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havendance · 30 days

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Year One vs Zero Year: A Tale of Two Batmen

(You can also read this on AO3 if you want)

In the introduction to the Batman: Year One collected edition, Dennis O’Neil writes about the impetus behind the post-crisis reboot—things had become dated and it was time to revamp their most iconic characters: Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman. “The writers assigned to the task had quick and clear ideas about how to update Superman and Wonder Woman, but Batman was a problem. He was fine just as he was.” Batman: Year One was not a story that was trying to reinvent Batman, it was a story that was trying to distill him, to revisit and retell his origin for a new era of DC storytelling. Whatever you may think of Frank Miller, he and David Mazzucchelli certainly succeeded with that goal.

While I don’t have a nice clear editorial quote like that for Batman: Zero Year, it’s clear that Synder was trying to do the same with the story. Zero Year is a Batman origin for the new era of storytelling that was the New 52. It has its nods to Miller—it has to, simply existing after Year One’s influential rewrite of Bruce’s origin—but it owes far more to the Batman of the golden age in it's story beats. It is not just Batman: Year One for the New 52, it is the Batman origin of the post-flashpoint comics, it's art and storytelling reflecting this Batman of a new era.

Batman’s origin has always been consistent in its strokes: Bruce Wayne’s parents are killed by a mugger. Devastated, the young boy swears to devote his life to justice. He trains both body and mind, until finally ready to begin, a bat flies through the window, and he takes it as an sign that he should become Batman—a creature that strikes fear in the hearts of criminals. It can be summarized in a page or two to get the audience up to speed.

(Batman’s Origin as told in Batman #47)

Neither Year One nor Zero Year change any of the fundamental pieces, but the narratives that surround them are vastly different. Year One seeks to tell a Batman origin grounded in reality as much as it can. In an afterward by David Mazzuchelli in the Batman: Year One collected edition he writes that “with year one, we sought to craft a credible Batman, grounded in a world we recognize”. The main enemy that Bruce Wayne faces is corruption: in the police and in the leading families of Gotham. Beside Gordon and Alfred, the other members of the Batman mythos that are present are Selina Kyle, just beginning to put on the catsuit and Harvey Dent prior to becoming Two Face, both of them surrounded by plausibility and grit. The Joker gets a single name drop at the end. It takes up four issues and covers the span of a year, covering the emergence of Batman’s mission

In contrast, Zero Year is bombastic. It’s a story full of bright colors and fantastic events: explosions, blimp chases, and Gotham city cut off and run as the Riddler’s personal fiefdom. It’s longer—spanning 10 issues—and covers a significantly shorter period of time. In it, Batman faces the Joker, The Riddler, and a bone-mutated mad scientist foe who’s name I don’t remember. Pamela Isley and the Penguin are alluded to as well. The giant penny plays a role in the plot. It calls back to many pieces of golden age lore, such as Bruce’s Uncle Philip Kane, and his love interest Julie Madison. (For a more modern retelling of the golden age Batman’s origin, see Secret Origins (1986) #6)

(The Batman: Year One and Batman: Zero Year trades. Please also note that the Year One trade contains at least an extra issue’s worth of bonus content at the end, where the Zero Year trade only has some variant covers)

There is also a difference in attitude between the two origins. Year One is a comic that is trying to escape the bounds of genre; Zero Year is a comic that revels in it. Part of it is the tone—Year One is setting itself in contrast to the Batman of the past in its commitment to realism rather than melodrama. Part of it is the art. In terms of color, the original printing of Year One and Zero Year are very similar. In Year One, this is because of technical limitations. There are only so many colors, most of them bright, and still Richmond Lewis works to create a strong sense of atmosphere to highlight the noir-type story that is being told. Zero Year uses these colors as a deliberate homage to comics of the past. It’s filled with bright pinks, blues, yellows, and greens set in contrast to each other. It’s beautiful. It’s also a clear stylistic choice.

Richmond redid the colors of Year One for later reprintings. While beautiful, they are far more subdued and muted. It’s clearly the sort of look they wanted for Year One from the beginning, but could not achieve. In contrast, Zero Year stands out from the comics surrounding it in the first half of the New 52 precisely because everything else is illustrated in this overly realistic dull and gritty style.

