Best of this Week: Batman: Creature of the Night Book Four – Kurt Busiek, John Paul Leon and Todd Klein
Kurt Busiek is amazing at humanizing and retelling the stories of our favorite heroes.
He managed to do so during his tenure on The Avengers and even more so on his breathtaking Superman: Secret Identity. He delves into the mindsets of characters and creates an emotional attachment between them and the reader that draws you into their individual struggles and his work on Creature of the Night is no different. He manages to juxtapose the story of Batman from the perspective of a fan of Batman in the “real world” and despite the long wait, it proves more than worth it.
Batman: Creature of the Night follows the life of Bruce Wainwright, inheritor of the Wainwright family fortune and company after their murder by a home invader. Throughout the series we see him deal with his family’s death by doing his best to live up to their ideal, making the City of Boston better through philanthropic pursuits and smart business decisions. Though, he has a dark side to him, believing that he’s managed to conjure an actual Batman-like protector for the city and believes it to be his stillborn brother, Tommy.
The last book saw Bruce obsessed with the origin of The Batman, how we was able to solve crime and how his company was succeeding because of the various arrests and takedowns, finding out that “Batman” had been the cause of everything. He had gone after Bruce’s business opponents, exposed their wrongdoings and essentially cheated their way to the top. This sends Bruce on an unfortunate Spiral, thinking that all of Boston was corrupt and that maybe the other business people and Bruce’s own allies might have had something to do with their deaths.
This issue begins with a splash page of an original page cell from Batman; specifically where Thomas and Martha are killed by Joe Chill. It’s also taken extreme damage likely from the Batman entity that Bruce believes to exist. This shows just much Wainwright’s own parents deaths has affected him and his mindset. We also get a few shots of Bruce’s messy office. John Paul Leon makes sure to draw the readers attention to just how much Bruce’s life is beginning to spin out of control. His floor is full of trash, booze and even a bra from who knows and Bruce himself is found by his assistant Robin, passed out among the mess.
In his stupor, he asks her about coffee before flinging himself off of the roof, turning into the Bat entity himself. Robin isn’t surprised and we learn that she’s known about Bruce’s supposed abilities since the first time she and Mr. Jepson, one of Bruce’s employees (his Alfred so to speak), saw him transform two years prior. If I remember right, the moment when Brice was on the roof was when he found out about what Tommy had done and it’s implied that Bruce was up there alone the whole time.
Unfortunately, Jepson suffers a heart attack after seeing his boy like that and is admitted to a hospital in and out over the next few months or years. Jepson’s failing health leads Bruce to continue winding down, violently stopping crime while knowing that it’s not actually doing anything better. At the same time, Robin is tasked with taking care of him by Mr. Jepson as she’s been with them both for a very long time, Bruce even played her way through college. When Bruce goes to jail over a bar room brawl that left the other guy hospitalized, Robin bails him out.
These scenes are grim and paint Bruce at almost his lowest, drinking in some decent looking bar and getting angry at even the smallest of slights. A man bumps him and Bruce decides to make a big thing of it, so they take the fight outside and Bruce gets his ass kicked while being watched by a small crowd. As it goes on, the Bat entity, or at least what we perceive as the Bat Entity from Bruce’s perspective, emerges and begins to absolutely wreck the other man. Leon uses minimal, flat colors for the entire issue and these pages are some of the more dynamic of them. Leon makes Bruce look animalistic and his eyes are colored red, signaling the change and after his arrest, he’s unshaven and looks like a mess.
Bruce and Robin’s relationship together serves as the main crux of the book with her watching him as he goes down his dark path and doing her best to get him back on track. Bruce, however, is still caught up in his parents murder and the continued injustices that Boston is home to every night. Both of them are fighting losing battles and growing darker with each passing day. Their relationship reaches a particular low after a still drunk Bruce plants an unwanted kiss on her after she picks him up from jail. This is particularly horrible because of their aforementioned history together. She tells him that he needs to see a therapist or help of some kind.
Initially, he thinks that he might disagree, but says yes and explains what he’s been going through to his doctor. It seems like a very cathartic moment for him, getting everything off of his chest and eventually being prescribed antidepressants. For a while, he returns nearly to his normal self. Jepson and Robin are happy for him, but we learn later on that he feels like the antidepressants make him feel sludgy and confused. He feels like he needs to wean himself off of it for a little while, having had fear that they would break his connection to Tommy or kill him.
