Batman: Year One

AUTHOR: Miller, Frank

ARTIST: David Mazzucchelli (illustrator); Richmond Lewis (colorist); Todd Klein (letterer)

PUBLISHER: DC Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1987

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1988

Publication History

Batman: Year One was first published by DC Comics as a single-format, four-issue story in the regular Batman comics series. Known for his dark and violent crime-laden stories and accompanying noir-inspired artwork, writer Frank Miller first worked in comics purely as an artist, notably collaborating with Chris Claremont on Wolverine and illustrating Roger McKenzie’s Daredevil scripts before taking on the writing duties. Miller had previously worked with artist David Mazzucchelli on Daredevil: Born Again (1986).

Batman: Year One is a prequel to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and is part of what Miller terms the “Dark Knight universe,” which includes Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Spawn/Batman (1994), Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001), and All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder (2005-2008). These stories occur on DC Comics’ Earth-31, one of fifty-two realities created after the events of Infinite Crisis.

One of DC Comics’ best-selling titles, Batman: Year One was collected in a trade paperback edition in 1988. A deluxe edition was produced in 2005.

Plot

Spanning an approximately twelve-month period, Batman: Year One tells of Batman’s first attempts to tackle crime and corruption in Gotham City and the genesis of his alliance with James Gordon. In the first chapter, twenty-five-year-old Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham after twelve years abroad and assumes control of Wayne Enterprises. On the same day, Lieutenant Gordon arrives in Gotham to a police department beset by corruption and violence. Gordon’s wife, Barbara, is pregnant, and Gordon is reluctant to bring up a child in a place such as Gotham.

After a month, Gordon is making headway combating corruption, much to Detective Arnold John Flass and Commissioner Gillian B. Loeb’s chagrin. Flass and other fellow cops beat up Gordon as a warning to curtail his investigation. To show he will not be intimidated, Gordon beats up Flass in retaliation, drawing on his army training.

In disguise, Wayne ventures into Gotham’s dangerous East End. After defending a young streetwalker named Holly, he gets into a fight with her pimp. Holly stabs Wayne in the leg for his trouble. Selina Kyle, Holly’s protector and a dominatrix, joins the fracas. The police arrive, and Wayne is shot and arrested. Wayne soon escapes and returns to Wayne Manor, bleeding heavily. Before calling for Alfred’s help, Wayne searches himself for a way to make criminals afraid. A bat crashes through the study window, triggering a childhood memory of being scared by a bat. He takes it as a sign and resolves to assume a bat’s appearance.

In the second chapter, Gordon single-handedly resolves a hostage situation while simultaneously angering special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team leader Branden. He is hailed as a hero by the media.

Wayne ventures out for the first time as Batman, confronting three teenage burglars on a fire escape. The Batman visage scares them at first, but the situation soon deteriorates. Batman knocks one off the fire escape but manages to save him from falling to his death while the other two continue to attack. Batman prevails, barely, and acknowledges that he is a “lucky amateur.”

A month later, Gordon investigates Batman after seventy-eight assaults on criminals have been attributed to him. Detective Sarah Essen joins the investigation. Detective Flass recounts an encounter with Batman, much to the police department’s amusement—no one else believes that Batman is not human. Commissioner Loeb is not particularly concerned about Batman’s vigilantism; however, when Batman threatens Loeb, mob figure Carmine Falcone, and Gotham’s mayor at a dinner party, Loeb quickly changes his mind. Batman soon escalates his agenda of terrorizing powerful Gotham crime figures.

Gordon thinks go-getter assistant district attorney Harvey Dent may be Batman, while Detective Essen suspects Bruce Wayne. Gordon and Essen cross paths with Batman when they both try to stop a runaway delivery van. Batman stops the van, saving several civilians in the process. As police arrive, Batman is chased and shot in the leg before he holes up in an abandoned building. Branden’s SWAT team is called in and drops a bomb on the building.

In the third chapter, Batman escapes the blast by sheltering himself in the building’s basement. The SWAT team searches the building’s ruins while Gordon watches, ruminating on Batman’s selfless exploits.

Batman disables the SWAT team but is in danger of being caught as dawn approaches. Low on gadgets, he uses a device that attracts a swarm of bats from the Batcave under Wayne Manor. Under the cover of thousands of bats, a wounded Batman fights his way out and escapes.

Gordon investigates Wayne, trying to link him to Batman, but comes up empty-handed. Gordon also reassesses his idea of Batman as a criminal, and he begins an affair with Essen. Wayne decides he needs Gordon as an ally. Meanwhile, inspired by Batman’s exploits, Selina Kyle buys a cat suit and begins her career as the burglar Catwoman.

