Bayou’s Simplicity

Bayou uses a technique we’ve seen many times throughout the semester (Maus, Jimmy Corrigan, Exit Wounds), where the simplicity of the art (or masks in the case of Maus) is used specifically to endear the reader and enhance specific aspects upon which the comic is commenting.  For instance, in Maus we saw the cartoon-like overly simplified mice masks offer a door through which the reader was able to connect more strongly with the characters and surpass the atrocities of WWII in order to see the story of Maus.  I won’t go into Jimmy Corrigan, because I still don’t think I understand that one.  Bayou seems to do a similar thing, both in its form online, and in the art itself.  The simplicity of navigation and straightforward instructions, along with the ability to zoom-in (Josh, I think there was something wrong with however you were looking at it, I could zoom in just fine) made my experience of reading the comic easy and enjoyable (as opposed to Shooting War, where my eyes were completely exhausted by the time I finished because I couldn’t zoom in without distorting the images.  I know that comic doesn’t have a lot of money, but there’s something to be said about a comic that doesn’t let the reader zoom in perhaps not really caring about the reader experience.  I digress.)

My point is that the simplicity of the drawings in Bayou and the way such simplicity has been used in what we’ve seen parallels the story of Bayou itself.  The first chapter seems pretty typical of the societal norms of the time (segregation, racism, hangings), but there’s something else going on that we don’t yet see.  Lee sees some sort of fairy under water, while her white friend has her necklace stolen by a overly large dripping hand that comes out of the swamp. In the first three images we have a similar thing happening: First we see a house in the background with flowers in the foreground in an extremely picturesque and perhaps romantic rendering of a place.  Next we see a pickup truck, very cute rabbits and a sign, “welcome to Charon, Mississippi” with the confederate flag as its background.  We still have a hint of the picturesque in the bunnies, but the confederate flag diminishes said picturesque-ness.  And finally we have a hanging of presumably a black man (feet dripping blood with flies around it, we don’t actually see the face) and a group of white men in the distance.   It’s as if the comic is telling us not to necessarily believe what we first see, or understand.  Lee’s friend’s bruise underscores this point, playing with reader expectations.  For me, at least, I assumed she was rich and educated and generally had a good life thus far, except that her mother beats her and she has bruises under her clothing.  The simplicity of the art also underscores this point because we only see a surface and easy art style that has few details and very little background.

Victimization in Exit Wounds

While reading the interview in the back of Exit Wounds, Modan’s discussion about victimization was particularly enlightening (p. 183).  She says that the Exit Wounds is about dropping the victim role, specifically for Israelis to stop playing that role so that they may move forward.  When read through the lens of victimization, the story takes on a deeper layer than the surface story of an estranged son meeting his father’s estranged lover and falling for her offers.  When we break down the various characters, it seems that they all embody the victim.  For instance, the lady in the morgue is very cheery, which is juxtaposed by her position as being the morgue receptionist.  Her defense is a particularly bothersome sunny disposition that we are not privy to seeing beneath.  She is nonchalant about death and to her everything is just a matter of course.  In other words, while Numi and Koby are freaking out about the fact that an unidentified body might be Gabriel and now they cannot be sure because he has been buried, the receptionist goes off to lunch and dismisses their emotional distraught-ness as nothing important.  Her defense mechanism is her impenetrable upbeat-ness, which is a sign that she is thoroughly entrenched in the victim role.  Instead of dealing with the facts of the bombings and bodies constantly moving in, she has become blind and untouchable to the atrocities around her.

Numi and Koby are both acting within their victim roles until the very end, when they lay such roles aside to be together.  Koby’s emotional distance is indicative of his victimization, specifically by his father.  When he does open up to Numi, because she has shown him kindness by getting him a perfect present that his father failed at, and they start to have sex, he overreacts to her joking comment, “Like father, like son” (p. 139), and leaves.  He is not confident enough to take her joke at face value.  Numi, on the other hand, plays the victim when it comes to her looks.  She is not beautiful and is awkwardly tall – in no way is she the typical or even celebrated female and because of this she has been victimized.  She is ready to assume that everyone believes her ugly, and does not want Koby to see her body (“Don’t look” (p. 136)).  Both Koby and Numi, then, are equally victims, only in different ways.

