Batman: Creature of the Night
Back in 2004, writer Kurt Busiek teamed with artist Stuart Immonen for a story called “Superman: Secret Identity.” It had a dubious high-concept premise: What if a kid named Clark Kent gained the powers of Superman, in a world where “Superman” was a fictional character like he is in ours. The end result, however, was an affecting, heartfelt tribute to the Man of Steel that went in some surprising directions and is still recognized as a fan-favorite story over a decade after its release.
Of course, when you’ve done a story that’s basically “Superman in the Real World” and have it come off as successfully as “Secret Identity” we all know what has to come next. Except that “Batman in the Real World” is kind of redundant. Busiek knew this too, which is why “Batman: Creature of the Night” is a much different kind of story than that classic “Superman” tale. It’s a much darker and sinister one, being a “Batman” story and all Fortunately for us, it’s not needlessly so.
Things start out innocently enough with young Bruce Wainwright, a kid living with his parents in an upper-middle-class brownstone in New York during the 70’s. He loves “Batman” as all kids do, and he even has an Uncle Alfred — Alton Frederick, actually. It isn’t long before the story takes the tragic turn that you’d expect a “Batman” story to, and Bruce’s parents are shot when they come home on Halloween after a night of trick-or-treating. Bruce is shot too, but he survives the experience. Not before encountering a shadowy presence in his comatose state asking if he’s safe.
It’s hard for Bruce to re-acclimate to regular life after this, especially since there are no leads regarding who killed his parents. At the same time, a raft of vigilante attacks strike New York as criminals are attacked as they commit crimes. What’s really strange is that Bruce is getting visions of these attacks as they happen. He even starts to believe that he’s controlling them as the visions from this attacker start to shift to finding the person who shot him and killed his parents. It isn’t until he finally confronts this being that Bruce realizes what he has done: He’s brought Batman into this world to make it fair and just for all.
This is a good thing, right? We can all agree that the world needs more fairness and justice in it, and who better to realize it than Batman himself. Except that this version of the character is a bat-shaped monosyllabic nightmare that seeks to impart fairness from a particular perspective: Bruce’s. What Busiek has done with this take on the character is to externalize one of the core concepts of the character. That being a child’s wish to eliminate all crime.
This is all well and good when Bruce as a kid is having this Batman stop muggers and attackers on the street. The problems start when he grows up and the idea of what’s fair starts to become muddled. Bruce has great success running Wainwright Investments and he leverages it to help other individuals disadvantaged by crime. Except that success is revealed to have been founded on… an outside factor manipulating things in the name of fairness. To Bruce. It’s that revelation that upends our protagonist’s mindset and drives the volume’s second half.
Screaming “MAKE IT FAIR!” at the the world and hoping that it will have some effect isn’t good for anyone’s mental health. Especially someone with their own pet “Batman.” There are just too many complexities and unknown factors to make that possible and having the kind of unchecked power Bruce has at his disposal will only make things worse. Seeing Bruce struggle to make the world a better place on his own terms and fail in the process feels believable in this context. Depressing as hell, but believable.
Then there are the mental illness issues/parallels which crop up in the story as well. While the story does seem to toy with the idea that this “Batman” may be a figment of Bruce’s imagination, it soon becomes clear that it isn’t. That our protagonist is also revealed to have mental stability issues isn’t surprising, though it does complicate things a bit. For a while it seems as if Busiek is setting us up for some kind of “Fight Club”-esque revelation regarding this “Batman.” Except that, in the end, the writer is asking us to consider the possibility that both things may be true. That Bruce has a phantasmagorical partner and lingering mental issues from the death of his parents at the same time. Accepting this is the biggest narrative ask the book places on the reader.
As far as balancing the real and the unreal in this story, artist John Paul Leon does a superb job of that. He delivers a New York that’s as shadowy, grim, and gritty as you’d expect Gotham to look like. In short, a hulking bat-creature stalking its streets doesn’t look out of place even as it appears to be something out of nightmare. Leon also manages the gradual aging of the core cast in a very believable way, while his stylistic departures to show us “Classic Batman” adventures are also spot-on as well. It’s great work all around, which makes me want to see Leon do more interior work like this than all of the cover work he’s been doing as of late.
Busiek acknowledges in his afterword that “Batman in Real Life” would ultimately be a horror story. While I don’t think “Creature of the Night” is very scary, it’s still interesting in how it takes an unexpected path to addressing how the character would function in our world. Granted, the approach winds up being an interrogation of the themes that are core to the character than showing us an actual person dressed up as a bat fighting crime. It’s an approach I could appreciate, which made this a worthy read along with the incredible artwork. Even if its message about the complexities of the real world and inability of one person with power to change it make for a depressing read at the same time.