Batman - the first year
Batman - The First Year ( English Batman: Year One ) is a comic published by DC Comics in the USA in 1987 and consists of four issues of the Batman comic series (# 404-407), with a self-contained story. The author is Frank Miller , the drawings are by David Mazzucchelli . It tells the story of the early days of Lieutenant James Gordon and Batman . The early history of some other characters from the Batman universe is also touched on.
The comic was translated into numerous languages and also adapted as an animated film.
action
In Batman's First Year , Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham City after a 12-year absence and is determined to fight crime after his parents were shot dead in a robbery. Gotham is one of the worst cities at the time. He tries to fight the crime in cognito for the first time, but fails because he is shot by the police. He realizes that his opponents must be afraid of him and on his next mission he wears the bat costume for the first time, which will later make him known as Batman.
Lieutenant James Gordon is one of the few police officers trying to save Gotham. He is new to town with Barbara, his pregnant wife. He was transferred because he mistakenly reported a colleague. Gordon tries to get used to his new work environment, which doesn't quite work because he quickly realizes that many of his colleagues are criminals themselves. Gordon's supervisor, Commissioner Loeb, is also corrupt. Since they cannot assess Gordon, he is a thorn in the side for Loeb and Flass. Which is why they try to intimidate him by hitting him with a baseball bat by masked men. Gordon recognizes the voice of Flass, so he follows and catches him. Later on, Gordon has his first real mission. A man has taken a child hostage. He solves the case without injuries, even if his trigger-happy colleagues would have preferred to storm the house. This is how the media turns him into a hero.
Batman raids a meeting of the most influential criminals, deliberately provoking them. Since the commissioner was also present at the meeting, Gordon gets the order to arrest Batman. Gordon therefore plans a series of traps for Batman, the last of which Batman is almost killed by the emergency services. However, he realizes that Gordon did not want to kill him, but only wanted to arrest him and that the order to kill him came from Loeb. But he can just escape.
Selina Kyle, a dominatrix from the red light district with whom Bruce Wayne had an encounter on his first assignment, dresses up in a cat suit and begins a series of robberies. Since the burglaries were wrongly assigned to Batman, she decides to break into the Roman, an influential man of the underworld, in order to be taken seriously. However, when she stands across from him in front of his bathhouse, she realizes that she is in danger and would not have escaped without Batman's intervention. James Gordon starts an affair with his colleague Sarah. Batman scares an important witness into testifying against Flass, as the case won't get very far without an insider. After Flass was charged and arrested, Loeb tries to blackmail Gordon with a picture of him and Sarah.
Gordon seeks out Bruce Wayne because there is suspicion that he could be Batman. Bruce Wayne mimes the rich playboy in this questioning. In order not to be blackmailed, Gordon confesses the affair to his wife and soon becomes a father. As a final attempt, Roman's assistants, with Loeb's help, prepare a trap for Gordon and try to kidnap his wife and child. He notices the trap and shoots one of the two kidnappers. Since he doesn't know that Batman also knew about the trap and tries to help him, he shoots him too. The kidnappers escape and Gordon chases them to a bridge where Gordon, the kidnapper and Batman fall down and the latter saves Gordon's child.
Gordon now knows he can trust Batman and has gained an ally. In the last picture you can see Gordon waiting for Batman on the roof of the police headquarters. The scene, familiar from many Batman comics, establishes the connection to the well-known Batman universe.
Structure and structure
Batman - the first year has an unusual structure that is nested several times into one another. The four “chapters” of the story form the first structural framework and, as usual, are based on the structure of the first publication (in four issues) and have corresponding cliff hangers at the end of the respective action sections.
As a second structural element, 33 dates are used, which subdivide the title-giving first year of Bruce Wayne and Gordon's returned to Gotham into 33 sections of different lengths. In this way, a consistent orientation frame that overcomes the structure of the booklet is created. Finally, on the action level, there is the third conspicuous structural element. The experiences of James Gordon and Bruce Wayne are told in two consistently parallel storylines and thus related to each other. From a narrative point of view, the exposition alone (events of January 4th) is certainly one of the highlights of graphic novel literature.
Characters
Bruce Wayne / Batman
Bruce Wayne is an attractive young millionaire whose parents were murdered in a robbery. He then decides to keep the crime in his hometown Gotham City in check. After a few failed attempts to fight the crime, he decides to act as a bat to instill fear in the criminals. The police in Gotham City are not behind him, but pursue and hunt the "Batman" because they see him as a cold-blooded murderer and another criminal. Only one policeman named James Gordon realizes the good and teams up with him to work together to stop the crime in Gotham City.