Gabriel is perhaps the more complex of the characters because throughout Exit Wounds we mistakenly think Gabriel has been a victim of a bus station bombing (probably by Palestinians, though this is not mentioned).  We find out throughout the course of the graphic novel that he has been the victimizer to both Numi and Koby. He victimized Numi by betraying her; Koby by not being a good father.  The link between Gabriel and the Palestinians is interesting because in a way I think Gabriel represents the Palestinians, though this link is more complex than a simple straight line.  If he does represent victimizers of Israel, but is also thought to be a victim of those victimizers, it would mean that Gabriel is a victim of himself, which I don’t think is necessarily wrong.  This would probably need to be thought out in more detail, and if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Finally, Koby sheds his emotional detachment and goes after Numi.  The many obstacles he faces (gate, high wall, dogs, Numi’s initial rejection) are ones that would have probably convinced him to give up if he still was still playing the victim.  Because he has finally shed that role, he is able to continue on.  Numi likewise sheds her victim role, and in fact is able to use her physique to save Koby, thus validating her untypical femaleness.  The happily-ever after ending takes place only because both Koby and Numi shed their victim roles thus giving them the capability of moving forward and being together.

Omar

My first reaction to In My Darkest Hour was to put it down in disgust at the overly sexualized females and the stereotypical horny male who has a hard time controlling his urges and so is constantly making women uncomfortable to the point of even violating one (with the mirror).  In my opinion anyone, whether or not they are bipolar, schizophrenic, sociopaths, etc who approaches women in the way that the Omar approaches them is disgusting.  My first impression is still reigning high, but unfortunately for my moral righteousness I decided to go back through and recheck my first reading.  The results are what follows.

I do not know where the line between reality and fantasy lies within this graphic novel and so it is particularly difficult for me to come to a conclusion as to whether or not I have any sympathy for Omar, or of his girlfriend for that matter.  We see a distortion of reality throughout. One example is towards the beginning when we see Omar looking for Lucinda, and there are several panels of him stretched horizontally so that he looks obese. He might be overweight, depending on his height , but not to the extent that these panels show.  Here we are seeing him through his own eyes, and the distortion that such a perspective brings with it.  The difficult aspect, however, is that there is no way of knowing, no indicator within the text, that, at any point, we are seeing something outside of Omar’s perspective.  In my first reading I assumed that only some of it was from Omar’s point of view, but after looking through it I’m not sure that any of it was from a third person point of view.

This graphic novel is not so subtly about sexual abuse, and as much as I want to dismiss Omar’s actions (again, looking up the girl’s skirt with a mirror) as being that of a self-centered male who sees women as little more than pieces of meat, it’s clear that the truth is that he does not understand the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior when it comes to approaching a female.  He’s not trying to overpower them or hurt them and for this I have to let go of my righteousness.

Finally, my dislike of Omar is because Omar does not like himself.  There must be some reason that Lucinda is with him, and we see pieces of the pain and disgust and confusion that Omar lives through with the “grotesque” images strewn throughout the novel.  We see his childhood abuse, his gross body, his strange dark dreams from which he awakes to Lucinda telling him everything is okay.  Some of the images, such as the female who’s breasts have been sewn on, who has what looks to be Jesus hanging out by her vag, whose face is made of pieces from different pictures, and who has something indecipherable happening to her mouth, remind me primarily of something I would find if I stumbled onto a serial killer’s art book.  But I think it’s important to remember that these are Omar’s eyes.  That image is the first hint that something else is going on here, that something along the lines of abuse have happened.  My first reaction is to think the artist was a little full of himself and that these images are unnecessary for the telling of the story (as Jay describes in his post), but now I think they’re there to show something outside the norm, something truly distorted and ugly and frightening, and it’s not Omar, at least not yet.  It’s his past, it’s the symptoms of childhood sexual abuse, it’s the extremely serious but rarely discussed psychological monsters that trauma can manifest.

