Your monthly Kelley Jones' Batman update

Well, this week Batman: Gotham After Midnight #9 by Steve Niles and Kelley Jones came out, which means it's time once again for a monthly-ish check-in with how insanely awesome and/or awesomely insane Jones' Batman work is.

This "Nefarious 9th Issue" was full of the things Jones does so well.

The over-the-top, visual-operatic melodrama was in full effect for much of the issue, in which Batman discovers the burned corpse of his new lover, resulting in many panels of his forehead burning with red rage, and a few panels of him smashing his red glowing arm fist into a mirror or through a window to vent his frustration. Even Commissioner Gordon gets some neat dramatic imagery, like a panel featuring his glasses reflecting Batman's silhouette and he raging apartment building fire behind the Batman, or a two panels later, one of Gordon standing before the burning building, his hands thrust into his trench coat pockets, while torn pieces of police tape and wanted posters featuring the villain Midnight swirl in the wind around him, foreshadowing the fact that he's going to be a target of Midnight's.

There are also lots of cool bat-gadgets and Batcave scenes this time around, but this page is probably the best of them:

Yes, that's Bruce Wayne driving a nondescript, rich man's civilian car through the countryside while speaking to an R2-D2/CNN-style holographic projection of Alfred, then entering a tunnel, apparently pushing some kind of crazy button that activates all these hidden mechanical arms (panel four), and then emerging from the other side of the tunnel now dressed like Batman, his car completely transformed into some kind of strange two-wheeled, missile-with-a-cockpit style Batmobile.

I always call attention to how wild Jones' art and designs are, and there's certainly a lot of that in this issue as well (the very first panel, for example, has Batman charging into a burning building, his left thigh all of a sudden longer than his entire torso, and most of his entire right leg), but Jones can really, really draw.

Just check out the detail on this page, which you may want to click on to make bigger:

One could certainly say that the Batmobile looks ridiculous to them, or that they don't like the Batman design, but, wow, just look at the city Jones drew here!

Look at the details...all those little lines, all those little windows, the skylights breaking up the black planes of roofs near the bottom. It's a splash page, but rather than looking at that as an opportunity to rest, to slack off for 1/22nd of the book, Jones draws a page that looks as detailed and difficult as any multi-panel page in the book. H

ow often in super-comics do you come across a page like this where you just kind of want to linger for a while and admire the architecture, a page that lets you imagine what it must be like to actually be in Gotham, which isn't just New York City with the Wayne tower, more gargoyles and a couple of blimps, but a distinct, videogame/playground kind of place with multiple levels of bridges and rooftops for vigilantes to swing from, jump around on and pilot their super-rocket cars over?

Wow.

Here's one more splash page, this one a lot less detailed, and featuring Jones interpretation of the current Catwoman costume (and not doing so hot with it, honestly):

I like her hands though, and the weird, cat-like posture. Artists usually interpret her feline grace as a series of either athletic or seductive poses and stretches. Here she's just kinda collapsed like a cat, and, you know, despite the rep the jungle varieties have, cats aren't always the most graceful of animals.

That's not why I scanned this page though. Look at how her dialogue was written and/or lettered.

Um, shouldn't that be "Perrrrrfect," to indicate she's purring like a cat, and thus allowing Niles to make the hoary old perfect/purr Catwoman pun, rather than "Peeeeerfect," to indicate that she's...well, I don't know what drawing out the e into a super-long e sound indicates. That Catwoman thinks she and Midnight are perfect peers...? A pun about how he was just peering at Batman through a telescope?

Bat-Pope Week: Building a better Batmobile

The original, 1966 Batman movie gets an awful lot of grief, but there’s one thing it does better than the half-dozen live action Batman movies to follow: It’s Batmobile doesn’t completely suck.

Of course, that movie had a giant penguin-shaped submarine and Bat-shark repellent in it too, so it could afford to have a completely ridiculous Batmobile in it and still not have detracted from the tone of the film at all.

That Batmobile was basically just a bitching black convertible with lots of bat-symbols all over it. Batman didn’t have to worry too much about people trying to steal his car or the cops tracing it back to him and discovering his secret identity, because that Batman was basically just a celebrity policeman. That Batmobile parked on a street corner was a little like a fire truck or ambulance parked on a street corner. Who’s going to mess with it?

The later movies all have a moment or three that just hurled me out of the worlds they were creating, and they all had to do with the Batmobile.

In the first Tim Burton movie, the Batmobile didn’t do anything too stupid, other than that weird scene where its has, like, armadillo body armor grow all over it. But in the sequel, it’s got a built-in hydraulic lift to turn around with, and a bunch of gadgets that seem built in to specifically battle an army of gothic circus clowns, should the need to do so ever arise.

