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| Batman, Volume 4: Zero Year - Secret City |
After three quintessentially dark and murky Batman stories, the bright splash of color that greets readers on the first pages of Secret City is both a jarring and welcome shift in tone (having Danny Miki and FCO Plascencia on ink and colors, respectively, is nothing short of a revelation). The very first panel establishes that this is Gotham City, but six years ago. And this is where things take a turn for the surreal. The city lies in ruins, a kind of hellscape where fish swim in flooded subway tunnels and the buildings are overrun with overgrown shrubbery. Into this strange, post-apocalyptic world comes a child, who is almost immediately assailed by thugs. Enter the Batman, like you've never seen him before. Instead of his trademark cape, he's packing a rugged rucksack and crossbow. Instead of the classic Batmobile, he's mounted on a mud-slicked dirt bike meant for navigating harsh terrain. This is Batman by way of Mad Max. He saves the child, who proceeds to tell him that a mysterious "he" has been telling everyone that Batman is dead, "ever since he killed the city."
"Good," Batman retorts. "Then he won't see me coming." And suddenly we're off again, jumping back in time another five months, where we meet a younger Bruce Wayne—before he becomes Batman—who has an axe to grind. He has only recently returned to Gotham City after some years of being away, and everyone believes him to be dead. He wants to keep things that way. See, even though Bruce has yet to become the Batman, he has wasted no time getting his hands dirty as a street-level vigilante, working to infiltrate the vicious Red Hood Gang. Bruce is a young man, looking to be somewhere in his mid-to-late twenties. While he's full of piss and vinegar, as the old codgers say, he's a tad unrefined and takes ballsy but unnecessary risks.
The story established here is poles apart from Snyder's two previous narrative arcs. Which is an intelligent storytelling decision. After the dark subject matter of Death of the Family, having something a little lighter in tone gives readers who are in for the long haul some room to breathe. Snyder executes these kinds of genre shifts with a kind of flawless perfection. He has such an understanding of both the Batman character and classic genre tropes that he can flip between horror, thriller, adventure, and even science fiction with ease, exploring Batman through a multitude of lenses. If the first two volumes were action-thrillers, and the third flirted with horror, then this volume is firmly planted in the pulpy, adventure-thriller genre. For a retelling of Batman's origin, this is completely appropriate, given that the character was originally conceived by Bill Finger and Bob Kane in 1939, at the height of the old pulp fiction era.
Noticeably absent from this volume is Snyder's trademark use of mythological themes. This isn't necessarily a criticism, as Snyder is a master of genres, and he puts the storytelling emphasis not on symbolism, but on character development and big, bombastic set pieces. It works for the more adventurous feel that this volume is going for.
There are three major relationships Bruce develops throughout the narrative. The most obvious one is with his butler, Alfred Pennyworth. Ever the caretaker, Alfred is quite opposed to Bruce's harebrained schemes, and early in the volume the two have a rather startling confrontation. Alfred has serious issues with the fact that Bruce refuses to reveal himself to the world and reclaim all that he is entitled to as the sole heir of the billion-dollar Wayne estate. He even goes so far as to accuse Bruce of behaving as a coward, and tells him that his parents would be ashamed. When Bruce turns physical, Alfred gives him a much-needed slap to the face—it's a jarring moment. After Alfred storms away and refuses to help Bruce further, Bruce flies into a fit of rage. This is a young man full of anger and defined by his pain, specifically the pain of having lost his parents to a senseless mugging as a child. This singular moment from his past is what drives him. Every criminal he faces down essentially wears the mask of the man who murdered his father and mother. There's very little selflessness here, and Alfred is right to walk away.
Another relationship of note is the one between Bruce and his maternal uncle, Philip Kane. Not long after Bruce's return to Gotham, Philip finds him. In Bruce's absence, Philip has been running Wayne Enterprises, the company that is the Wayne family legacy. With Bruce now back in Gotham, Philip approaches his nephew and asks him to reveal himself to the public and to return to Wayne Enterprises as the golden boy of Gotham, since the company never really recovered in the wake of the Wayne murders. Bruce refuses Philip's proposal, but is disturbed to learn that the Red Hood Gang has been stealing non-lethal arms manufactured by Wayne Enterprises. As the story unfurls, it becomes clear that Philip's not the most honest businessman, being that he has actually been negotiating with the Red Hood Gang to sell them small arms, in hopes of deterring them from stealing the more dangerous weapons. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Philip is drafted into the gang and is looking for a way out. The man he turned to in the past, a strategist with his own sordid history, is one Edward Nygma. It's clear that Nygma is Philip's confidant, and when Bruce refuses Philip's request to return to the public sphere, Nygma suggests that Philip should have him killed in order to gain public sympathy. While Philip's difficult position is to be appreciated, he is clearly a weak man who always looks for an easy way out and who is now paying dearly for it.