Red vs. Blue; Shading vs. Form (Asterios Polyp)

I have to say, reading Asterios Polyp was a lot of fun, and I’m certain I would need to read it several times in order to understand it completely.  There’s just so much going on in terms of the philosophical ideas that are expressed by words and images and sometimes it seems the ideas are only expressed in one format and other times in a combination of the two.

My favorite idea expressed is the difference between people’s realities and what happens when two people come together.  The narrator brings up this idea most clearly for me when Asterios first meets Hana in 1984.  The party is full of a variety of people and each of those individuals is drawn using a completely different format: large lines with simple detail; shaded lines and all outline; triangular shadows; letters; circles connected by straight lines.  What’s so incredibly interesting to me, and this does not actually strike me as a novel idea, but I really love the way it’s executed, is how the different styles for Asterios and Hana end up intertwining as they start talking.  Asterios is drawn in blue lines and he looks hollow and made of shapes artists use when first drawing the form of a person.  Hana, on the other hand, is drawn using a very detailed red line that seems to be primarily shading.  In terms of the colors, red and blue are on opposite sides of the spectrum, but reinforcing this opposite idea is how these two things compliment each other.  For instance, the form-style (I’m not sure what else to call it) of Asterios is perhaps the first thing that an artist would draw, but the shading is just as important and is essential to making objects seem more real.  When Hana’s shading meets Asterios’ form, the portrait is complete.

Later on, when Hana and Asterios are fighting (we actually see the final panel of when Hana says, “what makes you think you’re always right?” at the end of the fourth chapter later on when Hana and Asterios are breaking up, but from a different angle) the original styles that we were introduced to when they met come up again and are drawn out.  It seems that as they fight each individual returns to his or her original individual reality, or perspective (?) by returning to the original style used to introduce them.  Hana is the red shading and Asterios is the hollow blue form.

This links to another idea in the graphic novel about dichotomies that Asterios claims are natural and that it seems eventually he learns are not necessary.  I’m not entirely sure why Mazzucchelli does not use the same styles when Asterios and Hana meet again for the last time at the end of the novel, but I do think it has to do with a certain abandonment on Asterios and Hana’s part.  I think by this point they are no longer forcing their original individual realities / perspectives on each other and they are no longer defined by them.

Repitition and Layering in Fun Home

The intricacy of repetitive images and actions throughout Fun Home seem to finally create a layered reality where each truth is not quite whole until the entire story is told.  We see Bruce’s death several times throughout the novel, for instance, and each time we hear about it or Alison’s mother telling Alison about her father having affairs with men and boys, we have a slightly different perspective.

First, we hear about Bruce’s death at the end of the first chapter, only after hearing about how obsessed he was with interior design and restoration of the family home, and the lack of relationship he therefore had with his family.  Next, we go through the evidence of what adds up to Alison’s belief that her father killed himself.  We see more into the sorrow of the individual man and not his neglect as a father.  Next, we see some of the difficulty within the marriage itself and see Alison’s declaration of homosexuality.  This goes on, but what’s so interesting to me is that Bechdel slowly reveals her story by adding more details each time she tells it to us.  We don’t see the extent to which Alison was dealing with her own homosexuality until later when we see that she had already brought her girlfriend home (though introduced her only as a friend) by the time of her father’s death.  Whereas earlier in the graphic novel it seemed that the link between Alison’s coming out of the closet and her father’s death were much closer in time.  Another layer to this is Alison’s winter class through Ulysses.  Her parents are receiving her declarative letter of “I am a lesbian” the same day that she is having her oral exam for the class on Ulysses and she’s obsessively reading more and more books about homosexuality.

