In Panel Sight: The Swamp Thing

The Saga of the Swamp Thing #24 (1984)

 

The Swamp Thing #16 (2022)

The Inmates Run the Asylum in Rocksteady's Arkham Trilogy

I love video games. I suppose I always have. Growing up in the early years of economic liberalisation in India, you took your first steps into the world of gaming on bootlegged consoles, manufactured by local companies that had cropped up all over the country to meet the demands of a large population with growing purchasing power and aspirations to live the life their relatives “abroad” and the stars of their movies did, all the while the companies that actually manufactured those consoles scrambled to set up shop in the nation. My earliest memory of gaming is playing Contra and Super Mario on one of these bootlegged “NES”, plugging in those “99999 in 1” game cartridges and setting up the system on those huge CRT television sets that took up an entire corner of your living room.

I am telling my age, aren’t I?

Well, kids, playing video games for as long as I have teaches you a lot of things, especially if you are interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff – how they are made (the tools and technologies that go into making a game and how they evolve over time), the politics of it (because, as with everything else in life, there is politics involved here as well), the economics of the gaming industry (and how it, at times, becomes the primary driving force for innovation) – which, I suppose, you become at least tangentially aware of if you stick with a particular hobby long enough. But, perhaps more than that, it teaches you to see that hobby differently. You learn to notice and appreciate the craft behind it. You learn to see video games as art.

Video games are a unique medium because they allow you to experience a story by putting you into the shoes of the protagonist (which, with the advent of VR gaming, is true quite literally now). Using the controller to move a Batman under the influence of Scarecrow’s fear toxin down claustrophobic corridors with decaying walls as his grip on reality slips has a completely different effect on how you experience the story than, say, watching Christian Bale play Batman in a similar situation. It engages you with the story on a more profound level, but that, of course does pose a challenge for the developers. How do you sustain this effect throughout the game? Or rather, in the case of Rocksteady’s Arkham Trilogy, how do you sustain this throughout not one, but three games?

­When you break it down, Rocksteady’s approach to this is deceivingly simple. Every game in the trilogy, from Arkham Asylum to Arkham City to Arkham Knight, follows the same core idea but expands it out one level further every time, thereby raising the stakes – of the story and for the players – in, what comes across as, completely natural. Well, as natural as can be in the case of Gotham City.

A Serious House on Serious Earth

We start small and, as is enforced by the game not just with its opening sequence but throughout, rather mundane. The Joker has broken out of the Asylum (again) and is brought back in by the Batman (again). Nothing seems out of the ordinary – it is just another night at work for the Batman – until, of course, it isn’t and the night turns into something else entirely.

Influenced in parts by the Grant Morrison and Dave McKean book of the same name, the game follows a rather simple story, but enriches it by using complex narrative devices through which that story is told. This is true for the gameplay as well, for even though the combat is rather simple in its design – you could button-mash your way through the enemies, though that of course would not be advisable – its presentation works well within the context of the game since the idea here is to let you, the player, be this extraordinary individual who is an expert in perhaps every fighting style known to man.

Once the story kicks into gear, we are faced with the core idea that Rocksteady employs through all these games. The social order of things is flipped and the inmates run the asylum now. Interestingly enough though, the same hierarchical organisation of society remains. While earlier you had the medical staff and the security personnel reporting to the warden, Quincy Sharp, you now have the inmates and the henchmen reporting to the Joker, one way or the other. You could read this as the human need for community and our natural inclination for order and control, as much as it is possible in a lawless place, but it is perhaps something more.

It is fascinating how quickly and easily the structures of ordered society in the game collapse, thereby allowing for the siege of the institution, yet the characters in the game maintain an air of nonchalance about the events. I’d like to think that this is because they believe that good will prevail over evil no matter what, but it is perhaps that they live in Gotham City, where nothing really seems out of the ordinary, does it? In a way the Asylum becomes a microcosm of Gotham City as whole, with the characters caught in the traps of their world, an idea that is reinforced by the game design, where while it does seem like you are progressing linearly further along the story and are visiting a particular section of the Asylum grounds for a reason – to further the plot, that is – you are actually circling the same rooms, this time perhaps with a new gadget that can help get you those pesky Riddler Trophies.

The game design also offers a look into how Gotham City chooses to treat its most vulnerable, but unlike Arkham City, where that is quite literally a plot point, here that is explored in subtle undertones – in how a public-funded institution purposed to offer mental health assistance is built like an endless prison labyrinth, with rotting infrastructure, little to no accountability, haunted by suicide spots, and located far off from the main island of the city. Out of sight, out of mind. 

