Not Your Parents' Batman

Frank Miller, along with artist Jim Lee, recently added a new Batman story to his catalog that began with The Dark Knight Returns (has it really been over 20 years?) and the latest entry, All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder Vol. 1, seems to be generating as much controversy as his first take on the caped crusader.

The new story unfolds around Dick Grayson, an extremely gifted young aerialist who performs with his parents. After a performance in Gotham, both his parents are felled by an assassin's bullets while taking their bows, leaving the newly orphaned youth in shock. He's quickly hustled out of the arena by the police who, in an exchange with reporter Vicki Vale, who witnessed the performance and subsequent murder with Bruce Wayne and diagnoses the youth's shock, is back-handed by the police as Grayson is hustled into a waiting police car.

It turns out that the Batman has "had his eye" on Dick Grayson for some time. Batman soon grabs the boy from the cops and takes him to the Batcave where he announces that's Grayson has been drafted into a "war." But he has some choices to make, and the Batman goes through some self-doubt as he agonizes over whether the boy is too young. There's also their obvious discomfort with each other-- Grayson because he thinks the man is a bit crazed, the Batman because the youth is an unknown, and the Batman has grown used to working alone. But there's also the dark symmetry that bind the two in Batman's eyes, since he was also present on the night years earlier when a criminal killed both his parents before his eyes. He's faced what Dick Grayson is going through. He knows what effect that kind of event had on another young boy. Will the Batman try to turn the young orphan into a clone of himself, or will he use his new-found relationship with another to help him find his own humanity?

Part of the appeal (for me, anyway) to the story is the exploration of the Batman's relationship with the other members of the Superhero community at this fairly early stage in all their careers. In a huge character twist, Batman has contempt for Superman (Batman is smart enough to figure out Superman's secret identity) and Green Lantern (considered a moron because with the power ring he's been given, Green Lantern creates giant flashlights and brooms, rather than exploiting the full power of the ring as Batman would). There's a new take on Wonder Woman too, who in a very brief appearance comes off as a bit of a man-hater with contempt for the world of men. When the other heroes believe that they should try to contact the Batman and rein in his questionable methods, she suggests they deliver Batman's head to the authorities on a pike.

And then there's Batman's "fling" with the Black Canary, after he aids her in a brutal confrontation with some thugs on the Gotham docks.

Make no mistake, the violence is even more extreme than was depicted in The Dark Knight Returns. Criminals aren't merely brought to justice, they're brutally punished, with compound fractures and elbows or kicks to the head doled out indiscriminately. And, this being Gotham City, where there's only one good cop (Jim Gordon, in his pre-commissioner days), the rest of the police are fair game for the Batman's over-the-top violence as well. As the Black Canary suggests to him after their dockside tryst, it wouldn't hurt him to actually talk to another human being once in a while.