Still working on a few more serious re-reads. They are, as you might guess, more work both in the re-reading and in the consideration of what to say as a result.
But I did find this comic that I recently turned up in a stack taken from one of my long boxes and remembered that I had found this storyline especially good. As I re-read it, I found myself thinking about the technical challenge of writing serially for long-running shared-universe franchises like super heroes and soap operas and about how really skilled writers able to work in this context are underappreciated.
Chuck Dixon is a good example of that kind of skilled writer. He’s not one of those comics writers who’ve achieved a level of mainstream fame, but he’s written a great many of the kind of stories that make comic-book superheroes durable and satisfying. He generally doesn’t write genre-redefying or character-redefining work. He had an especially productive period of writing for multiple titles associated with the character Batman and his supporting cast—including Detective Comics #707.
Why did this issue make me think about how hard it is to do that kind of writing, and how underappreciated that difficulty is even by comics fans? Well, the villain in this issue, the conclusion of a three-issue storyline, is the Riddler. And that right there is the heart of the challenge.
Fans of Batman and his famously memorable “rogues gallery” of enemies sometimes complain that very few of his villains get strong storylines or writing, most particularly the Riddler and the Penguin. (The Joker, on the other hand, is widely regarded as over-used and over-exposed, even before Heath Ledger’s memorable last performance in The Dark Knight.) Part of the problem is that in contemporary comics writing (since the end of the 1990s onward), a “good” story focusing on a particular villain is expected to deepen and complicate the character’s motivations, the nature of his enmity with his superhero antagonist, and to offer some significant re-interpretation of the character.
In the case of Batman’s enemies, leaving aside the Joker, that’s happened for a number of characters. The Batman animated series made by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm famously introduced Harley Quinn, but it also completely reinterpreted Mister Freeze in a way that distinguished him from three or four other DC villains who had freezing guns and gave him a distinctive and melancholic reason for its actions. They also refurbished Clock King, previously a completely pointless character associated with Green Arrow. In the comics, several arcs by different writers dramatically sharpened the character of Poison Ivy, who had just been a conventional seductress who had plants under her command.
The Penguin and the Riddler, on the other hand, didn’t really get a major reinterpretation in either the comics or the animated series that really stuck and seemed right. Both characters just have some basic conceptual problems. With the Penguin, if you want to sort him out, you have to decide whether to simply make him a mob boss with a name (a gritty makeover like what Frank Miller did with the Kingpin), to make him a grotesque (like Dick Tracy’s villains or like the cinematic version played by Danny de Vito), or to keep him a campy supervillain with trick umbrellas and a bird fetish.
I suppose someone could come up with a startling new interpretation or twist that gives the Riddler a durable new feel or stabilizes his characterization. The current film The Batman is working that angle, for one. There have been attempts—Tom King’s recent “War of Jokes and Riddles” (which really was more like a new interpretation of Kite Man, curiously enough) or Peter Milligan’s curious insertion of the Riddler into a story about summoning a demon who is the secret heart of Gotham and possibly the creator of Batman. Paul Dini did some interesting work with trying to rethink the Riddler as a kind of ambivalent possible-ally for Batman, going straight (sort of) by becoming a private detective.
I think mostly people working on Batman want to avoid The Riddler. Or they want to put him in stories where he’s a side character or his gimmicks get sidetracked or overridden. In the first major story to feature the character Bane, most of Batman’s antagonists get involved somehow, but the Riddler gets stuck on a minor crime, gets frustrated because Batman’s too busy to bother with him, takes some people hostage and then gets taken down easily by Robin. In a memorable attempt to re-launch the villain King Tut, the Riddler gets involved as a reluctant partner for Batman due to Tut’s use of riddles.
But why do I think they want to avoid a full-on Riddler story? The character’s got a great schtick in his classic manifestation. Maybe it’s the intrinsic camp of his modus operandi (with his Frank Gershin-invoking green leotard) that makes modern writers devoted to the serious and brooding Batman decline a Riddler story. They know they can’t just turn him homicidal—not only is that not his thing generally, to the point that his lack of murderousness is often a story beat in a Riddler story, but to do so would just court the accusation that the writer was making the Riddler just like the Joker. I don’t think it’s primarily the camp, though.
