Batman, Volume 3: Death of the Family (Review)

Scott Snyder's Court of Owls storyline dealt with themes commonly found in Greek mythology, from the Court's labyrinth to Bruce Wayne's long-lost sibling. Batman, Volume 3: Death of the Family shifts gears, taking the Batman mythos into territory that is positively medieval. This book is not Snyder's first foray into writing the Joker, as he penned a take on the character in an earlier Batman story, The Black Mirror. But the character's appearance in that story was tantamount to a memorable cameo. With this volume, Snyder finally gets to dig his fingers into the character's guts, and the yarn he spins here surpasses the previous two volumes (excellent in their own right) in terms of sheer storytelling prowess and mythological power.

Batman, Volume 3: Death of the Family

The Joker is a character that, at first glance, should never have worked. A thin, demented clown should in no way, shape, or form become the biggest threat to a grim and hulking protagonist like the Batman. Yet the character has become Batman's greatest antagonist, growing into a comic book icon in his own right. And this has nothing to do with the physical threat he poses to Batman; in truth, Batman can (and often does) manhandle him. Instead, Joker poses the greatest threat to the caped crusader when he attacks Batman psychologically and emotionally. Snyder understands this, and writes the Joker accordingly. The effect is darkly sublime, causing Death of the Family to read less like a superhero story, and more like a spine-chilling psychological thriller.

But Snyder's brilliance is not merely in his well-written characters; rather, what makes his work on Batman a modern classic is the way he imbues his stories with mythological symbolism, which has quickly become his trademark. While the Court of Owls storyline evokes the themes of classical Greek myths, Death of the Family taps the vein of medieval archetypes.

The story kicks off with a zinger that could have been lifted from a horror film. Joker, having previously had the skin of his face filleted off, has been absent from Gotham City for a year. Reborn, in a sense, he heralds his return in monstrous fashion by stalking into the GCPD where the face is being kept as evidence. He retrieves the face, leaving a body of dead police officers in his wake. Batman arrives on the scene, and the plot unfurls as Joker's horrors compound and Batman races to stop him. The key lies in Joker's twisted machinations, which sees him reenacting a number of his former crimes. With his allies quickly becoming victims, Batman follows the trail of destruction to a reservoir, the site of his first encounter with the Joker. Of course, Joker is waiting for him, the decayed flesh of his old face strapped onto his skull, giving him a hideous and truly frightening visage.

Here at the reservoir, Joker makes his intentions more pronounced. He has returned, he explains, to bring Batman back to form. He reasons that Batman's reliance on his numerous allies, known as the Batman Family (Nightwing, Batgirl, etc.), have made Batman soft. And Joker sees it as his job, as the "court jester," to make Batman, the "king," strong again. "And that's all I've ever tried to do for you," he says. "Bring you the worst news of your own heart so you might survive it, laugh at it, even, and become strong." To do this, Joker explains that every member of the Batman Family must die. And that shouldn't be a problem, because Joker claims to have acquired each Family member's true identity, which he has written down in a small notebook that he keeps on his person.

This initial encounter at the reservoir lays the groundwork for the themes Snyder's story will ultimately deal with. The imagery of Batman as a kind of mythological king is recapitulated time and again throughout the book. Interestingly, the voice of this particular mythology is the story's villain. The Joker sees himself as the only one who truly "gets" Batman as this mythological figure—a king, of sorts. And this fixation underlies his motivations to wipe out the Family. Batman's allies make him weak, Joker believes, precisely because they humanize him. But to Joker, Batman isn't human. He is representative of something more primal—a myth. And Joker's goal here is to wipe out Batman's allies so that the cat-and-mouse game he plays with Batman can go on into a harrowing eternity. Batman as the mythological king, and Joker as his court jester who spices up the king's dull, mundane existence.

The middle act of the story takes place in Arkham Asylum, the legendary psychiatric hospital where Batman's rogues' gallery are often taken after he has captured them. This old gothic structure plays as the king's castle, the perverted Camelot to Batman's dark Arthur. As Batman stalks the hallways, which look more like dungeons and crypts with every panel, he encounters numerous villains from his past, dispatching them with a ruthless efficiency on his trek toward Joker. There are several powerful moments here that arrested my attention. The first is a surreal one. As Batman navigates one particular hallway, he is nearly struck by a burning horse that Joker had turned loose in the Asylum and set afire. The image of the flaming horse racing down the dark hallway is not easily forgotten. The second finds Batman flanked by a number of Arkham inmates that Joker has freed and dressed in a kind of pseudo-medieval armor using police gear. Equipped with riot shields and flaming batons in place of swords, Joker refers to them as "Galahads and Gawains," an obvious reference to the characters of Arthurian legend. One of them even rides a horse. After dispatching them, Batman mounts the horse and travels deeper into Arkham, encountering a series of live bodies suspended from the ceiling, all stitched together to create a stomach-turning "royal tapestry" upon which Joker has painted scenes from his and Batman's previous encounters. Batman passes the human tapestry to the hellish chanting of "Hail the bat king!"

