Thursday, April 20, 2017

Button Part One Analysis: Batman #21

The opening scene of The Dark Knight Returns uses a sporting event – a car race – to describe in symbols all the major events of the entire story. The car (world) goes out of control and the driver (Batman) is the only one who can control it. It looks like he dies, but he escapes certain death.

Batman #21 begins with a similar sporting event, whose actual event (a hockey player dies in a fistfight) is probably not as significant as the symbolism that Tom King – almost certainly working under the vision of Geoff Johns – provides. The contest is between Metropolis and Gotham City with "two heavy hitters" confronting one another, and if you need to be told who those two cities represent, you've probably never read a comic book. If you still don't get it, the Metropolis team's colors are red and blue while the Gotham team wears black and yellow. And if you're wondering what the outcome will be, the Gotham team is named after a deadly weapon and the Metropolis team is named after an extinct species. And if this fight is meant to be prophetic, the Batman surrogate beats and literally kills the Superman surrogate.

We're not the only ones to get the symbolism. Saturn Girl, in Arkham Asylum, has privileged knowledge about the future, and she lets it slip that she's not talking about more than what we see in the hockey game when she says "They're going to kill him." Not the one person – "he" – that we see on television, but "they." Maybe the hockey game is tragic in its own right, but Saturn Girl sees something else – "Superman won't come. Our friends will die. The Legion will die." If the hockey fight represents a superhero calamity to follow, Superman will somehow be sidelined by Batman, and will therefore be unable to save the lives of the Legion and their friends (present-day superheroes?). Remember, Geoff Johns used Saturn Girl's fellow Legionnaire Star Boy in an almost identical fashion after Infinite Crisis, with the now Star Man taking over the role of the eponymous member of the Justice Society and providing ample quantities of foreshadowing along with mental illness.

These events are the kick-off to the big DCU / Watchmen crossover event that's coming, as symbolized by the hockey commentator's phrasing: "We're down to the final minute here, folks." (FYI, hockey overtime isn't one minute.) And then, "Here we go."

There are visual symbols galore as well, and if you're wondering why the Reverse Flash is involved in this story, one starting point is that his symbol – like the hockey visual in the first panel – looks like the Comedian's bloody button, for a big visual case of "Coincidence? I think not." (When Batman spits blood onto the Reverse Flash's yellow-masked face, it produces a mirror image of the same design.)

But there are important plot points, too. Reverse Flash remembers the Flashpoint universe in which Thomas Wayne was Batman, and he speaks to the no-longer-living Thomas Wayne in a mocking tone, enjoying how the elder Wayne died and how it hurts both Waynes when Thawne rips up the letter that Thomas sent to Bruce. The carrier of that message (a la the Roman god Mercury, who inspired the Flashes in many ways) was Barry Allen, so it's very appropriate that the message is destroyed by the Reverse Flash, un-doing something that the Flash did.

Like Saturn Girl, the Reverse Flash has information that allows for a very Johns-ian lookahead, and he tells us that some power resurrected him. This is undoubtedly for a reason and there are only so many possibilities. In this issue, the Reverse Flash beats the tar out of Batman, rips up the note from the Flashpoint universe, vanishes into a blue glow, returns speaking of God, and dies. And, I would caution the reader: We don't know if they actually occurred in the simple linear fashion that we thought we saw. If we take the events on their surface form, this Reverse Flash has come to this world from the world of Flashpoint, which makes him as well as the letter alien objects in this timeline, and if his purpose was to destroy the letter, and whoever revived him wanted to eliminate the connection between this Earth and the Flashpoint timeline then it's logical that Thawne needed to die after destroying the letter. It appears as though he did, but maybe something trickier happened. Reverse Flash was thoroughly splashed with blood before he vanishes, but when he returns, there is no sign of blood. Maybe he went through a physical experience that removed the blood (along with a fair bit of his own flesh), but maybe the timeline is trickier than it seemed, and the Reverse Flash who returned might be from a very different moment in his timeline than just a little bit after his fight with Batman. Otherwise, why make it so complicated as to have him disappear and reappear, instead of just burst into a blue flame and die? Note also that he disappears when the button is in his hand, but he returns with no apparent trace of it. Perhaps it just got lost in the violence of the moment, but given that the story is named after this object, it seems odd for it to be misplaced as a small detail.

