#batcomics meta

[fiapple]

something i love about huntress (1989) is just how succintly its opening scene builds up helena as a character & the overall themes of her narrative.

the comic opens on western society’s prototypical idea of a victim, a young white woman (that fact having its own horrid political history should be acknowledged)- fashionable for her era- walking alone at night, and being followed by a man with a knife.

Immediately, the scene visually cuts between the young woman & helena, tying them together in the eyes of the audience. it then plays out as so:

Huntress (1989) #1 by Joey Cavalier & Joe Staton

Both through the very explicit paralleling of the two women, and the lamp-shading thereof on the writer's part within the scene itself, helena is framed within the eyes of the audience as someone who herself has once been a victim. the creative team presents you with the one most archetypal examples of a victim they possibly could, though, again, the problems within the history of that fact can't be ignored either- one that for all its commonplace is still powerless and meek as ever, and said "our hero has once been her."

"I knew somebody with a name like that... a long time ago..."

By allowing the audience access information so early on, the creative team is quickly able to position helena as existent within a dichotomy of the struggle between the ongoing disempowerment of trauma, and the fight to regain one's sense of power thereafter, as seen through the lens of non-linear trauma recovery. It is planting the seeds of what will grow to be a major theme in helena's arc.

Additionally, it very quickly posits helena as a character who is, in part, motivated by the phantom of her own vicitimization. She is very quickly suggested to the audience to be a character that is doing this- doing all she can to fight, stave off, prevent acts of violence- as a form of penance both to herself and to the world for the moments in her own life in which she was unable to do so. It is put into the mind of the reader that she is followed by the wraith of her own suffering, and of knowing that the weight of trauma is one that others can also be forced to bear.

This is further reinforced by the immediate narrative focus the collaborators chose to place on helena as a figure of compassion. from her first scene in main canon, her focal point is the victim, so much so that when choosing to return to the scene to comfort the young woman, she is able to notice something as innocuous as a wallet and return it. Moreover, due to its atypical nature in the context of comics, the 'alley-way victim' being named with such a sense of gravity in this scene takes on an added layer of importance besides the aforementioned. The victim is humanized, emphasizing their centering in helena's concious motives. To further compound this, the first time we ever see helena speak on-panel is when she chooses to comfort this young woman. her words, her actions, her passion are all motivated by her own needs & wounds, yes- but the victim, the person being hurt, that is what is at the centre of them. if further evidence were required, one may even point to the fact that the first face we see at all is that of the victim's.

And, emphasizing the overall themes present within the introduction to an even more extreme extent, is the nature of the visual story-telling taking place on pages 4 & 5.

Page 4 begins with helena fighting the perp, her back turned away from the audience, but ends with her walking toward us, body language confident. This draws our attention both to helena's capacity to be imposing, to inhabit the position of the unknown in order to illicate fear, and to helena's individual power as a character.

Conversely, the first time we see helena on page 5, when her face is finally revealed to the audience, she is talking to the victim. It ends with her back to the audience, standing as if fixed in her position, taking up fairly equal panel space with her fellow as she watches helena k. walk off, and falls into a memory. this places the audience's focus on the fact that helena b. is just as, if not more so, consumed by her victimhood as her counterpart.

(this also sets up the following scene, in which we are given helena's backstory, exceedingly well btw)

Moreover, the visual choice to hide her face temporarily gives helena a sense of being quite guarded as a person, which will be expanded upon later, and shows that the dedication to character building started very early-on for Stanton & Cavalieri, which i really appreciate.

From the first breath of life given to her story, helena is deliciously presented as a byronic heroine- an unusual type of female character to see at all, let alone in comics- and it is done through focus on her agency as a character & her dominating sense of compassion for others.

Truly, I adore beyond my heart’s capacity just how much Staton & Cavalieri chose to dedicate their opening to showing just how much Helena is a character who finds the power to find personal redemption, empowerment, & rebirth- as violent and bloody as that rebirth may grow to be- in the ability she has to do good unto others, to try to allow them to retain the innocence that was taken from her by force & the closure she was denied. They put such energy into making it clear that she is a character so very deeply driven by a sense of compassion, one so consuming it may as well be keeping her heart in chains, and they portray it as equally served by her violence as tender-heartedness. it’s enrapturing, it’s enchanting. like, really, heart’s honour, i live for it.

