Faltering At the Finish Line

Like when I talked about DC's Dark Nights Metal, I'm going to talk about a comic book story.  So please, please, please resist the urge to say "I haven't read that" or "I don't read comic books" and actually read the whole article.  Or maybe just skim to the end where it gets to the point.  OK?

I've been a big fan of Tom King's writing on Omega Men, Vision, the novel A Once Crowded Sky, and most recently the Rebirth-era Batman series.  A big development in this series was that Batman asks Catwoman to marry him after a mission to kidnap the Psycho Pirate from Bane.  Where I left off, Batman had defeated Bane's attempt to get the Psycho Pirate back and Batman told Catwoman a story about a war between Gotham's villains led by the Joker and the Riddler.

The story then begins to focus more on the engagement.  Batman and Catwoman travel to Saharan Africa for proof to clear Catwoman's name for a crime she didn't commit.  This is to clear the way to being able to live as man and wife.  But Batman's ex Talia al-Guhl--the "mother" of his test-tube son Damian--isn't having this and so she squares off with them.

After this, there are a couple of stand-alone issues.  In one, Batman investigates a series of murders that seem engineered to implicate his enemies like Two-Face and Mr. Zsazs.  In the end, Batman finds the murders were conceived by a little boy who has a serious obsession with Bruce Wayne, to the point he had his own parents killed!  In another issue Batman and Catwoman go on a double date with Superman and his wife Lois Lane at a carnival.  Everyone is supposed to dress in costume so Superman wears Bruce's Batman costume and Bruce wears Clark's Superman costume.  And Lois Lane wears Selina Kyle's Catwoman outfit.  Selina gets the short end of the stick as Lois doesn't really have a costume.  Anyway, it's just kind of a fun little issue without any big superhero fights or anything.  There's a two-part thing after that where Batman and Wonder Woman go to another universe filled with demons.  They exchange places with the guardian of that universe to give him a day off.  Except a day in our world is like 40 years in the other universe.  So Batman and Wonder Woman fight monsters for like 40 years--though never age or anything--while this guy gets to hang out with his wife and stuff--until Catwoman finds out what's going on and makes him go back.  There's another stand-alone issue where Catwoman sneaks out one night and steals a dress from a bridal shop without Batman knowing.

Before the wedding are three more short arcs.  In the first, Poison Ivy has put a mind-control poison in all the world's food over a long period.  When she finally triggers her mind control, only Batman and Catwoman are able to get a cure in time.  In the end they recruit Harley Quinn who gets her friend Ivy to stand down.  This also serves a lead-in to King's upcoming "Heroes in Crisis" miniseries about heroes and villains in psychiatric counseling.  Another arc also probably leads into that event.  Blundering hero from the future Booster Gold thinks he'll give Bruce a gift by saving his parents.  But that creates an apocalyptic future where Gotham is even worse than it usually is and the Batman there is Dick Grayson, though he goes around with guns and stuff like the Punisher.  Ultimately everything gets put back to normal again.  The final arc before the wedding has the Joker ambushing Batman and knocking him out.  Catwoman goes to confront the Joker and they wound each other pretty bad before having a chat while lying on the floor bleeding out.  But of course they don't die or anything.

Issue #50 is the actual "wedding."  After battling Kite Man (Hell yeah!) they decide to get married at dawn on the rooftop.  Batman goes to kidnap a drunk judge while Catwoman busts out her best friend.

So after about 38 issues...Catwoman gets cold feet and leaves before dawn.  Because she was worried if Bruce Wayne was happy, he couldn't be Batman anymore.  Or he couldn't Batman as well.  This just now occurred to her and she decided not to even talk it over with him.  Nope, just leave.  Afterwards, Catwoman's best friend meets up with Bane and other villains.  Apparently this was all part of Bane's plan to get even with Batman.

What a cop out.  King and DC can say whatever they want, but this has the bad smell of editorial meddling.  I mean, why would you craft a storyline for almost 40 issues (starting around the beginning of 2017) and then at the last second just say, nah, let's not do this anymore.  Needless to say fans were pissed, especially since DC and comic book stores pulled out all the stops to market the book with fake wedding receptions and everything.  And then it was just a total cop out.  Why wouldn't people be irritated?

OK, I get it, Batman is supposed to be dark and brooding.  The idea of him being married was obviously just too messed-up for some people to contemplate.  The thing is, though, King did such a great job of making them a plausible couple.  Not just Batman and Catwoman but Bruce and Selina.  It worked because Catwoman/Selina knew Bruce was Batman and didn't really care.  To her his war on crime was like dating a guy who's really into fantasy football; it's a thing that can be annoying and time-consuming but ultimately you just put up with it and go along with it.  I think that's why it worked so well--she wasn't stamping her feet and shrilly demanding he quit.  And in the end, isn't that a big part of love:  putting up with your partner's bullshit?  (And he/she putting up with yours?)  It was a good partnership and a lot less creepy than any of the Robin ones because she was a full-grown adult.

Speaking of, if the reasoning is a wife would make him happy, how is it he's had a son for like 12 years now?  Even if that son was grown in a vat and trained to be an assassin, having a kid didn't really soften Bruce Wayne or make him stop being Batman--except when he was thrown backwards in time by Darkseid and got amnesia after fighting the Joker, neither of which was because he had a kid.  If they could make that work, why not a wife?

Sure, we all know eventually like Spider-Man's marriage to Mary-Jane (or probably Superman's current marriage to Lois Lane) it would end eventually with a reboot or Catwoman "dying" or some other damned thing.  But with all the work he put in on it so far, it would have been really interesting to see where King would have gone with this.  Maybe he'll get the chance eventually.  Until then, it was a dick move to set all this up and wuss out at the end.

So, if you're skimming, now we're at the point.  Endings can be really hard and the worst thing is an unsatisfying ending.  The most unsatisfying are the kind called "non-endings" (copyright by me) where a character goes through a bunch of shit and before he or she can make a decision the book just ends.  Like if after a bunch of stuff Batman asks Catwoman to marry him and...that's it.  We just end the book there and never get back to it.  It would be really annoying because there's no closure.

In this case it's sort of a non-ending.  It puts together Batman and Catwoman and has them face all these issues and then before we even get to resolving the issue of whether Batman can still be Batman if he's married, the story just backs away from all that by having Selina run away.  She doesn't even give him the chance to make a decision for himself.  Total cop out.

To have a satisfying ending, you need to have the character face and resolve whatever issues are presented.  Whether it's defeating the villain or facing up to some issue from the past, you need some sort of closure.  A happy ending, a sad ending, or a little of both, it doesn't really matter.  The point is that you have a feeling that things are settled in some way.

Otherwise you're just ripping off the reader.  I mean, why read a book or watch a movie if at the end there's no resolution to it?