Basically it seems that, and there are tons of examples throughout Fun Home, Bechdel is purposely telling the story in a way that adds layers to what seems at first to be a simple story of a bad father killing himself.  This multi-layered perspective is intriguing because it calls to mind questions about the authenticity of memory, similar to Maus and Alan’s War, while simultaneously showing that the truth in the first chapter is not negated by last page when Bechdel endearingly remembers how her father caught her.  This truly seems to underline the complicated relationships most of us have with our families, especially with parental figures.  Instead of peeling back the layers one by one, however, Bechdel reverses it and adds the layers, one by one to show the whole truth from multiple angles.   She starts with anger and ends with love, but her love at the end does not erase the anger in the beginning, and instead complicates it.

Uneasiness (Jimmy Corrigan)

Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan strikes me as an experiment in self-loathing and an exercise in writing a comic book to make the reader as uneasy as possible.

First, the strange embodiment of time creates uneasiness because we’re constantly going back and forth between the present reality, the present fantasies/nightmares, and the past without any obvious markers for having done so. I was grateful for the first and only summarization of events which I cannot give page numbers for because they are not included in the book and I think it’s contrary to the author’s purpose to try to count them.

Which brings me to a question – why are there no page numbers?  What purpose does it serve to never let the reader know where they are in the book?  I think it adds a layer to the already intricate storyline by leaving the reader always a little uneasy.  We never really know where we are in the story, or even really what the story is until very late in the graphic novel.  In terms of the panel format, it seems that Ware is purposely consistently changing it and on top of that the font also changes size making it very difficult to not pay close attention to where you are on the page.  I was grateful for the little arrows giving me some direction, but it still made me uneasy to have to figure it out anew for every page.

The protagonist was my biggest problem.  Because the protagonist harbors no typical hero quality I found myself constantly looking for some redeeming characteristic.  Although it could be argued that wanting to be liked fits into that category, I would argue that it is specifically this trait that makes Jimmy so unbearable, spineless and empty.  He has no sense of self worth.  But I don’t think we’re really supposed to like him.  He is the alter-ego that nobody wants to admit (and of course I am certainly not doing that here), the victim who cannot be anything other than that.

On a separate, but maybe relevant note, I think the grandfather’s story of physical and emotional abuse could easily be Jimmy’s story and I think Ware is again playing with a sense of time and order.  Although Jimmy did not know his grandfather’s story it seems that he is, personality-wise, a direct descendant of that history.  This places him even more firmly in the victim role, but because it wasn’t him I find it even more difficult to like Jimmy.

Perpetuating Trauma (Maus II)

Maus II struck me as a much more detailed account of the father-son relationship than Maus I because more the of graphic novel takes place in the “present” as opposed to Vladek’s memories. But what became clear through this relationship, to me, is how it is riddled with the past and exists in its current form specifically because of the past.

In Maus I we see Art in an unsympathetic light.  He’s more concerned with getting Vladek’s story than in talking with this father about his current life.  He’s quick to leave when Vladek starts talking about Mala, and is impatient with his father’s requests for help.  In Maus II we see Art in perhaps even a worse light as he refuses to help his aging father beyond a weekend visit.  Art will not consider letting his father moving in with him or moving in with his father after Mala has left the senior Spiegelman.

But in Maus II we also see more of why Art would need to distance himself from his father.  The most striking example of this to me is Vladek’s blunt racism and complete inability to understand that he is perpetuating racial hatred, of which he himself was a victim.  We also see the absurdity of Vladek’s actions when he goes back to the supermarket to return food that he wasn’t going to eat, even though the boxes were already opened.  His obsession with saving money and food go beyond socially acceptable limits and enter into the arena of the absurd.  This absurdity is what Art has dealt with his entire life and with which he no longer has any ability to be patient.

