Batman #686

In part 1 of "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" Neil Gaiman examines Batman as a myth to get at the essence of the man.

Typical, really. Whether he's finding the humanity in the Dream King (the Sandman epic) or using mythic plots as metaphors for universal issues between children and parents (Coraline, Mirrormask), Gaiman stories always seem to exist at that intersection between our stories and ourselves. They remind us that life really is larger than life. And who is larger than life than the Batman, a hero without super powers who nonetheless can defeat every other hero and villain in the DC Universe?

Of course, "Whatever Happened..." opens with Batman at last beaten - dead as a result of some convoluted storyline I haven't actually followed. But the how doesn't matter, and the circumstances presented here are strange in any case. Batman's friends and foes are gathered for his funeral, an open-casket affair with Batman (not Bruce Wayne) on display. Their ages and costumes keep shifting, and there's an unseen man - Bruce's ghost? - talking to an unseen woman in the caption boxes, insisting none of this can be real. Will the story turn out to be a dream? Is this what the world looks like when Bruce Wayne is crossing to the other side - in the company of Sandman's Death, perhaps? (Though I suspect the latter is a little too obvious, a little too 'fanwank' for a writer of Gaiman's subleties.)

What matters are the stories being told. Here, in the first half of the two part adventure, Selina Kyle and Alfred the Butler each stand up before the crowd, telling their versions of the Life and Death of the Batman.

Selina tells how as Catwoman, the Batman convinced her to go straight, to use her guile and cunning and sheer bad-@$$ery to help clean up Gotham, only to wind up a lonely old woman running a cat shelter. When Batman comes to her for help, years after their last encounter, she allows him to die, telling him it's because she loves him. "But that's Robin Hood's death..." the ghost of Bruce says.

Alfred tells how Batman's famed rogues gallery, all those colorful, maniacal villains he fought, were nothing but thespian flim-flam. Alfred saw his master going quietly mad, and having been an actor before he buttled, he called on his old theatrical troupe to create wild foes for the Batman to vanquish, to make Bruce Wayne feel like his life mattered. But when Alfred at last confesses the truth to master Bruce, the Batman doesn't turn in his cape and cowl. Even if all the evil's he's fought has been a lie, there's still evil out there that needs fighting. "Somewhere the joke is much worse than this one, and it's on everybody, not just me," he says. And he rides quixotically back out into the night - and is immediately shot in the face by one of his "fake" villains. What we pretend to be, we become, for better and for worse.

Selina and Alfred's tales may conflict, yet both are tragedies about a man who can't quit. The mission is all for Batman, and no matter how hard the people who care about him most may try, he will not be diverted. Love can't make him turn away, nor can lies, nor can reason.

Only death might stop him, and I do say might. I suspect we'll find out in Part 2.

- JC