Gotham City: Year One

“Year One” is a title that holds no small amount of significance within the DC Universe.  It was first (and arguably bes), used to illustrate the start of Batman’s crime-fighting career back in the 80’s from writer Frank Miller and artist David Mazzuchelli.  The title has since been used to showcase the early days of a hero, or villain’s career following their origin – the story that shows what molded them into who they are today.  “Gotham City” is the first place to have a story with this title, but it’s been shown to be such a… distinctive place over the years that adapting it to this format shouldn’t be a problem.  Right?

The story starts with the reader and the protagonist being informed that Helen Wayne, the baby daughter of tycoon Richard Wayne and his wife Constance hasn’t been seen in public for some time.  This is of little concern to private investigator Sam “Slam” Bradley until a woman walks into his office with a letter she wants delivered to Richard for a hundred bucks.  Not having anything better to do, Sam agrees to deliver the letter and swiftly finds himself embroiled in the darkest and most wretched case of his career.

That setup shouldn’t surprise anyone since that’s how most stories about unassuming yet hard-boiled P.I.’s start.  It’s clear from the start that writer Tom King and artist Phil Hester are going to give us an old-timey noir story delivered as a period piece about the disappearance of the Bat-Lindbergh Baby.  Some of King’s work outside of the ongoing series he’s written can feel like he’s nailing a familiar genre story into a format that’ll work within a superhero universe.  That’s very much the case here and it worked for me.  Until it didn’t.

You see, the main story is delivered in a pretty satisfying way.  You’ve got Sam (to his friends, “Slam” to those looking for a beating) as the requisite cynic with a heart of justice being drawn into a plot that steadily gets worse for him and those around him the more he digs into it.  King serves up dialogue that feels perfectly tough without crossing the line into self-parody, while Hester effortlessly makes his wiry style comport with the physical darkness of the city and its brutality.  It’s enough to see these two work their craft over the course of the story with its shocks and surprises and it really only suffers when the reader realizes that they should be expecting the  very worst thing to happen next and adjusts their expectations accordingly.

Well, there’s that, and the general sense that, “THIS is how Gotham became the cesspool of crime and human depravity that ‘Batman’ has to save on a regular basis?”  I’m not saying that Helen’s kidnapping and the revelation of the rot within the Wayne family wasn’t part of the problem.  To hang it all on that, though, makes it feel less interesting.

There’s just so much weirdness and strangeness to Gotham that the kidnapping of a baby girl feels like a drop in the bucket. I mean, this story doesn’t even talk about Barbatos.  It was first mentioned in a Peter Milligan story from the 80’s as a demon summoned and then imprisoned below the city.  Then it was retconned into a Batman-seeking threat through time by Grant Morrison nearly two decades later, and then further into a multiversal threat by Scott Snyder.  You think this thing might have had some influence on how Gotham turned out?

I know that King ignored all this because it didn’t fit into the story he wanted to tell, and fair enough.  Still, when you’ve got an aged Sam bitterly telling this story to Batman and then telling him that he doesn’t know a damn thing about his city… it rings kind of hollow.  As if the Dark Knight is just patiently indulging this old man who once had a bad experience with his family while he thinks, “Yeah, I probably shouldn’t tell him about Barbatos. That’ll just ruin his life even more.”

I guess what I’m saying here is that if you can read “Gotham City:  Year One” in isolation from the rest of the Bat-mythos, then you’ll likely enjoy it more than I did.  It’s a well made hard-boiled P,I. story done with enough craft to elevate it above pastiche.  For everyone who has been immersed in every kind of Batman story over the years – the weirder the better – the story’s assertion that Gotham went bad for entirely human reasons will feel reductive.  It was the people and the demonic energy lurking under the city, and plenty of other weird reasons I’m forgetting right now.  Maybe we can get a proper unification of the human and horrific reasons if King and Hester, or another creative team, come back to give us the city’s “Year Two.”