When Batman finally encounters his nemesis, Joker plays the ace up his sleeve. He reveals that he has captured the Batman Family, and the only way to save them is for Batman, as the mythological king, to take his place on the "throne," which turns out to be an electric chair. Of course, to save the Family, Batman does, and is shocked into unconsciousness.

The scenes taking place in Arkham are the most memorable of the entire volume because of their powerful symbolism and imagery. Capullo's art really shines here, painting one gruesome scene after another that plays like a descent into madness the deeper Batman ventures into the asylum. Snyder's use of the villain to develop the mythological conceits of his story is a tactic already seen in his previous two volumes, but it is even more effective here because of the subtle shift in genre and tone. Most any good Batman story is fueled by elements of the noir and thriller genres, but in Death of the Family, Snyder takes these elements to the extreme while throwing in a dose of horror for good measure. It's a chillingly effective concoction, and the dialogue boxes that give the reader insight into Bruce Wayne's internal thoughts are the real gems of the issue, demonstrating the psychological toll Joker takes on even the stalwart protagonist. A vision of Batman may haunt every criminal who prowls the streets of Gotham City, but it is the disturbing image of the Joker who haunts the Batman.

When Batman awakens, he finds himself lashed to the same chair in a familiar system of caves—the caves leading back to Wayne Manor and Batman's base of operation. In the caves, Joker has prepared a nightmarish dinner party. The Family is also present, bound to their own chairs. Joker explains that the cave has been doused in gasoline, and whenever Batman grows tired of the Family's company, all he has to do is escape from his chair. This will ignite the gasoline, burning his allies to death. When Joker threatens to set fire to the Family himself, Batman escapes, trigging the ignition. But, ever the thinker, Batman blows the ceiling of the cave, allowing a torrent of water to wash in and quench the flames before the Family can be harmed. Joker attempts to escape, but Batman pursues him to a dangerous precipice in the cave system. At the edge of the sheer drop, Batman claims that, during Joker's absence, he had managed to deduce the history and the true identity of the man who had become the Joker. As Batman threatens to whisper the man's name, Joker unexpectedly hurls himself over the edge, falling into the black nothingness below. Batman recovers the little notebook that Joker claimed contained the identities of all the Family members, but its pages are blank.

There are at least two other themes of note here that make Snyder's take on the Batman-Joker relationship worth exploring. The first is the notion of family. A major plot point of Death of the Family has to do with how the Joker managed to locate the caves beneath Wayne Manor in the first place. After his initial encounter with Joker at the reservoir, where Joker claims to have uncovered the Family's identities, Batman confesses to his allies that there was a point in time, years earlier, in which he suspected Joker could have traced him back into the cave system. Bruce had kept this piece of information from the Family, and justified his decision to do so as an attempt to protect them. He assures them that he worked and reworked every possible scenario, and is confident that Joker never made it far enough to learn their secrets. Still, his allies confront him for never telling them of even the potentiality that their identities had been compromised. This theme of familial secrets is nothing new; Snyder already treaded these waters in the earlier Court of Owls arc. In that story, the emphasis was on the value of keeping certain painful truths from those whom the truth might hurt; however, in Death of the Family, this theme is explored from the opposite side. By the story's end, the Family remains upset with Bruce for having kept this from them. In keeping the secret, Bruce was less concerned with protecting his family than he was simply not trusting them to handle the truth well.

This is a small but significant detail that resonates with anyone who has had to deal with a particularly difficult kind of family member. Bruce rationalizes away his inherent mistrust of the people closest to him by saying that he kept the secret to protect them. The truth, though, is that this was a critical choice that allowed him to retreat within himself, a seemingly simple choice to remain silent, which turns out to have dire consequences in the long run. Despite the Joker's brutal assault on the Family, at the end of the day, it's not the Joker's attack that cuts Bruce's allies the deepest. Instead, it's their patriarch's lack of trust in them that wounds them profoundly, and drives a wedge between them and him. Joker's accusation that the family makes Batman weak by humanizing him actually has a bit of truth to it. Specifically, the family humanizes Batman precisely because—as all families or close-knit friends tend to do—the members bring out the flaws in the hero's very human alter-ego, Bruce Wayne. The people with whom we are close are always the first to feel hurt by our actions, and the people who know us best are the ones who can pinpoint our deepest insecurities and character flaws. Wayne's reliance on his allies, even when he wears the cape and cowl, reflects a very human component to the character of Batman. They keep him from stumbling over the brink, from being swallowed up by the darkness that is inherent in bearing the mantle of the dark knight. During his final confrontation with Joker in the caves, Batman states that it is actually his trust in his family that makes him strong. In other words, it is his trust in others, in someone other than himself, that keeps him grounded and ultimately saves him from his own darkness.

