In anticipation of Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s upcoming Batman and Robin: Year One, Comic Watch is going back to the Dark Knight’s earliest days in Gotham. In a week-long series of features and reviews, our staff will dive deep into Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s seminal origin story, exploring its influence on comics and beyond.
It’s said that brevity is the soul of wit. In essence, sometimes fewer words are the more powerful choice. While a sprawling, pages-long monologue can create a compelling opportunity to express an ever-expansive sentiment or idea, there is just as much power in a handpicked, simply crafted turn of phrase. To abandon simplicity for excess can lead to ruin, distracting an audience from what matters most in a story being told or theme being expressed.
Brevity is not a word that would describe one of the most recent attempts at establishing Batman’s origin story, the 2013 New 52 crossover event, Batman: Zero Year. Written by then-current Batman scribe Scott Snyder and illustrated by Greg Capullo, the crossover set out to define the secret history of the Caped Crusader in the new timeline (at the time, later revealed to be an alternate earth). Running as a year-long event that took over the main Batman line, the story also tied in with other books from DC like The Flash, Green Arrow, and Action Comics.
Zero Year opens with what appears to be a post-apocalyptic Gotham, complete with a scavenger Batman costume and all. Flashing back a few months, Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham after his travels abroad. Due to the length of time that Gotham’s favorite son has been away, he’s been declared legally dead. Appearing back in the city with a disguise, Bruce battles the leader of the Red Hood gang. Philip Kane, Bruce’s uncle on his mother’s side, is currently in charge of Wayne Enterprises and wants Bruce to ascend to the head of the company.
Bruce refuses and Kane’s corporate strategist, Edward Nygma, suggests murdering the Wayne scion to avoid a schism in the company. After hiring the Red Hood Gang, Nygma is fired and then plots to take control of the city while Bruce is forced to confront the Red Hood Gang both in and out of costume. This builds to a confrontation with the Prime Hood at Ace Chemicals and results in the birth of the Joker.
Afterwards, Batman battles with another supervillain, Doctor Death, in the wake of Ace Chemical. Riddler is backing the bone-themed villain, and using the carnage of the fight, Nygma manages to flood Gotham and take control of the power grid. Every day, Riddler offers a new challenge to the people of Gotham to return power to the city and each time, they fail. Lucius Fox, Jim Gordon, and Batman have banded together to try and defeat the Riddler, achieving their goal after Bruce is forced to literally restart Gotham with his heart.
Trying to recap the event is in itself a monumental task, with plenty of details still untouched. At its core, Zero Year is the total antithesis to Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Year One. The latter is an intimate story of crime and corruption built around Gotham’s mobsters. Meanwhile, the former is a big, bombastic origin for a superhero, filled with a sprawling cast of villains and science fiction stakes. One is a four-issue miniseries while the other is a twelve-issue event with a dozen tie-ins.
Snyder’s approach to the origin as this intricate, sprawling mass of continuity and characters ultimately results in a backstory that feels of the moment, for both good and ill. In the context of the New 52, which tried to shed DC’s continuity baggage (except for all the Robins, Green Lanterns, and more), Zero Year made sense. The focal point of the Justice League’s formation was an invasion spearheaded by Darkseid. Choosing that as a basis for your superhero universe sets an expectation of turning the dial to 11 for every story.
Consequently, the story for Zero Year is dense and mythology-heavy, at times feeling overwhelming due to the amount of plot that is packed in. The result is an unfocused story that lacks the thematic weight of Batman and Gordon’s rich parallel journey in Year One, opting for a hollow explanation of Joker, Riddler, Duke Thomas, and more. While no single plotline in the book is outright bad, each comes across as a story that feels inconsequential to Batman’s formation in Gotham’s early days.
In that same vein, the book becomes instantly dated, pulling from the iconography of too many other sources to tell its story. There’s some classic Batman in the story but also The Killing Joke, bits from the Dark Knight trilogy, and even shades of the Animated Series. Revisiting Zero Year ten years later reveals the cracks, showcasing how of the specific moment the event is. It’s difficult to separate Zero Year from the era of comics it was born out of, resembling the overly detailed costumes from that time.
At times, Capullo’s art is at odds with the writing, as it tries to capture that sense of timelessness that defines Mazzucchelli’s work on Year One. Other times, especially in the designs for Batman, the artwork is just as detail-oriented and overstuffed as the writing, resulting in an overwhelming visual language. Mazzucchelli’s batsuit is all clean lines and very little detail, evoking the ethos of a vigilante in the most concise way possible. Capullo’s Batman is all flash and affectations, with unnecessary stripes and lines adorning his suit. (Though, the best decision of the book remains the purple gloves, which start to tap into the character’s pulp roots.)
Ultimately, Zero Year was not outright washed from continuity during DC’s many revamps and resets in the years since. However, its flaws make it difficult to recommend as a jumping-on point for new readers. Instead, it remains an excellent case study of the comics from the mid-’10s, showcasing the need to jam detail into every element of a book. Zero Year also managed to spotlight just how effective Year One is as a timeless, straightforward origin point for the Dark Knight, proving that brevity does lead to wit.