Dark Night: A True Batman Story, August, 2016
Today, Saturday, September 18, is DC’s annual “Batman Day.” Although not exactly a national holiday, DC and Warner have used the occasion to commemorate the caped crusader and launch and market new products around the event.
So, as in the past two years, we continue to honor the celebration with the rest of the month’s posts devoted to The Dark Knight… and a special doubleheader today from a unique Batman story.
In more than eighty years of Batman stories, there is nothing quite like Paul Dini’s Vertigo graphic novel, based on a brutal mugging that happened to him personally in 1993: Batman and the rogues gallery become imaginary voices helping and hindering Dini’s state of mind as he attempts to physically and emotionally recover from the horrific beating.
Listening to Paul describe the incident in detail on a podcast at the time of the book’s publication was harrowing.
And the art pages, while gorgeous from start to finish, took an initial emotional toll on the Emmy-winning writer. As he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2015:
“When I first downloaded the pages from the attack, I looked at them very quickly once, horrified. Then I put them away for a week,” Dini recalls. “I burst into tears. I couldn’t look at them.”
The two-page sequence here, which I acquired last year, is a critical part of the story. (The pages are even specifically called out on Wikipedia). The “imaginary” Joker taunts Dini’s misery, until Batman shows up in the final panel of the sequence, and dispatching the clown prince of crime, tells Dini to stop feeling sorry himself, and get back to work.
Fortunately, for him (and us), get back to work he did.