The other theme of note is an interesting one, and concerns the relationship between Batman and Joker. A codependent relationship is a sometimes-controversial psychological concept in which one individual's thinking revolves almost entirely around the other individual in the relationship. It is a kind of addiction that frequently rears its ugly head in dysfunctional families, unhealthy friendships, and romantic entanglements. This is a particularly sinister kind of addiction that masquerades as being other-focused, but is actually a deep-set caliber of narcissism in which the codependent says to the other individual, "You are what I say you are, because that is precisely what I need you to be." I've seen this strong, manipulative kind of relationship play out with friends, within my own family, and have even been guilty of it myself. It is the antithesis of genuinely caring for another human being, of giving that person the freedom to fail or to be better on their own terms. It's a closed-fisted way of dealing with others, fueled by an inward bend of the spirit that operates under the pretense of being concerned with and sacrificial for the sake of the other. And this is the very same type of relationship the Joker espouses in regards to Batman.

There are bound to be some critics who want to focus on the strange eroticism that is laced throughout the Joker's portrayal in this story. Indeed, the Joker's scenes with Batman are tinged ever so slightly with a loose sexual tension. To be sure, I do not believe this is a political statement on Scott Snyder's part. The point of portraying the Joker in this way is not to make readers scrutinize these scenes in an attempt to ascertain whether or not these characters are homosexuals. Rather, what Snyder seems to understand and to write extremely well is that codependent relationships always come entwined with a kind of erotic energy. I use erotic here not to denote explicit sexual tension, but in a more Lewisian sense, to denote eros, the extremely desirous parts of the human being that is ignored only to one's detriment. In short, what Snyder understands is that true eros, as Lewis advocates it, is actually a good and healthy desire to know and to be known by another, be it in a romantic relationship, or merely a good friendship. But what the Joker exhibits is eros gone horribly, horribly awry.

Upon their initial meeting at the reservoir, Joker greets Batman with a bizarre "Hello, darling." During their battle in the caves, he rages against Batman's trust in the Family, screaming, "They're not your real family! We are! I am!" And right before throwing himself into the abyss, Joker says, "This isn't what you want! You know it, I know it, and now they know it, too! In the end, the real end, the only ones left will be you and me." For Joker, his relationship with Batman is symbiotic. One cannot exist without the other, because Joker, in his own mind, completes Batman. He believes that he makes Batman stronger by continually pushing the dark knight to the brink of his humanity over and over again. Perhaps the most telling thing, though, is how Joker reacts when Batman threatens to whisper his true name. By throwing himself into the abyss, Joker effectively says that he would literally rather die than face reality.

This same warped psychology is found all throughout the narrative. When he accuses Batman of having grown dull because of the Family, this results from his refusal to see Batman as a human being. In Joker's mind, Batman is a myth. In his delusion in the caves, he says the reason he removed his own face was to show Batman that "Beneath my grin, though, is just more grin! Ha ha! And beneath that face of yours is something snouted and fanged and lovely and that's what this is about. Reminding you of the bond we share, you and I!" Only with him, Joker insists, does Batman truly become transcendent. In Joker's mind, Bruce Wayne doesn't even exist. There is only the Batman. And when Batman turns the tables on him, by claiming to know Joker's history and true identity, he essentially threatens to crack Joker's delusion. In giving the Joker's name, Batman would shatter the illusion that they are both these mythological figures caught up in some cosmic hunt. It would prove that Joker is just as vulnerable as Batman, that both of them are actually mere mortals who are in need of serious, serious help.

The story ends as Bruce Wayne converses with his butler, Alfred Pennyworth. He explains to Alfred that, years earlier, just after he realized the Joker could have slipped into the caves, he had traveled to Arkham Asylum, where the Joker was an inmate, and visited him. Only he had gone not as Batman, but as Bruce Wayne. The Joker, it turns out, did not acknowledge him. In that moment, Wayne says he knew that the Joker did not care about Batman's identity beneath the cowl. Joker, he realized, was ultimately a narcissist who had become transfixed on the idea of Batman, thus removing him from all reality. To him, it was all one big fantasy. The Joker didn't have categories for facing Bruce Wayne instead of Batman. "It would," Bruce says to Alfred, "ruin his fun."

This dark, moody, and absorbing thriller is a brilliant character study. Snyder's take on the Joker is unique and completely unnerving, elevating the character from homicidal maniac to true monster. Greg Capullo and Jonathan Glapion craft some truly stunning art, effectively capturing the tone and mood of the story. With Death of the Family, Scott Snyder has written another instant classic.