The third (and most interesting) relationship Bruce forms in the story is with the leader of the Red Hood Gang. As the name suggests, the gang is identified by the crimson masks each member wears when carrying out gang-related activities. There is implied to be a system of rules in place within the gang that prohibits the members from divulging information about their personal lives to one another. So each member is assigned a number, which becomes their gang callsign. As such, the leader of the gang is identified as Red Hood One. Now, this is where being a bit of a serious Batman reader pays off. One take on traditional Batman mythology tells us that before the Joker became the Joker, he was a small-time criminal known as the Red Hood, and only becomes the Joker after a confrontation with Batman leaves him boiling in a vat of chemicals. In Snyder's rewriting, it's clear that Red Hood One is the modern incarnation of the classic Red Hood villain. Though we only ever glimpse the man under the mask and never see him outright, Capullo brilliantly ensures the Joker's trademark hook nose is present, as is a penchant for unsavory jokes and a dark fascination with the Batman. It's a subtle thing that unfamiliar readers are likely to miss, but it's worth pointing out that Red Hood One and the Joker are likely one and the same, if only because of the nice parallelism with Snyder's previous yarn. As Bruce Wayne evolves into the Batman, Red Hood One evolves in the Joker. The hero and the villain are intricately tied together, even in origin. In a turn of sinister poetry, this provides a basis to the Joker's codependence on Batman, which was the highlight of the previous volume, Death of the Family.
The story forward is by the numbers, yet there's something to be said for doing something familiar, and doing it well. It gives the things we're accustomed to a new sheen, and that's exactly what Snyder does with Secret City. After Philip chooses to go public about Bruce's return on his own terms, his strategist Nygma goes behind his back and hires the Red Hood Gang to kill Wayne, and they nearly do. Broken and alone, Wayne heads to the only place he has left to go—Wayne Manor, where Alfred is waiting to patch him up. His brush with death giving him a new perspective, Bruce reconciles with Alfred and resolves to fight this war on crime in a different way. In a powerful moment, beneath the cold stare of Thomas Wayne's statue, Bruce resolves to "become a bat."
As Batman, Bruce begins dismantling the Red Hood Gang through fear tactics and guerrilla warfare. When he uncovers a plot involving the ACE Chemical Processing Plant, he chooses to combat the gang on two fronts by finally going public and announcing his return to Gotham, reclaiming the Wayne legacy. The story's climax involves a battle at ACE Chemical between Batman and the Red Hood Gang, during which Philip sacrifices himself to save Batman, and Red Hood One is dropped into the vat of chemicals despite Batman's attempt at saving him. Again, this is all pretty familiar territory for Batman fans, but the execution is done well enough that it's a thrill to read anew.
The biggest twist comes in the final pages of the main story. Batman and Alfred are discussing the outcome of the battle at ACE when Edward Nygma—now calling himself the Riddler—causes a city-wide blackout. This, of course, sets the stage for the story told in the first few pages of the volume, which depicts Gotham as a devastated cityscape. It's definitely an interesting wrinkle in Batman's backstory, but one that will have to wait until the next volume to pay off. The backup stories collected at the end of this volume give snapshots of Bruce's training sessions around the world. These are smaller, self-contained stories that are equally as fun as the main plot. One short story that stands out is titled "The Pit," and depicts a 24-year-old Bruce Wayne who has battled in a death match in Norway for 28 hours straight, simply because he refuses to kill his opponents. His instructor, a cryptic woman identified only as the Queen, tells him that the lesson he has yet to learn is that the only way to win a war is by finally killing his opponent. Sparing lives only leads to battles being won, not wars. Or so she preaches. But after hours of fighting, it turns out that no man is willing to set foot in the pit, having been frightened into submission. Bruce wins, having conquered his enemies with fear. It's a nice touch, demonstrating the beginnings of the scare tactics the Batman will eventually use to keep the villains of Gotham in check.
This volume is certainly not as deep as Snyder's previous work on Batman, but deep is not exactly what this particular story is going for. Batman, Volume 4: Zero Year - Secret City is a fun, adventurous romp through Bruce Wayne's earlier years, that provides an interesting context for the relationship between Batman and Joker. It drips of pure, pulpy goodness and fist-pumping excitement, with a zinger of an ending that promises a bigger and more unexpected story to come.
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