bet. Oh, and I almost forgot. Gun? Loaded. Definitely loaded."

Issue #74 finds Selina just after she has faked her own death, given up her baby for adoption (there are of course major safety concerns for any tot who's mother is a super-villain), and has been sold-out by a villain known as the Calculator, who has been hired by a hot-shot new talent in town known simply as "The Thief." The Thief wants to establish his cred in town by taking down Catwoman. Selina, finding herself trapped, manages to escape, get her gear, and convinces (re: threatens his death) the Calculator that he should tell her how to wage her revenge on the Thief.

However, all of this is just plot, and in the wrong hands could read as just another mechanical exercise in super hero storytelling. Where this issue manages to succeed is in marshaling the emotional forces that Brubaker had set up as a title standard in the 2001 relaunch. The first of these two scenes that really sells the issue is in when Selina cuts her hair (featured above). This act recalls the title's relaunch when Selina remakes herself as an anti-hero and defender of the East End. Here, Selina in an emotionally touching scene, remakes herself not into a hero, but into a woman without a daughter. She murders a little bit of herself, so that she can keep on living with her decision to give up Helena for adoption.

This type of pathos rises again when Selina has planned her revenge on the Thief and is about to strike. Her plan is perfectly laid out, but she is attacked by a trio of "reformed" government-sponsored super-villains before she can strike. What could read as a straightforward action scene is given weight because this comes as a particularly ignominious end to Selina's plan. Just as she's about to strike her revenge on a practicing burglar, she's arrested by fellow rogues. When told of the arrest (which involves her being drugged) she mumbles "Arrest. . .? But I'm not the one you. . ." implying that they should be going after the Thief. However, Selina and we find that neither justice nor vengeance will be fully executed that night. Selina will not have her revenge on the Thief and the Thief will not be harmed as he hastily retreats from a botched job. Instead, the already suffering Selina will pay for improprieties committed long ago.