What’s so interesting in this dynamic is how it also shows the perpetuation of history, and not necessarily in a simple action – consequence sort of way.  We easily understand Vladek’s need to save money and food after reading his story of surviving on hardly any food and desperately needing money in order to bribe people either to get food or to look away while he escaped.  This is easily understandable.  His racism is not.  His racism tends to show the other side of his learning process.  It almost seems that as much as he was struggling to survive, he somehow adopted some of the hatred that the Nazis had and simply directed it to a different racial group.  In essence he is a victim, but also a perpetrator of the kind of thoughts that lead to the atrocities he has survived.

While Art, thankfully, does not adopt his father’s racism, he still has such a strong emotional repulsion to the very things that his father learned from the holocaust.  His intolerance could be understood as another variation of the holocaust’s effects and thus showing how the experience of such trauma is perpetuated.  While our reading for this week argues that graphically Spiegelman shows that the past is in the present, I wonder if there’s another layer that I’m not able to reach.  This layer would be the one where Art is also haunted, but not necessarily by the Holocaust so much as by its effects on his father.  The only thing that I can think of that really shows this is Art’s intolerance with his father.  Of course we see Art growing up with his father’s stories, but I wonder what absurdities Art has picked up and I wonder, also, if that’s part of the reason he was in the mental institution that he refers to in Maus I.

Distancing Mice Masks

Spiegelman’s use of animals to represent specific groups of people threw me off at first and made me think about how to express inexpressible events.  While Brown argues, with Speigelman’s own words to back him up, that the mice masks are used in order to undermine Hitler’s own metaphor for Jews, it seems to work in a very complicated way.  For instance, the fact that Spiegelman uses it for the present as well as the past indicates that this is an ongoing fight against Hitler’s metaphor.  But more interestingly for me, the use of animal masks instead of people made it very clear that this is a story, though as historically accurate as possible.  In essence, the fact that Spiegelman does not use faces, and does not use a great amount of detail, as he did in the comic within a comic, he is drawing attention to the fact that this is a representation and therefore is creating some distance between the reader and the text.

Most Holocaust rememberings that I’ve come across, whether they be movies, books, or pictures, have used the awful details of the stories to shock and disgust viewers into understanding how incredibly atrocious World War II was.  Spiegelman goes in a different direction, and I wonder if the outcome is somehow more emotional.  I’m not disgusted so much with the stories, though that may be because I’ve heard them before.  I’m not focused on the ovens or the torture, even though we do see some awful happenings even in Speigelman’s story (I’m thinking of the children being thrown against a wall and blood spewing out).  Instead, I find myself focused on the human relationships and personal actions of the story.  I wonder if Art will ever try to fix something for his father; if Mala and Vladek will ever get along; if Vladek is ever going to be able to relax again.  I already know that Vladek and Anja made it out alive, but I want to know how they were able to do it emotionally.

My suspicion is that by creating distance between the reader and the text by using animal masks, Spiegelman has allowed me the space to become intellectually and emotionally invested in the story.  Instead of being bombarded by images that would surely inspire nightmares, I can quickly move past the atrocities and see what’s going on around them and beneath them.  A good counterexample to this is “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” comic within a comic – it’s completely emotionally charged in every detail and I cannot really get past that emotional aspect.  Its placement in the story, not as part of the Holocaust, but as a continuing effect of the Holocaust, also makes me wonder if survivor memories of the Holocaust are perhaps harder to face than the Holocaust itself was.  Simultaneously I’m thankful that Spiegelman did not draw all of Maus this way, because I think it would be too difficult for the reader to digest, and in some way disrespectful.  In the same way that Calliope’s rape could be argued as being disrespectful to rape survivors because it’s used as a plot device and laid out on the page in obvious detail; Speigelman’s distance from the subject matter seems to denote a certain amount of respect for Holocaust victims and survivors specifically because he does not try to draw accurate cartoons based on pictures and historical accounts.  The distance created by mice masks, then, is not only for the reader, but perhaps also shows Spiegelman’s distance as well.