There's another important reference/recurrence here: In Crisis on Infinite Earths, Batman sees a dying version of the Flash (Barry Allen) who is jumping in and out of time from later in the story. A dying Reverse Flash also appears before Batman here, which makes for the second reference to COIE, the other being Psycho Pirate's mask. All told, we have four objects from other timelines: The button, the letter, Thawne, and the mask. At the end of this story, two or three of these objects have been eliminated, leaving possibly just one. Clearly, someone is trying to eliminate connections between worlds, or at least certain connections. Perhaps the person pulling the strings is Dr. Manhattan, perhaps Mr. Oz (who also took Tim Drake "off the board" for presenting a similar threat). Perhaps the multiple, quick actions in this story were taken by more than one player, with someone wanting to get rid of the letter and someone else wanting to get rid of the button.

Whatever the case, more action is afoot in Superman #21, where someone who looks just like The Comedian deliberately summons up something that looks a lot like the giant cephalopod from Watchmen appears. Quite possibly, we have seen in short order, the handiwork of at least three major players from Watchmen, along with one artifact and one killer apocalyptic bio-weapon. If that many Watchmen characters are now in the DCU, it recalls the line:

At midnight, all the agents and superhuman crew go out and round up everyone who knows more than they do.
 -Bob Dylan

6 comments:

  1. Awesome Rikdad, really glad to see you back! I read this comic three times already and you still picked up on some things I may have overlooked. This story has me the most excited I have been about DC in years now. I really look forward to next weeks issue. Nice catch on the big squid over in Superman. This week's issue of Trinity is a major Rebirth tie-in as well.
    Did you happen to check out the latest Nightwing? I hope we get more information on this characters surprising return!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Jonny. More good stuff this week than there's time to comment on. I'm behind on Trinity. I saw the events in Nightwing, but will withhold judgement… it could be a rather humdrum use of the characters in question, or something remarkable: We'll see.

    More thoughts on the Button mystery… Parsing Reverse Flash's dialogue, it seems as though he may have expected the button and found the letter by happenstance. Then again, he may have been an unwitting pawn of whoever awoke him, and not known his piece in their plan.

    If I had to guess, Reverse Flash in this issue was the pawn of Mr. Oz, who wanted to remove a link to Flashpoint and/or create a link to the Watchmen Universe. I would try to tie the Superman and Batman stories more closely, but their timelines are slightly contradictory. In one, Batman is a hostage on a farm, and in the other, he's in the Batcave. Maybe RF touching the button is what allowed the octopus to be retrieved from the Watchmen universe and the Superman story comes second.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi sir, off topic question but with Twin Peaks revival 2 weeks away didn't know if you were going to be doing posts on that. The wife and I just re-watched the whole series and really enjoyed it, with the new series and it all being directed by Lynch it's going to amazing and I'm sure probably one big puzzle.

    ReplyDelete
  4. John,

    Indeed I will be watching Twin Peaks Season 3, and I hope to post on it regularly. The series return is an event that I never thought would transpire, but here we are so close to it! I have recently re-watched the series and will probably post once before the new episodes air, but the massive scope of the existing material prohibits that I could say much in any depth about the first two seasons without making it a full time job.

    Let's Rock!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Very excited about the new Twin Peaks season. I am a really big fan of the original series and Fire Walk With Me. Reading your posts on Season 3 will definitely be a treat and welcome companion piece to the show. I can't wait.

      Delete
  5. I thought it would be a fun idea of sitting down and writing a 1 page outline of how I thought the first episode would play out, since it will be 25 years later. Of course, I'm sure whatever thoughts I may come up with will be nothing like whatever Lynch has planned over the 18 episodes, but we know the real Cooper is still in the black lodge and the doppelganger has been out for 25 years, there are just so many different ways to go. Especially since Frank Silva who played Bob died many years ago. Can we imagine Twin Peaks without Bob? So many thoughts.

    ReplyDelete