(Batman #405 — original printing vs recolor)

(Batman (2011) #22 vs Batman (2011) #1 — These comics have the same colorist, but clearly different philosophies guiding them)

This can also be seen in the Batman costumes themselves. While both Year One and Zero Year are drawing from the same original Batman costume from Detective Comics #27, they take different parts. Year One’s Batman suit has a simple and streamlined black and grey. The Zero Year suit keeps the purple gloves.

(From left to right: Batman in Detective Comics #27, Batman #405, and Batman (2011) #24. While the image from Detective Comics #27 is faded, note that the gloves are purple)

This contrast isn’t just in the origins themselves—it is the comics that surround and follow them as well. Year One and Zero Year are origins for two different eras of Batman. I’ve read primarily post-crisis Batman comics and am less familiar with the pre-crisis era, so I can’t say how much of the storylines that followed were specifically picking up on Year One’s influence, and how much was just the natural change in storytelling direction, but throughout the major Batman events of the Post-Crisis era, there is a throughline of sensibilities that they share with Year One. AsYear One set out to tell the grounded origin of the Batman, so do many of the foes and challenges he faces have this grounded nature to them as well. They all still have a larger than life feel, but the foes Batman faces tend to fall into the categories of crime (Knightfall, War Games), natural disasters (Contagion, Legacy, Cataclysm), and himself (all of them, but more specifically Murderer/Fugitive and arguably a Lonely Place of Dying as well). These are events that start from a realistic starting point that are magnified. Earthquakes, outbreaks of disease, a gang war—these are all things that could happen to any city. Any man could lose a son or be framed for murder. The heightened nature of these stories is what separates them from the real world.

(Even an event like No Man’s Land, with its premise of ‘Gotham getting kicked out the United States’ that stretches the suspension of disbelief, is intensely focused on what this means for the city that remains. It cares about grounding the fantastic events in real reactions.)

In contrast, post-flashpoint events tend to have this more fantastical feel. The Night of the Owls does not put Bruce up against ordinary corruption among the elite, but against a masked conspiracy with immortal assassins at their disposal. The driving force of Robin War is not the idealism of the We Are Robin movement against a city that doesn’t like or trust them, but a power play by the Court of Owls. In Night of the Monster Men, Batman and co. fight Kaiju-like monsters; there are themes of contagion throughout the story, but this isn’t a hopeless fight against that ancient enemy of humanity that is disease, it’s a thrilling, action-packed fight. One approach is not necessarily better than the other, but they are fundamentally different paradigms of storytelling. I remember reading Night of the Monster Men at the same time as the lead up to Bruce Wayne: Murdere/Fugitive and thinking that they didn’t feel anything alike.

Unlike Year One, Zero Year does not feel like a origin point for this shift in narrative focus. The beginning of the new52, while having the benefit of being the beginning of a new era, also isn’t it—these storytelling trends could be seen in the comics leading up to Flashpoint as well. If I had to pick an event that started to show this shift, it would be Batman RIP. Morrison’s love for silver age comics and deep cuts to lore lead it to having that same fantastical feel. While the Batman of Morrison’s run is nominatively the one of Year: One, he fits more in line with the storytelling motivations of Zero Year—the callbacks to older ages (Morrisons’ Batman definitely wore the purple gloves), the extreme feats of survival, the larger than life events. Year One was an origin for an era that had come to an end.

A new Batman origin was inevitable, if for no other reason than the constant passage of time. One of the big differences between Year One and Zero Year is the sheer difference in the type of technology Batman uses in each. In Year One, there is no Bat-Computer. Bruce has his grappling hooks, his smoke bombs, his ultrasonic device that summons hoards of bats—It’s all far too simple for a Batman of today’s world. Zero Year has computers everywhere and Batman’s gadgets are upgrading to fit the glitz and advancement of the modern era. The New52 gave DC the chance to revisit it and for better or for worse, no one could call Zero Year, ‘Year One only set 30 years later’. Both works are products of their times, and both works show the audience not only the basic beats of Bruce’s origin, but also what a Batman story looks like. Together, they show the way that he has evolved as a character over the years. Maybe in 15 years, DC will put out another origin epic for Batman. Chances are, he’ll have changed yet again.

#dc #batman #bruce wayne #bats + birds + affiliated #batman year one #batman zero year #batman: year one #batman: zero year #meta #havendance writes #<-this counts #carthago delenda est

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