Masks and Disembodied Faces in Sandman Vol. 3

While reading Sandman Vol. 3 I found a repetition of masks and/or disembodied faces, which basically are masks.  These faces haunted me a little bit, and I noticed that in the artwork at least, perhaps accidentally, they are present in each and every story.  More than that, they seem to have a sort of power, or at the least denote power, sometimes too much power as in Facade.

In “Calliope” the faces are on page 23, panel 6:

These faces seem to represent the power that Ric Madoc has because of his new-found muse.  As the poster shows, Ric’s creativity has earned him nominations for 3 Oscars, best original screenplay, etc.  Beyond that, however, Ric’s true self was unable to create a second novel and so he uses his muse to become a successful novelist.  In other words, he uses the mask that he brutally forces from Calliope to pretend that he has talent.  The mask, then, gives him power.

We see disembodied faces again on “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” on page 54, panel 2:

In this case these are the faces of the people who dreamed a world where humans were larger than cats.  These are the faces potentially responsible for the current power humans have over the feline species.  It could be said that these are the faces that created the current mask of reality, and I couldn’t help but see a connection because of the disembodied aspect of them, similar to the poster in “Calliope.”

“Midsummer Night’s Dream” is full of masks, but perhaps the most telling panel seems to be on page 77, panel 2:

Here we see the true Puck looking down on the human who is looking down on the Puck mask.  In terms of the story, the masks are the reason the faeries and goblins came to Earth again.  The humans are pretending to be the creatures that they are performing for, and in so doing have power in the instance of the play.  While the hobgoblins and others want to eat the humans, or hurt them in some way, they are unable to while the masks are on.  It is only after the human-Puck takes off the Puck mask that the true Puck can kill him.

Finally we come to “Facade”, where page 90, panel 2 seems to be the best representation of the masks Rainie has used:

These masks are both show Rainie’s power in that she can create them in the first place, but they also show her weakness, in her inability to throw them away.  She wishes she could keep the masks on forever, but unable to do this she instead gives a little part of herself to each and every mask she creates.  In this case it seems that the sacrifice she unwillingly made for the power she currently has is one she is unable to accept.  She is completely alone in a room full of masks that unceasingly stare at her.

Throughout these short stories masks play an important role in showing the cost of power and perhaps also the flimsiness of reality.

Rant on Character Flaws in Watchmen

Watchmen tells its story amazingly well, but it’s not an enjoyable one.  It may be that I want a hero, I want someone who I can like, and Moore makes that impossible.  While I’m sure there’s a reason for this, in the end I like likable characters and some part of me believes that these characters and their flaws are somehow wrong.

To start with, Doctor Manhattan certainly offers an interesting character arc in his simultaneous increase in emotional distance from humanity, and his ultimate understanding that humanity is worth saving.  But his ease of accepting Veidt’s atrocity renders his new-found love for humans worthless.  How could someone who can see atoms so quickly accept that the only way to save humanity is by deceiving them into thinking an alien entered their universe and killed millions?

Veidt is too easy to hate – his money, his egotism, his final plot.  And why did he have to kill his servants?  Couldn’t he have just kept them on in his frozen palace until they died naturally?

Laurie drives me crazy.  She’s useless, except as a girlfriend, and she’s not even good at that.  She’s a kept woman by Dr. Manhattan and then runs off to Nite Owl and makes out with him the same night she leaves Dr. Manhattan.  Really?  She’s a sex symbol who occasionally fights, but only when there’s a man at her side.  She doesn’t want to go along with Nite Owl’s new-found heroic desires, but does anyway and we never really know why.  My thought is that she can’t function without a man and needs to follow one around in order to even exist in the Graphic Novel at all.  She gets her happily ever after, which I suppose is perfect since that’s all she was ever after – the American Dream, complete with husband and a hint that little ones might be on the way.