In the fourth chapter, as Gordon’s prosecution of corrupt cops continues, Commissioner Loeb tries to protect himself by blackmailing Gordon with pictures of him kissing Detective Essen. Gordon instead tells his wife about the affair and continues his crusade.

With Detective Flass indicted on corruption charges, Gordon, Barbara, and their newborn son become targets of Loeb and Falcone. Wayne reasons that Gordon will be targeted and races to Gordon’s home, deliberately coming to his aid as Wayne, rather than Batman, in order to gain his trust. Gordon is called out to a hoax crime but soon realizes he has been tricked, returning home to find Barbara and the baby being held hostage. Gordon shoots at the criminals, allowing Barbara to get away; however, the criminals speed off with the baby.

Gordon and Wayne pursue the criminals, who crash their car on a bridge after Gordon shoots out a tire. Gordon struggles with the remaining criminal, and the baby falls over the railing. Wayne dives after the baby and catches the child before he hits the water. Gordon realizes that Wayne is Batman but plays dumb, claiming to be unable to see without his glasses. At the conclusion of Year One, Batman and Gordon’s alliance is further cemented by the introduction of a new threat—the Joker.

Characters

•Batman, a.k.a. Bruce Wayne, the protagonist, is a handsome, twenty-five-year-old bachelor and heir to the Wayne Enterprises fortune. After twelve years abroad training himself to physical perfection, Wayne returns to begin a crusade against Gotham’s crime and corruption. Batman’s first attempts at crime fighting are far from confident. Miller’s Batman is fallible and lucky, continuously questioning his own ability. In his first year as a crime fighter, he only begins to come to terms with the depth of his mission.

•Lieutenant James Gordon is a glasses-wearing, mustached member of the Gotham City police force. He reluctantly begins a new life in Gotham with his pregnant wife, Barbara. Gordon is confronted by endemic police corruption yet pursues a hard line even after physical harassment. He has a no-nonsense attitude but struggles when dealing with his personal life.

•Commissioner Loeb is the obese, smug, corrupt head of the Gotham City Police Department, with links to organized crime. Loeb is self-important and self-indulgent, more worried about winning elections than stopping crime. He is instrumental in organizing the abduction of Gordon’s child.

•Detective Flass is a solidly built, corrupt detective in the Gotham City Police Department. He is an arrogant, selfish, and violent bully. After being indicted on corruption charges, Flass turns informant to help bring down organized crime.

•Catwoman, a.k.a. Selina Kyle, is a hot-tempered dominatrix working in the seedy East End of Gotham. Inspired by Batman’s exploits, she adopts the persona of Catwoman.

•Carmine Falcone, a.k.a. The Roman, is the calculating and suave head of organized crime in Gotham.

•Detective Sarah Essen is a Gotham City police detective who has an affair with James Gordon, which compromises his anticorruption efforts. Essen requests a transfer from Gotham to end their relationship.

•Alfred Pennyworth is Wayne’s butler and confidante. Alfred has training in combat medicine. He has a sarcastic attitude toward Wayne and his life as Batman.

Artistic Style

Mazzucchelli appropriately interprets Miller’s script as a noir piece and therefore makes heavy use of silhouettes and shadows reminiscent of Miller’s own artwork. Gotham is suitably dark, gloomy, and atmospherically menacing. Mazzucchelli also continues Miller’s use of panels resembling television screens when depicting media and associated story elements. Inspired by early detective comics and Bob Kane’s original Batman design, Mazzucchelli portrays Batman with a credible, realistic physique, one that would allow him to climb up the side of a building while still wearing a heavy cape and boots.

Colors are muted and generally consist of grays, blacks, browns, and ochres, with many panels having a three-color palette. Primary colors are used minimally. The coloring is often flat, leaving the inking to provide shades.

Lettering is personalized for Batman/Wayne and for Gordon. In opposition to the standard practice of using all capital letters, Batman/Wayne’s voice-overs appear in cursive, resembling handwritten diary entries. Gordon’s voice-overs are written using normal sentence-style capitalization. The boxes for both characters’ voice-overs have ragged edges and resemble ripped pieces of paper, representing the fragmentation of both characters’ thoughts.

