Posted By Phil Redbeard on February 11, 2013

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” – a proverb

Wayne of Gotham

My introduction to comics and the comic book world has come almost exclusively through film adaptations. I am interested in comics, and know from several reliable sources to be great entertainment, they’re engrossing stories interwoven with spectacular artwork, but the serial nature of the comic book and the fact that each one must be purchased separately has been a barrier to my hopping over to my nearest comic book shop and picking up the next issue of Batman (or whomever.)

However, I will always think about picking up a paperback if it catches my attention. I found Wayne of Gotham as I was browsing my local Barnes and Noble. I opened it up and read the first page and started reading. Straight away I was gripped. I simply had to find out where the story was taking me…

In almost every Batman story I had ever heard, seen, or read, Bruce Wayne’s father Thomas Wayne exists only to get gunned down in an alley to give Bruce the rage and darkness he needs to become the Dark Knight. In these stories, Thomas is barely more than a Redshirt, a character who is only important because he dies.

What will always fascinate me is a story that digs deeper, that fills out the blank edges of the map, and that pulls back the curtain on what we don’t see. As much as I love Batman as a character, I very much want to know about the broader canvas of his life. Who is Batman’s father? Who is Bruce Wayne’s mother? What did she bring to the world? In glossing over the details of a protagonist’s background, there is a risk that some richness is lost. Sure, most of us have great relationships with at least one parent, or can at least understand what parents are supposed to mean to us emotionally, and therefore we understand Bruce Wayne’s reaction to their sudden and violent death, at least on some level. But, emotion punches harder and tragedy strikes all the more potent when we understand who Thomas and Martha Wayne were, and what their light added to the world.

Tracy Hickman gives us all that and more in Wayne of Gotham. The present and the past intertwine as Bruce Wayne investigates his oldest closed case: his parent’s murder. Along the way, he gradually discovers that his father was not the man he always admired, that Thomas Wayne was capable of dark depths and horrible secrets. At the same time, the elder Wayne was every inch the crusader for a better world that Bruce had always imagined. In the end, Bruce discovers that his father is entirely human, full of mistakes and majesty.

It is a discovery that every child eventually makes about their parents, but it was not until that “moment that Bruce Wayne realized he really knew nothing of his father beyond the belief that he was a noble and good man who had died senselessly in the arms of his son…yet now he was being confronted by the stark reality of [his] past, which…he was loath to know” that moment being the methodical hunting for a murder in Batman’s present concurrent with Bruce’s uncovering of Dr. Thomas Wayne’s shady medical experiments in the past, and the revealing knowledge of how the two are unbelievably intertwined. Hickman brings a lofty superhero story down to the everyman level while losing none of the crime fighting grandeur.

Packed in the dark, grimy corners of a son’s discovery of his father, there is everything you would expect from a Batman story: gadgets, rogues, and shadows. If Hickman has a fault in his story it is that of a nerdish attention to detail. When describing Batman’s current suit, or mobile, or toys, he gets just a tad obsessive in the description. The reader is forced to slog through a mishmash of pseudo-science and straight up technobabble, which is meaningless and therefore boring. It is cool to know Batman’s suit enhances his strength, or allows him to see in the dark, or that his car has auto navigation, but the reader really doesn’t need to understand how it works, just that it does. To be fair, I have found that this particular flaw exists beyond Wayne of Gotham. Pick up any theme book, be it Star Wars, Star Trek, comic, or even spy, and you will see this excitement for the universe crowds out the story. Warp drives, lightsabers, Batsuits, and Bond’s gadgets are cool, but the story is more important than any of that.

All of those details should be made to serve the story, not the other way round. If the reader really needs to understand how a particular thing works so that such working reveals something about a character, then all systems are go. But, when you find the author has stopped telling you why Batman is wearing his suit to instead list and describe the sproings and sprockets and gobbledygook of the suit, then you know you have lost the plot. Nothing wrong there, necessarily, but probably better saved for the USS Enterprise Technical Manual and not the heart-wrenching story about those brave few who go where no one has gone before.

Similarly, but not quite as badly done, are the references, both subtle and overt, to Batman’s rogue’s gallery. Sometimes it seemed like a reference to Scarecrow or some other villain seemed a little forced, and when the Joker shows [spoiler!] he seems only to serve his own cameo and not really add to the story. In fact, in the scene, Bruce Wayne is so consumed with being elsewhere that it really seems odd that he wouldn’t stop to fight his arch nemesis. Batman exits the premises as fast as possible and nothing is ever said about the Joker again. I was left more than a little confused. If you are going to introduce the Joker into Bat-Story, shouldn’t he be important to the story? Instead, he was irrelevant to the story. An ordinary thug could have achieved the same plot machinations and left the narrative better off.

Despite all that, and the extremely corny (in my humble opinion) concluding connection between both plots*, Wayne of Gotham was a surprisingly engaging and entertaining read. I didn’t want to stop reading, and if there is any measure to the success of a book, that must be it. It isn’t perfect, but it got me reading. So grab yourself a copy, and get reading.

*[Author's note: I try to avoid discussing plot details in my reviews. What I refer to here is the final revelation [spoiler!] that Thomas Wayne’s experiments created Batman’s rogues gallery, which could have been believable, except that Hickman stretched my credulity when he tried to convince me that Dr. Wayne’s mental/chemical alterations somehow resulted in a predilection for flamboyant costumes in addition to criminal psychosis. Uh…no. Bat-Villains have flamboyant costumes because they were created for a visual medium. Much better to do what Christopher Nolan did in his Batman film trilogy: realize that flamboyant criminal costumes in real life are unrealistic and homage them without slavishly reasoning them out and recreating them.]

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Categories: Bookworms
Tags: Batman, book, books, bruce, Bruce Wayne, comics, DC, DC Comics, detective, father, father and son, gotham, gotham city, NerdSpan, review, reviews, son, thomas wayne, wayne