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| Batman, Volume 1: The Court of Owls |
The story begins, as most good Batman stories do, in Gotham City. Bruce Wayne, the billionaire bachelor and reigning crown prince of Gotham's socialite upper class, leads a dangerous double life. By day, he runs Wayne Enterprises, a multinational conglomerate and his family legacy. By night, he stalks the city's dark underbelly, investigating heinous crimes and pummeling any number of deranged criminals while dressed as a bat. He is the Batman of Gotham, and he prides himself on knowing his city inside and out. Positively nothing catches him off guard.
Until a man is murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion, and the Batman is called in to investigate. Working alongside GCPD Commissioner James Gordon, Batman begins to peel away the layers of a mystery darker and far more odious than he could have ever imagined. It turns out that there exists a cabal in Gotham City that has remained buried in the shadows, hidden even from Batman himself. This cabal of powerful men and women—known as the Court of Owls—essentially controls Gotham from the shadows, and has now set it sights on the Batman. The Court lures him into a dangerous game that makes for one thrilling story, rife with mythological undertones.
Most obvious, at least at first, is the storyline's focus on pride. And, true to mythological form, pride is conceived in the acquisition of knowledge. Just as Satan tempted Eve using the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Batman takes a dangerous amount of pride in knowing Gotham City, its history, its secrets, better than anyone else. This, he believes, is what makes him so effective as the city's dark protector. But numerous times throughout the story, he is warned by two of his closest friends, Alfred Pennyworth (Wayne's butler) and Dick Grayson (his protégé), that perhaps he does not quite know Gotham as well as he thinks. This, of course, only fuels his desire for knowledge, and Wayne takes it upon himself to dig deeper into the mystery, if only to prove what he thinks he already knows. But as he peers deeper into the darkness, his long-held convictions concerning his city begin to crumble as he learns a truth that has been sealed up for centuries: the Court of Owls, once believed to be nothing more than an urban legend, is real, and Batman has been a pawn in the Court's game. Bruce Wayne, it turns out, does not know his city. The Court, the city's best-kept secret, has remained hidden this entire time.
His pursuit of the Court lands him in the middle of a mysterious labyrinth. The mythological connection here is not to be missed. In Greek mythology, Theseus ventures into the Labyrinth at Knossos and slays the Minotaur. Much in the same way, Batman is dropped into the Court's labyrinth and stalked by one of the Court's assassins, called a Talon. A vicious killer, the Talon hunts Batman inside the labyrinth for several days. But rather than kill him outright, the Court wants to first teach him a lesson: Batman operated in Gotham insofar as the Court allowed him to do so, and now it is time the Court called him to heel. There is a deep history to this dangerous consortium, and we are told time and again that they are much older than Batman, that they were there in Gotham first, and to them, he is just some Johnny-come-lately to a dangerous party that's been raging since the city's foundations were established. Wounded, starving, and fighting for his life, Batman wanders the labyrinth, clinging to the shadows, slowly losing his grip on sanity. The Court tempts him with water that is likely drugged with hallucinogens or worse, and attempts to break down his mind by showing him numerous pictures of previous victims, all of whom died while trying to escape the labyrinth. It's all somewhat disturbing to read, my pulse was pounding the entire time.
Of course, Batman manages to escape. Because he's Batman, and because this story must go on. And the remainder of the book, smartly, deals with the emotional and psychological fallout. I don't know if it was the intention of artist Greg Capullo to draw Bruce Wayne in this way, but in the opening pages, Wayne seems younger, with a hint of that reckless Harrison Ford-esque look about him. But after he emerges from the labyrinth just a few days later, it's as though he has aged years. Wayne is a darker, more grim individual because of what he has gone through. It's a subtle but strikingly effective touch that is a testament to Capullo's skill as an artist. It's those kinds of nuances in detail that I appreciate when reading a comic book. And Jonathan Glapion's inking keeps the world of the book appropriately moody without being dull, yet is still vibrant in certain places to allow for some truly stunning panels. Capullo's art and Glapion's ink really jive with Snyder's storytelling, synthesizing perfectly so as to give the book a distinctive and—more importantly—consistent tone.
What Snyder illustrates so well in his opening salvo is the oft-discussed lesson of Proverbs 16:18, which states that "pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before stumbling." The real daring in the way he has chosen to tell his story, though, is that the prideful character just so happens to be the protagonist. And that protagonist just so happens to be one of the grandest icons of pop culture. But the true brilliance of Snyder's Batman lies in how Bruce Wayne deals with his time in the labyrinth in the aftermath. This is a Batman capable of accepting defeat without resignation. Though he escaped the labyrinth with his life, he did so barely. And he accepts this. Bruce acknowledges that he had misjudged the situation from the start, that the reality of things had been concealed behind what he'd wanted to believe, and what he wouldn't allow himself to see. It's a quieter moment amidst the fury, but this instance of reflection and self-awareness on Batman's part is the kind of thing we need to see in those to whom we look as mentors and in whom we put our trust, even if those individuals exist only on a page or on a screen. It teaches us the value of admitting when we are wrong, that we've missed a step, of accepting that we were mistaken, without resigning ourselves to despair, which itself is a way of looking at sin without recognizing the possibility of forgiveness. But this belies the grander point, one that is too often misconstrued by our culture. Namely, that Bruce Wayne's heroism is not found in his willingness to dress as a bat and battle psychopaths in the dark; rather, true heroism lies in one's ability to recognize one's own errors, and in one's ability to make the difficult but necessary changes going forward. This cuts the heart out of pride, and echoes Christ's words in Luke 14 in which he casts a vision of the eschaton by explaining that those who exalt themselves will be humbled, but the ones who humble themselves will be exalted.
Batman, Volume 1: The Court of Owls is worth reading on the strength of its convictions concerning pride alone. It is a rare gem of pop culture that spools a yarn of mythic proportions dealing with a classical theme. Effectively paving the road for what lies in store for Snyder's Batman epic, this is a rip-snorting thriller that ends with a pretty suspenseful cliffhanger, making it nigh impossible to not look forward to what's coming in the next chapter of Snyder's epic.
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