Nite Owl is a little easier to like as he gains his confidence back through his heroic acts, but he’s really a push-over who only sometimes has his own thoughts.  He falls back into heroism when Laurie and him decide to take Archie out and then happens to see a burning building.  He did not leave with the intention of doing something heroic.  Similarly, he wasn’t the one investigating the killings, but he does get Rorschach out of prison, seemingly only so he continue his new-found confidence.  But the end is the real killer (pun intended), because he ultimately accepts Veidt’s plot and Dr. Manhattan’s murder of his crime-fighting partner.

Rorschach was a psychopath who handed out judgments too severely.  His understanding of humanity is as far-off as Dr. Manhattan’s.  It is easier to like him because he is the only hero who wants to be a hero for the same reason as the Dark Knight, and that desire to right wrongs is something I think most people admire.  He also has the best line in the entire Graphic Novel when in prison:  “None of you understand. I’m not locked up in here with you; you’re locked up in here with me.”  But he crosses a line that the Dark Knight was careful not to cross; he kills people, and does so with a vengeance.  He seems to think that killing people is the only way to deal justice and he constantly takes note of any small moral infraction.  It is strange to me, then, that he is the one who cannot accept Veidt’s plot.  He seems to be the only one who we are set up to believe would accept it.

Moore has set me up to think that I will like some of the characters, but he has left me in the lurch.  I’m certain it’s on purpose.

Batman’s Villains

The most titillating aspect of the Dark Knight Returns, and many other comics for that matter, is how everything seems to represent something else.  Metaphors rule the superhero, and DKR is bursting at the seams with them.  While Miller discusses some of this in his interview, I wanted to try to walk through the narrative and pull out the largest ones and see what happens.

In the first book batman faces Harvey Dent, who Miller points out is a reflection of Batman because of his two-sidedness (Bruce Wayne & Batman).  In returning to the batman self, Bruce Wayne must face his own evil, represented by the bat, and not ignore it or silence it, but rather let it empower him so that he can fight for the weak and average human.  Batman sees his own reflection in Harvey’s vision of himself, as someone who has let the evil side of him rule entirely.  This one idea has many implications.  For instance, batman might have thought that by retiring for so long, he let his worst side of him (fear, laziness, old age) take over his persona to the point that he became a bystander in the increasingly chaotic city of Gotham.  Alternatively, he might have recognized that his own evil (the bat) had in the past taken over so completely that he let things happen that shouldn’t have.  I do not know what happened to the previous robin, but it’s obvious that whatever it was, Batman regretted his role in it.  When Batman faces Harvey Dent, then, he is facing the doubleness of himself, his good and his evil.

The mutant gang of book two seems to represent the anonymous group of mediocre villains, who are the same type of people who murdered Batman’s parents.  In facing them and finally taking out their leader, Batman has regained the power he lost when his parents died.  By killing the mutant leader and gaining the adoration of the mutant gang, Batman has essentially wrestled with the past, and then become the master of it.

Book three is Batman’s epic fight with his archenemy the Joker.  As Miller explains, the Joker represents chaos, and it is specifically this chaos that Batman, a control-freak, cannot stand.  It is also this chaos that killed his parents.  In facing the Joker batman is facing not only his past (like he did with the mutant gang), but also the larger universal force that ultimately lead to the murder of his parents.  In other words, the mutant gang was a replica of the type of people that killed his parents; the Joker is the puppet master that made them do it.

In book four Batman has to face Superman, and it is here that I get a little confused.  It seems that Superman is what would happen if Batman was all Bruce Wayne, in other words was all good.  Superman is not a complicated figure, but rather the simple easy example of pure good.  Batman is more complicated and so it seems that Superman might represent the other side of Harvey Dent – if Harvey Dent did see himself as his surgeons did.  Batman has to balance Bruce Wayne and the Bat in order to fully live out who he is.  If either the good or the evil was to silence the other, he would be out of balance and would become something akin to Superman – hired help who doesn’t think twice when asked to kill an old friend.