Bruce immediately begins to become more paranoid, asking why someone would want to kill Tommy. He starts to believe in some grand conspiracy to ruin him and his family and he decides to go to a private room in his company’s offices. Leon colors this scene with a light cool blue, giving off the feeling of Bruce’s cold “logic”, though the reader can likely also interpret this as Bruce turning inward to himself. He’s lonely and with only Tommy to really talk to, he’s not exactly the most reliable of narrators. He truly believes that everything that’s happened to him, including Jepson’s sickness, has been part of a carefully orchestrated plot to plunge Boston into darkness.
In an amazing reference to when Dick Grayson first discovers the Batcave, Robin opens the door to find Bruce alone in the room. Framed against his immensely large connection board, Bruce kind of looks like a crazy person. He berates her for not respecting his privacy and asks what could possibly be so important for her to find him before she informs him of Jepson’s passing. What was initially small paranoia morphs into FULL conspiracy paranoia with Bruce being absurdly sure that someone is targeting him for getting close to the real culprits behind his parents death. Robin tries to comfort him, but he tells her that she needs to run for a little while and she calls him delusional and pleads with him to get help.
Unable to handle the truth, Bruce flies away and later has a hallucination of Batman’s greatest villains surrounding him, telling him to take the pills. Joker, Catwoman, Two Face, Penguin and Riddler surround and taunt him. Leon makes sure to draw them as normal, potentially actually being there, but as Bruce’s mental state continues to unravel, they begin to deform and swirl into a mass of laughter and color/ As they begin to overwhelm his senses, Bruce tosses his antidepressants off the roof of the building as the background is colored a bright white – a clearing of the head in a way.
Bruce returns to his board and begins to connect the dots, trying to find out who benefits the most from the deaths of his parents. He notes local politicians and other people he couldn’t hurt as Batman and then has an epiphany. He goes to confront Detective Gordon Hoover, the man who had been in charge of Bruce’s and various other related cases before his retirement. He destroys one of Gordon’s walls when confronting him and soon after, Robin arrives and checks on the detective. He tells her that Bruce has gone insane and that all of this was coincidence at best before telling her where he went.
Concerned with his continuingly deteriorating state of mind, Robin ventures to Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo, a place very near and dear to Bruce as his family had a huge stake in it when Bruce was a child. He’s absolutely destroyed the entrance way and is in the Bat exhibit when Robin finds him having a complete mental breakdown. Leon absolutely smashes the art in this sequence, portraying Batman as fighting back against his enemies. They swirl around him in the same mass as earlier (with Ra’s al Ghul thrown into the mix for whatever reason) and Bruce says that he has to tear Boston down to make it better.
Robin, having had enough and sensing that Bruce might do something he’ll regret, asks him if that’s something that Batman from the comics would do. This manages to snap Bruce out long enough for Robin to reach him. She asks him who he’s talking to, who he’s fighting against and Bruce struggles to answer, seeing Batman’s Rogues gallery slowly swept away by the mass of bats around them before disappearing himself. Much later, we pick back up with Bruce who’s dating the girl he met in college way back in Book Two. He’s back on his medication with a modified dosage and Robin is doing well too. He realizes that there was no conspiracy and that he’d been holding on to his pain, causing him to almost have a psychotic break… though he still maintains one really important familial relationship.
Though the gap between Books Three and Four were absurdly long, the quality of the story was well worth the wait. Kurt Busiek doesn’t write as much as he used to, but with this book, he shows that he hasn’t lost a single step along the way. This was an amazingly character driven story that kept me interested throughout. John Paul Leon’s art was a big part of that as well with just how beautiful it was. Together, they managed to craft an underrated masterpiece. I loved the story of obsession and inspiration and how Batman can influence just about anyone. Bruce Wainwright turned out to be a really interesting character, both because he was very much inspired by Batman so much so that he modeled his life after him and because of his mental illness.
I can only hope that this book succeeded well enough that Busiek and Leon come back for another book together or Busiek does a third of these with Wonder Woman as the hero inspiration. Overall, high recommend.
Ty Talks Comics 