By the time Joel Schumacher is moving the Batneedle back to the ‘60s with his soul-destroying fourth Batman, the Batmobile is driving up the sides of buildings thanks to a grappling hook.

I’m not sure where the limit of my suspension of disbelief is, exactly, but I know I’m perfectly willing to believe in a billionaire who dresses as a rubber bat, but not that he also drives a car that drives up the sides of buildings.

When Christopher Nolan re-booted the franchise with Batman Begins, the take was decidedly grimmer and more realistic, and the new Batmobile seemed to reflect that. It actually looked like a vehicle that could conceivably be used in a war zone, and I recall one film critic referring to its jagged design as a deconstruction of the Batmobile, a cubist nightmare coach. That’s cool. Or at least it was cool until Christian Bale had it driving over rooftops. What the hell, Nolan?

The Batmobile scene didn’t ruin The Dark Knight, or even hurt it as much as I think the Batmobile scene in Batman Begins hurt it, but it sure wasn’t a highpoint, either. Batman zipping around on the so-called “Bat-pod,” a video game adaptation ready motorcycle with comically large tires was probably the low-point of the film, but then, all of the least enjoyable parts were the ones with Batman in them.

The late, great comics blog Dave’s Long Box had one of the best pieces of writing about the Batmobile I’ve ever read, in which Dave Campbell details the ways in which it would actually be a pain in the ass for Batman:


As anyone who lives in or near a big North American city knows, urban driving can be a maddening experience. Heavy traffic, one-way streets, swerving buses, crazy-ass taxi drivers, potholes, inadequate signage, kamikaze bike messengers, oblivious pedestrians – don’t even get me going about parking. The shit is hard enough to deal with in a normal city in a normal car. Now just imagine trying to navigate Gotham City’s rat nest of streets and alleys in an extra-wide custom hot rod with a wonky torque converter and limited visibility.


Seriously, if you haven’t read that post yet, go read it. I’ll wait.

Campbell points out some of the better ways Batman has to get into town, like the subway rocket he used back when Chuck Dixon was writing three out of every five comics set in Gotham City. “Bat-train” might not roll off the tongue like “Batmobile,” but I thought it made a certain amount of sense; it kept the underground, cave motif Batman has going, and trains are old enough to fit into the gothic/ghost story/urban legend vibe of the modern Batman.

There’s also the Whirly-bat, which might look a little silly, but hell, at least he can park it on a rooftop before getting to work.

The easiest thing for Batman to do, however, would probably be to just get a couple of JLA transporter tubes to stash around town. Have one in the Batcave, one in his penthouse at Wayne Tower, and two or three around town, and he can simply zap his molecules around the city instantaneously.

Like costuming, transportation is something that Paul Pope apparently gave a lot of thought to when building the future Gotham of Batman: Year 100.

Pope’s Batman doesn’t have any kind of working relationship with the police in his world, and is more of an outlaw/vigilante type figure. In fact, the major conflict of the story is Batman vs. The Police State Who Want To Unmask Him. So his mode of transportation needs to be somewhat inconspicuous, and, because this is a Paul Pope coming, it needs to be something that makes sense (A New Yorker, Pope would know firsthand how difficult getting around a major North American city is in any kind of car, let alone in an illegal race car with a jet engine and monster truck wheels).

So his Batmobile is simply a very, very cool motorcycle, one that can be easily hidden, can be customized with a voice activated remote control and other Batman-style technological enhancements, and which can be disguised as a monster bat.

Here’s a scene of Robin building the Batmobile. The Robin in Batman: Year 100 isn’t so much a teenage sidekick or son to Batman’s father figure so much as his friend. He never wears a red costume and cape, but tinkers on Batman’s bikes and, later, dresses up in a bat-suit to fool the police into thinking Batman’s in two places at once.

Note the completely inappropriate quotation of a Marvel comic book,



and the last-minute touch of slapping on a bat-symbol sticker.

What I like most about a motorcycle for a Batmobile isn’t the practicality of the vehicle (Batman could zip through traffic easily, if he had to ditch a bike it wouldn’t be as bad as having to ditch a super-stealth rocket limo, he could hide them in dumpsters and the backs of vans or rented out ground floor warehouses or whatever, and so on), but the way Pope has Batman and Robin package them.

Here’s the Batmobile once it’s built, all folded it up and wrapped in a tarp, so that it looks like a gigantic bat:


When Batman needs his ride, it can be found hanging upside down in a sewer tunnel. If you saw this huge shape in an underground tunnel, would you dare approach it?:


A voice command from Batman gets the Batmobile to release it’s grip on the pipe, and then it can be hastily assembled into a motorcycle which Batman can ride around making bad jokes to himself about:



Here it is in all its glory; note the only slightly abstracted bat “face” on it:


And here’s another image of Batman on his bike:

Now that is a Batmobile I can believe in.