[de-vespertiliones]

Yes, this. And also it's a question of whose life gets privileged, and it's a much harder question than "can anyone be redeemed?"

For instance: even if you assume anyone can, theoretically, at some point seek redemption, if people are literal mass murderers, what does it mean to privilege their potential redemption over the actual, literal people who they murder all the time.

The trick of batcomics in particular is that the people who get murdered are generally not major characters (or even characters at all). They're functionally statistics even before they actually become statistics. But if we attribute basic humanity to narrative canon fodder, it becomes even more of a pressing question: what does it mean to privilege the potential redemption of mass-murderer over the thousands of people they kill?

There's a boring (but true) argument that Jason is a mass-murderer himself, but his actions as a killer and say, the Joker's, aren't really equivalent (I'm skipping a long argument here that I can make if necessary) but the question remains intractable: what about the casualties?

I think, storytelling issues aside, this is part of why Jason is in such a weird narrative place in current continuity. He, someone who was murdered, who showed up and actually articulated the above question, presents an intractable problem for Batman. Batman's rogues can't, for meta reasons, ever be contained (or killed). Jason's presence, constantly asking the question of casualties, of collateral damage, is a constant challenge to the morality of Batman as a character and it literally doesn't have an answer.

Sorry, long ramble, but I love this so much and wanted to add thoughts!

Jason's point isn't about whether or not villains can be redeemed, it's about the people they continue to kill (potentially but not necessarily on their way to redemption).

[benbamboozled]

I actually don’t really agree with this meta!

I think—especially in the post-nu52-verse—that Jason’s issue is that he feels that his sacrifice wasn’t meaningful to a troubling degree because he feels like he isn’t meaningful. (And that the narrative tends to reinforce this message.)

Like, Jason very much understands that his death wasn’t meaningful in the grand scheme of things.

That’s sort of the entire plot of Under the Hood—that Jason’s death was, ultimately, ~just another death~ in a long, LONG string of deaths caused by The Joker.

The entire plot is Jason wanting his death to be meaningful to Bruce, specifically. The whole “Jason taking the name of his murderer” thing—that is to play into Bruce’s mythologizing of his pain.

And the whole plot of that story, the emotional arc driving it, is all based around Jason wanting his dad to show that Jason’s death meant something.

The reason why it has so much emotional resonance with people is because it’s NOT about a big grand epic. It’s just—at its heart—a hurt kid who wants recognition from his father that his death (and by extension, his life) mattered.

(Bruce: BATARANG!!!)

(Which is, imo, not a totally unreasonable wish for a child to have of their parent. It’s just that Bruce and Jay live in comic book world where the dead can live again and the stakes are “personal moral code vs the life of a clown-themed mass murdering serial killer.”)

Outside of that, Jason 1) pretty regularly has his death (and the circumstances leading up to it) mocked to his face (sometimes by his family), and 2) often blames himself in his own head/narrative for his death…

So, I just don’t see that Jason’s canon issues, pre-or-post-nu52 stem from self-mythologizing—at least any more than any character in a Batcomic does (because, you know, it’s kind of tied up in the premise of the books).

Pre-Flashpoint Jason’s issues manifest from not feeling recognized on a personal level because of the connections he built with people, and he tends to react to that in a hostile way—wanting recognition from people who knew him (Bruce, the Titans, Dick).

Post-nu52 tends to internalize it—neither his life nor death are worth recognizing on a personal level (pretty much everything Lobdell!Jay).

