The Playful, The Daring, The Batman, The Gothic

By Travis Hedge Coke

on July 22, 2024

Patricia Highsmash
The Playful, The Daring, The Batman, The Gothic
by Travis Hedge Coke

“[Grant Morrison is] the most pretentious asshole I’ve ever read.”

– Howard Chaykin

“Nevertheless, the accusations of pretension stung horribly. I was a working-class dropout pretending to be the art student he never was… No more plagiarism or quotes from the Romantics.”

– Grant Morrison, Supergods

The following was written in November of 2020.

Gothic is a 1990 written-for-the-trade five part gothic serial featuring crossdressing and religious satire written by a nonbinary person and drawn by a gay man and features some of the first openly homosexual characters in a comic published by DC Comics, set securely in the DC Universe and starring Batman. Art student, ho!

Every chapter of Gothic begins with a quote from public domain literature. The frontispiece is a public domain clipart modified by Klaus Janson and colorist Steve Buccellato. The Janson and Buccellato covers owe more to splash pages and movie posters than to the covers of contemporaneous superhero comics. It is both Grant Morrison’s attempt to prove they could write a straight superhero adventure after the embarrassing response to Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, their hardcover Batman comic the sold immensely well, but was pilloried by some of comics biggest innovators of the preceding decade, Alan Moore and Howard Chaykin.

This would not be the final comic Morrison would magpie from other sources to build, and they would, it seems, plagiarize it themself, expanding much of the content into new forms in their later lengthy run on the same character.

For Klaus Janson, it is a great showcase of his technical skills and emotive flourish. Janson utilizes traditional pen and ink, photo montage, multimedia, clipart paste in, and an amazing x-ray effect achieved by coordination with the colorist. It is an artists’ comic as much as it is a writers’.

How’s that for pretentious?

Gothic beautifully goes for it! Unrelenting, engrossing, playing fast and loose with Batman mythos and the expectations of Batman readers, more in line with Peter Milligan’s brief run on the character than either Morrison’s earlier Batman work or what anyone else was doing with the character, since, maybe, the risky days of Archie Goodwin editing.

It was, by accounts of Batman’s traditional audience, out of step and time with the way the bat-pendulum was swinging. This helps it read fresh and classic now.

Gothic opens with crossdressing and a homosexual couple, soon to be murdered, which today would seem even more a waste, but at the time, Sandman – lauded for pushing boundaries at DC in terms of queer representation – had only lightly touched on drag performance and was a year away from introducing Wanda, a notable and inarguably trans character. While only a tempest in a teapot at the time (as was the criticism of Janson’s art by the same sort of reader who found David Mazzucchelli “lazy”), it is a historic moment and adds a swell of sadness when we consider the nature of targeting and shame explored throughout the comic.

Batman, himself, Bruce Wayne, begins to recall both that his childhood before his parents’ double homicide, was not as glory-filled and happy as he made himself believe, but how his youth and schooling was systemically abusive and how abusive systems like school can be arranged to permit cruel indulgences from those in power. There is a lot of Foucault sensibility in Gothic, as well as the Lord Byron panache and that means oubliette-worlds where everyone’s looking at you and you’re in prison and it means sexual influence is virtually microbial.

“Children are not the be threatened.”

– Batman, Gothic

Bruce Wayne, shaped by being alone with his headmaster, bent over and spanked, while staring at the top of a child’s head disposed amongst rubbish in an office trash basket. Bruce forgetting this for twenty years. The insidiousness of schools, churches, school and church systems, criminal cabals, colonialism, the rough and brittle cathedrals of our minds and lives, how much they trap, preserve, or kill.

“It was traditional to be beaten and humiliated,” says Batman of the school he attended shortly before they died, “to fight off the advances of degenerate old teachers with doctorate degrees.”

The young nun with her boyish haircut, a quiet, victimizable version of a stock movie young girl type, is predated on by our villain, Mr Whisper, who is likely both immortal wandering monk, evil crime lord, and Batman’s own old school headmaster. Her victim status may be a ploy, her faith and earnestness of a different sort than either Batman or Whisper could predict. There are levels to cruelty and game.

We must not think that, at any point, Gothic is not a game. A game can’t be cruel. Sport can be vicious as it is vigorous or lazy. Mr Whisper is not banking his immortality or his safety on sure things, but incredible gambles because they are flamboyant. The ritual murder of children? The building of a two hundred year roach motel for souls? A piece of rope to extend a life? Even the exceptionally contrived death machine he traps Batman in, which Batman very quickly gets out of, is so elaborate and specific – designed by the writer, with diagrams for the artist to follow – that it has no serious value as an execution technique. The death trap is a trap designed to be escaped.

Coffee, whine, sandwiches, coffee; Gothic is consumed with people dining, snacking, subsisting.

The black, white, and spot color (blue) flashbacks and dreams evoke both Lyndsay Anderson’s If…, with its high emotions, high fragility black and white interstices, and a louder use in Frank Miller’s Sin City yarns, the first of those still a year off at this point.

The artwork is controlled by cruciforms and ripple rings. Everything is Xed out, permeable.

It is beyond intimate, for a Batman story, while reaching readily for supernatural and cosmic levels. When Alfred, Batman’s constant companion, brings him a meal, he brings himself the same meal, and even takes his first bite before Batman touches his.

The revelations about Batman’s early childhood alter the basic assumptions of all previous stories of Batman as a child. It is outright said or heavily implied that he led a charmed and happy life until the moment his parents were killed and then he became something else. In Gothic, we see Batman, himself, under this assumption, but that it is thwarted by nightmares and memories of being sent off to an abusive boarding school, that he felt distanced and abandoned, that he may have been something of a problem child in someone’s eyes. That is an extraordinary change to the narrative and to the characterization of Bruce Wayne, but goes largely unremarked on in other comics, save others written by Morrison.

Klaus Janson is rarely talked about as a formative figure in mythologizing Batman, but his work on The Dark Knight Returns, here in Gothic, later in Death and the Maidens and Cataclysm consistently redefine Batman and his world in fresh, intelligent fashion, while highlighting Janson’s skillful use of symbolic clocks, the omnipresence of architecture, and physicality of the human form. Klaus Janson helped bring pearls into the bat-cosmogony, ever since inextricably connected to the night Batman’s parents’ died, used again and again in film and animated adaptations, but he also took those pearls and made them fake, in Death and the Maidens, a duality that was reconciled, without him, in a Grant Morrison comic, because it all comes around in spirals,

Janson provides an indelible sense of muscle and bone in his Batman, of being barely trapped, barely contained, even in his own costume. Gothic’s preoccupation with architecture, as housing units, as testaments and as structures, gives Janson space to draw a gorgeous and untraditional Batcave, to delineate an endlessly tall Gotham, beautiful churches and haunting school grounds.

Janson and Buccellato give flame and spotlights incredible tenacity, the bat signal and floodlights creating shafts of penetration and stability almost the opposite of the constant criss-cross of shadow or window frame that fragment the images of faces and bodies.

Like Gotham, Gothic is dizzying. It is impossible to functionally discuss in a linear or bullet point frame. It has echoes of the whole in each page and reverberations reach to and from other stories freely. It is a haunting, raging, laughing, weeping, upside down and bleeding, tied down and fighting comic. It is pretentious and careful. It reaches the full heights of both artistic endeavor and pulp getting it done. Harsh and bloody and intimate and caring as open as the transparent skin of the x-ray nun with her bones and lantern and wimple exposed to the light and plain white eyes of the Batman.