Broken Frontier

There’s more to crime and evil in Gotham than street thugs and mobsters, as The Dark Knight learns when creatures of the night come to his city.

A young Batman interrupts Catwoman during a jewelry heist. She gets away, but not before leaving a calling card in the form of a scratch that makes The Dark Knight go woozy. Because of it, Bruce Wayne breaks a date with a Miss Julie Madison, and Captain Gordon finds himself surrounded by crooked cops while awaiting an answer to The Bat-Signal. But when the call is finally heeded, Gordon sees the Caped Crusader in action for the first time. He needs Batman’s help on a series of very strange crimes—bodies found with bite marks and completely drained of blood. Batman is incredulous, but the threat is real, as an unfortunate young woman learns later that night beneath a blood red moon.

Amid the darkness of Gotham and its shadows, and despite all the tried and true conventions of noir and hard-boiled fiction, there’s a timeless yet refreshing quality in early Batman stories that’s captured remarkably well in Matt Wagner’s writing. Batman’s war against crime is in its early stages, and his optimism that it can be won, that the world might not need him one day, is delicately balanced with a core belief that the world is governed more by chaos, randomness, and entropy than by order. This dichotomy not only defines the character, it’s the engine that drives the first issue of Batman and the Mad Monk forward. No matter how hard he’s trained, how hard he fights, we read this issue knowing that the night and the darker corners of the human heart have something more in store for him than his hyper-rational mind expects or can imagine. And in a master stroke of storytelling, challenging Batman’s early career optimism and expectations with reality is the vein through which Wagner injects several accents that flesh out the narrative. There’s the idea (also touched on in Batman Begins) that The Dark Knight’s appearance on the scene has somehow triggered others to take on alter-egos and become much more slippery and dangerous than mere street criminals. There’s Jim Gordon, watching Batman do his thing for the first time, marveling at how swift, sure, and untouchable he is. And the first Julie Madison scene brings home the difficulties of maintaining a secret identity by using the perspective of someone on the receiving end of a broken date. But most of all, there’s the moment when what would otherwise be a straight detective story puts its horror boots on and starts walking towards the supernatural. The shift and the conclusion do a great job of setting us up for issue #2. On the whole, Wagner pulls it all together with punchy dialog, perceptive first-person narration, and excellent characterization, while always finding interesting and subtle ways to stay on point with the tones and themes running throughout the story.

Likewise, Wagner’s art does with images what his script does with words. Visually, his figures, facial expressions, backgrounds, and accents like Bruce Wayne’s Rolls and The Batman’s silhouette pay homage to the Golden Age with a distinctly 50s feel, while his panel progressions and constructions, insets, and larger shots utilize more modern storytelling techniques. The blend of the two approaches is seamless, and together they give this story a freshness even though we know it takes place years before The Dark Knight got grim and gritty.

Anyone who missed out on Batman and the Monster Men would do themselves well to pick up the trade, due out this week, but only after picking up the first issue of its sequel.