Source is Red Hood and the Outlaws: Rebirth #10

i am once again thinking about jason self mythologising. 

self mythologising is all about making events in your life bigger and more meaningful than they are. it’s about creating a narrative. giving sense to what happened to you. 

it’s a natural coping mechanism, but i think it would be even easier for jason, especially with his interest in literature. he would view his life as a tragedy, the way the other people did; and he would try to walk away from it, and end up self mythologising even further. he doesn’t want to be a robin martyr, so he invents the red hood. he takes his murderer’s name, like he just took a class in literary irony 101. he’s writing his own story, but he’s still using symbols, he’s intellectualising. 

so he’s still trapped in a narrative. it might seem like one of his making, but it’s focused on his trauma. he’s trying to reclaim it, even though sometimes there’s nothing of value to find in your pain.

what jason needs to realise is that his life is not some greek tragedy nor a great epic. sometimes bad things happen and you need to overcome them rather than internalise them forever and reinvent in hopes that they will work in your favour. 

i guess sometimes it’s easier to gnaw at open wounds to try to find a purposeful explanation than admit that your “sacrifice” wasn’t meaningful. that you lost everything for nothing, and now have to start almost anew. starting over is lonely. healing is lonely. there’s no misery for companion. 

[thequiver]

I’m always a sucker for Green Arrow: Quiver and think it gives what’s sort of a nice explanation of all the things that came before, and while Green Arrow (2001) that immediately follows that has MANY issues that I’ll gladly talk about at length, if you want the classic fam that’s where to go.

Unlike Batcomics, Green Arrow is typically written as one run, and barring reboots you can typically find a fairly cohesive and continuous narrative across different runs. Unfortunately this does make it harder to get into the comics by just reading a particular arc as you’d sort of be coming in mid-story and many arcs are split across an entire run rather than just being a few issues in a row.

If you want to start with older comics I can’t recommend O’Neil’s run followed by GL/GA, and then the Grell’s works enough (both his actual Green Arrow stories ex, Wonder Year, Hunter’s Moon, etc, but also Shado: Song of the Dragon). O’Neil and Grell actually talked and communicated about their shared vision for the characters and their stories and it’s SUCH a compelling narrative and it really shows Ollie at his best and worst but that he’s always a man striving to be better than he was the day before.

I’m personally a huge fan of Silver Age Ollie and Roy cause they’re soft 🥰

Connor’s time as Green Arrow is largely defined by Chuck Dixon’s writing, and while he writes a great Connor, he writes a VERY VERY BAD Ollie and as such I wouldn’t recommend reading Dixon’s run until AFTER O’Neil’s and Grell’s (coincidentally Dixon picks up that consistent narrative from Grell so this works nicely).

Mia is introduced in Quiver and is then featured in the 2001 run mentioned above.

Emiko is introduced in the N52, but I’d primarily recommend her appearances in Green Arrow: Rebirth, I also have some criticisms about Rebirth that I’d be happy to link you to, but overall it is a good starting place to help ease new readers into Green Arrow, but it should be noted that Rebirth only has Roy and Emiko and not Connor and Mia.

The current Robin run’s Connor isn’t Connor. N52 Roy isn’t Roy (Rebirth Roy is also pretty far off). N52 Mia is not Mia. Just….. don’t go there for your own sake.

Additionally! You can’t really find things for these characters in their own tags BUT at @arrowfam-week-2021 we have reading lists, meta, fanart, etc. for the characters available under the character tag for convenience!

Hope this helps!

What's a good comic series you'd recommend to someone who's never picked up an arrowfam-related comic and who knows little about them?

I've been interested in reading beyond batfam lately and arrowfam is on my list of supers I'd like to know more about

Thanks!

I always recommend people start small with any comics family! So definitely the Arsenal mini! I want to recommend Snowbirds Don't Fly but without the added context of the rest of GL/GA u may get the wrong idea about Ollie (he's such a good dad). I also really like those old Seven Soliders of Victory stories even if Roy is blonde. And the Stargirl one shot that came out this summer has some great Emiko moments and again the 7 Soliders! Lian has some great moments in Titans vol 1 as does Grant so Roy's kids thrive there but quality may be an issue foe some of the issues. Im rambling now and Im at work so im basically gonna pass the buck to

@thequiver and @overheard-over-chili

🧡🧡🧡🧡