I think it’s mostly that writing a great Riddler story means writing great riddles and coupling them to a great criminal scheme.
Write bad, corny, easily solved riddles and you’ve undercut the character’s core. Write a dumb crime scheme that makes no rational sense—or has no connection with the riddles—and you don’t have the usual out that the Joker presents (that his plans can be insane or weird or incoherent). In most versions, he doesn’t have an obsessive drive—no one he’s seeking revenge against, nothing he hates. He just wants to baffle the Batman and get away with committing a crime that could have been stopped if only the Batman had been smart enough.
So the riddles have to be smart enough that it’s plausible that Batman and all his allies are stymied by them but fair enough that when they’re answered, the reader agrees that they were good riddles. The scheme has to be smart enough that there’s no alternative for Batman but to play the Riddler’s game. (The current movie does that much brilliantly, if grimly.) That is a really tough challenge for a writer handed a Riddler assignment.
Which brings me back to Dixon and Detective Comics #707. The story is really a beautiful piece of clockwork plotting over three issues. The Riddler’s two sidekicks stage an attack on the roof of the Gotham Police Department which is a kind of double misdirection—on one hand, to distract from the Riddler’s escape from police custody (he’s in a prison hospital, elsewhere). They seem to be after a hostage in the headquarters building, but it turns out they’ve got another minor Batman villain, Cluemaster (who has a Riddler-like gimmick) in tow. The police figure it’s a team-up and the bad guys are working together; in any event, the double misdirection leads to two successful escapes.
The core of the story is that it’s not a team-up at all. The Riddler affixes an explosive vest to Cluemaster that’s triggered to blow if tampered with and instructs Batman to go pick up Cluemaster and to keep a cellphone open at all times to the Riddler while he’s with the hapless villain. If Batman doesn’t solve the riddles he’ll be given one after the other, the Riddler will trigger the vest and blow up Cluemaster and Batman both. Any attempt to tamper or trick will meet the same response.
It’s a great multi-layered story structure from that point on. Batman has to communicate surreptitiously with his allies (Robin and Oracle) to get help and plan while also playing by the Riddler’s rules AND to deal with having a minor supervillain in the passenger’s seat next to him in the Batmobile. In the meantime, the Riddler is preparing for a major theft and figuring that even if Batman understands what his target is, he’ll be pinned down solving riddles in order to save Cluemaster’s life. Which IS the one thing that amounts to a revenge motivation for the Riddler—the Cluemaster intruded on his personal gimmick and he’s annoyed by that.
In this issue, Batman and Cluemaster escape an unintended encounter with some mobsters burying a victim that incidentally gives Batman some breathing room (they’re in a tunnel that cuts off the signal to the phone) and lets him switch Cluemaster into Robin’s custody (with Robin using a voice modulator to sound like Batman). (Fortunately this is an early flip phone with no visuals…) Robin has a sudden realization of what the meta-theme of the Riddler’s various riddles is (it’s baseball), and the Bat-team zeroes in on the crime (stealing a valuable early piece of baseball memorabilia scheduled to be auctioned tomorrow, though why anybody with anything of value allows it to be in Gotham City is beyond me).
The Riddler isn’t murderous in the story, but he’s willing to murder if need be—his willingness to blow up Cluemaster seems genuine, and he makes a serious effort to blow up both Robin and Cluemaster late in the story when he realizes he’s been tricked. And yet the story remains “light” in multiple ways and both the riddles and the crime scheme are genuinely clever and really quite tightly developed—there’s no tricks or distractions.
It’s the kind of comic-book adventure that somehow straddles the artificial “child-like” feel of the post-Comics Code “Silver Age” and the more grimdark mode of much contemporary comic-book storytelling (especially with Batman). (The cover is far more gruesome and vivid than anything in any of the three issues.) As such, I doubt it’s in anybody’s Top Ten Best Batman Stories Ever, though I think it might easily be one of the Top Ten Riddler Stories by any reckoning. But I think the ease of how the story reads might blind many readers to how hard it is to plot something this well.