Themes

Corruption is a major theme of Batman: Year One. This theme particularly applies to Gordon. Having been transferred after a failed attempt to bring down a corrupt cop, Gordon is faced with worse corruption in Gotham. Gordon loathes Gotham but works to achieve results, even when faced with violence. However, he is tempted and falls for his female coworker, Detective Essen.

Miller’s use of noir archetypes presents Barbara Gordon as “the good woman” and Essen as a pseudo “femme fatale.” While he has resisted the endemic police corruption, Gordon has been corrupted by Essen, which leads to his being blackmailed. Gordon, however, finds a kind of redemption in confessing to Barbara. More important, the confession allows him to continue his fight against police corruption. Nonetheless, neither Batman nor Gordon “wins.” While Loeb resigns, Flass is convicted, and Falcone becomes mired in the beginning of a mob turf war, Gotham’s corruption remains. As corruption looks to be impossible to rout, Gordon concedes that help must come from outside the law, in the form of Batman. Similarly, Wayne’s life can be seen as having been corrupted by the murder of his parents when he was a child, pushing him to create Batman to redeem a corrupted Gotham, a goal that can never be achieved.

A second theme presented is trust. Both Gordon and Wayne arrive in Gotham as outsiders, alone and virtually friendless. Wayne’s transformation into Batman succeeds because of his trusting relationship with his butler, Alfred. Batman resolves that he must have an ally, which means he must build trust with Gordon.

Similarly, after having an affair, Gordon must regain the trust of his wife in order to be fully effective in his fight against corruption. Gordon does not regain his wife’s complete trust by the end of the story, and corruption in Gotham continues. The story posits that without trust, justice cannot be achieved, which is demonstrated by Gordon and Batman’s inability to completely eliminate corruption.

Impact

Like The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One is a revisionary comic that, while keeping Batman’s origin true to the original vision of artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger, rewrites Batman and the complete Batman cast of characters. While adapted from works of Kane, Finger, and Jerry Robinson, Miller’s Batman is an original creation. He displays little of the trademark scowls and anger that characterize the “older” Batman. Miller’s Batman is unsure of himself as he takes his first steps in crime fighting, and he is far from the accomplished crime fighter typically presented. Miller’s Batman is human and fallible. Wayne is not yet fully immersed in the Batman role in Year One, though Miller emphasizes the psychological split between the Bruce Wayne and Batman personas.

Most important, Miller rewrites the Gordon-Batman relationship with Gordon’s realization that Batman is Wayne and his choice to keep the knowledge secret. Gordon becomes not an ignorant cop, as in some of his previous incarnations, but a true ally. Year One is as much about Gordon as it is about Batman. Gordon’s struggles with impending fatherhood, his attraction to another detective, and police corruption make him a well-rounded character and ground the story in realism.

Batman: Year One has contributed significantly to comics being treated as a serious literary medium. In addition to inspiring a number of other comics dealing with the early years of popular heroes, Year One has become Batman’s authoritative origin story. Other stories that have expanded upon Batman’s early years include Batman: Year Two (1987), Batman: Year Three (1989), Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (1989-2007), Batman: The Man Who Laughs (2005), Batman: The Long Halloween (1996-1997), and Batman: Dark Victory (1999-2000). In 2005, Batman: Year One was ranked number one by IGN Comics in its list of the twenty-five greatest Batman graphic novels.

Films

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (a.k.a. Batman: The Animated Movie). Directed by Eric Radomski and Bruce W. Timm. Warner Bros., 1993. This film stars Kevin Conroy as the voice of Batman and Stacy Keach as the voice of Phantasm. Flashback scenes reference Batman: Year One, showing an inexperienced Wayne fighting street thugs and being cornered in a building by a SWAT team.

Batman Begins. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Warner Bros., 2005. This adaptation, starring Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Gary Oldman as James Gordon, directly references Batman: Year One through its use of the characters Commissioner Loeb, Detective Flass, and Carmine Falcone. Other references include Wayne’s return to Gotham after an extended absence, his clothing while walking in the East End, his use of a device to attract bats from his cave headquarters, and Gordon’s announcement regarding the Joker in the concluding scene.

Further Reading

Brubaker, Ed, and Doug Mahnke. Batman: The Man Who Laughs (2005).

Loeb, Jeph, and Tim Sale. Batman: Dark Victory (1999-2000).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Batman: The Long Halloween (1996-1997).

Bibliography

Klock, Geoff. How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. New York: Continuum, 2006.

Murphy, Graham J. “Gotham (K)Nights: Utopianism, American Mythology, and Frank Miller’s Bat(-topia).” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 4, no. 2 (2008).

Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2007.