James Gordon
Lieutenant James Gordon (also called Jim or Jimmy) is next to Bruce Wayne the main character in Batman - the first year . He has been transferred to Gotham and is extremely unhappy to have had to move to such a dirty and opportunistic city full of crime with his pregnant wife Barbara. He doesn't initially find any friends or allies in Gotham and is shunned by the mostly corrupt police, knowing that he is an incorruptible and honest cop. James Gordon is not intimidated by his colleagues. Even after being beaten up by the corrupt Detective Flass and other cops, he sticks to his principles. But this also showed him that a cop in Gotham has to be tougher and he retaliates against Flass by beating him up too, as Flass did to him. But even James Gordon doesn't have a clean slate because he had an affair with his colleague Sarah Essen. Even so, he continues to worry about his family. Soon his affair is exposed and his wife finds out about it. Ultimately, they stay together, but attend couples therapy classes to process what has happened.
Arnold Flass
Detective Arnold John Flass is the corrupt partner and direct antagonist of James Gordon during his first year of service in Gotham. They meet for the first time at the train station, when Gordon's arrival. Flass is a former Green Beret, blond, tall and very muscular. He uses his position as a police officer to create more fear than justice with brutal arbitrariness. When he fails to divert Gordon from his honest path, Flass hits Gordon and other colleagues with baseball bats. In the end, his criminal activities are exposed and he is jailed.
Gillian Loeb
Commissioner Gillian B. Loeb is James Gordon's chief police officer in Gotham. However, he is an unscrupulous and corrupt man who supports and hushes up the criminal activities of his employees. Gordon becomes dangerous to him, just like the policeman Flass, when he tries to expose the corruption. Loeb later tries to blackmail Gordon with the affair. Due to Flass accusations, Loeb finally has to admit defeat and resign from his office. Thus, Commissioner Loeb was overthrown by one of the most powerful men in town, who with the police practically had all decisions about good and bad in hand, and lost everything through Gordon and Batman.
Harvey Dent
Harvey Dent is a young, ambitious, and upright prosecutor. He used to work with Batman as Gordon and provided him with information about police operations. This is how Batman escapes the traps of Gordon for his arrest. Batman and Gordon's efforts ultimately allow him to bring Loeb to justice.
Sarah food
Sergeant Sarah Essen is Lieutenant James Gordon's new colleague. In the course of the action, they regularly go out to eat after work. A short time later, James begins an affair with her, even though his wife is pregnant. This affair is slowly coming to an end, however, as he is blackmailed by Commissioner Loeb with photos showing the two intimate. The blackmail is also the reason for Sarah's transfer to New York City at the end of the year.
Selina Kyle
Selina Kyle is a dominatrix who works and lives in the East End red light district. She has a weakness for cats and lives with many. Therefore, inspired by Batman, she dresses up as a cat with the pseudonym Catwoman . In order to finance her own life, she decides to rob the rich.
reception
The work Batman: The first year was positively received by the critics and is after Batman - The Return of the Dark Knight Miller's second best work for DC with the character Batman. For illustrator David Mazzucchelli, too, the title is seen as a milestone in his career. Although originally published in booklet form, the work is considered important for the then still young genre of graphic novels .
Year One was and is also commercially successful; Released in 1987, it is still available in stores today. For several films with the character Batman it is given as an important source of inspiration, so u. a. for Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins and the Gotham television series . Inspired by the success of Batman: The first year , DC published a series of comics with similar-sounding titles (Year Two, Year 100, Batgirl: Year One, etc.), which were written or drawn by other teams, only in terms of content to a lesser extent have to do with Year One and artistically do not come close to the role model.
filming
In 2011 a version filmed as a cartoon had its premiere.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Frank Miller , David Mazzucchelli : Batman - the first year. Panini Comics Stuttgart, p. 3.
- ↑ a b Batman: Year One. In: imdb.com. 2011, accessed January 19, 2018 .
- ↑ Joshua Yehl, Hilary Goldstein: The 25 Greatest Batman Graphic Novels. In: ign.com. Ziff Davis, LLC, April 9, 2014, archived from the original on August 16, 2017 ; accessed on January 19, 2018 (English).
- ^ Klaus Schikowski : The comic: history, styles, artists . Reclam-Verlag , Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-15-010839-0 , p. 265 .
- ↑ Andreas C. Knigge : Comics: From mass paper to multimedia adventure . Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek near Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-499-16519-8 .
- ↑ Michael Dodd: Back to the Beginning: The Evolving Influence of 'Batman: Year One'. In: themissingslate.com. The Missing Slate, 2014, accessed January 19, 2018 .