Big Brother Is Watching You

Escalate the situation and the forces at play that led to the rise of the ecosystem that developed during the events at the Asylum and extend it over a couple of city blocks and you get the middle chapter of the trilogy, one that acts as, of course, an expansion of the core idea of the previous entry – the inmates run the asylum now – but also as a prelude of things to come in the next. 

It is perhaps telling of the decay already underway – of the individual, of the sense of community, and of society and its institutions – that the city’s response to the events at the Asylum are totalitarian. Politicians are paid off, public misinformation campaigns run rampant, and Professor Hugo Strange – Gotham’s preeminent psychoanalyst, noted Batman cosplayer, and all-around Nice Guy – is handed over the keys to a super-prison right in the heart of the city. This is also an extension of the “out of sight, out of mind” approach Gotham takes towards the “criminally insane”, wherein the city essentially turns into a fascist state without falling into the textbook definition of one. Cordoned off from the rest of Gotham, Arkham City becomes the dumping ground for “scum... criminal... and worse.” Left to fend for themselves and survive in a place of absolute anarchy, gang culture and the violence it begets run rampant. However, as Gotham can argue, since these criminals – shunned away from society and already demoted to second-class citizens – have no one else but themselves to victimise, they have no one else but themselves to blame.

The game doesn’t shy away from making Arkham City the Orwellian nightmare it really is – as is communicated with Plakatstil warnings all around the decaying urban slums that make this city within a city, cautioning the prisoners that “lethal force is authorised”, and the near constant public service announcements of the “rules” of Arkham City by Hugo Strange – “These rules are mandatory and by the power vested in me, by the people of Gotham City, lawful.” – reminding the inmates of their state-sponsored dehumanisation.

Fans have long argued why Batman doesn’t kill. Surely, isn’t that the simplest solution, giving him something concrete to help end his war on crime with, rather than choosing to reform these criminals and be caught in an endless loop with them? This has some very real world parallels, particularly with regard to the death penalty, but Batman’s world is steeped in heightened melodrama and offers an imaginary playing field to confront these questions. Arkham City comments on all of these and more, with the final act of the game putting the player right at the heart of this dilemma. Protocol 10, which the Batman spends much of the game investigating, turns out to be, essentially, mass murder. Do the inmates deserve it and is this the solution to ending crime? Since video games can articulate a story on experiential terms, what do you feel when you look around and see missiles being rained down upon Arkham City? Whatever it is, that is your answer to this question.

 
The City of Fear

Arkham Knight is the endgame. The stakes have never been higher, as is reinforced not just by the game’s ominous opening lines – “This is how it happened. This is how the Batman died.” – and the sheer scale of the map that is available to the player from the get-go, but also by just how different the game looks than its predecessors. This might be the conclusion to Rocksteady’s trilogy, but perhaps more than that, this is their magnum opus. It is also, however, the natural end of the core idea that Rocksteady had been employing in their trilogy, with the entire city of Gotham now becoming an asylum overtaken by its inmates.

On a Halloween night nine months after the fall of Arkham City, Scarecrow threatens to unleash a potent new strain of Fear Toxin, resulting in the immediate evacuation of six million residents of Gotham City. The city’s criminals and supervillains stay behind, choosing to run riot under Scarecrow’s protection, leaving Commissioner Gordon and the Gotham City Police Department outnumbered. In a way, the Batman has already lost. While in Arkham Asylum the inmates running the asylum felt wrong, an upset of the established order of things that needed to be corrected by an unofficial extension of the traditional institutions that make up a civilised society, by the time we get to Arkham Knight, it is perhaps the norm, the new world order. Here, Batman is the outsider, representing order and structure in a lawless place with no need for either.

On one level, technical limitations force this game design, but it also ties into the structural decay of society that is hinted at across the three games. The rot at the heart is now complete, the forewarnings of Wonder City from Arkham City have rung true, and Gotham is doomed even before the player gets to control the Batman. The horrors perpetrated in the name of fear of the other that led most citizens of Gotham City to look the other way while a section of them are subjected to dehumanising practices has caught up with them.

With Scarecrow as the main antagonist, fear is the central theme that runs across Arkham Knight. Every decision taken by a member of the main cast – and, therefore, every choice that drives the plot forward – comes from a place of fear. For Batman, it is the fear of not being able to fulfill his promise to his late parents; for Joker, it is the fear of being forgotten; for Gordon, it is the fear of Barbara’s life; for Arkham Knight, it is the fear of being replaced; for Scarecrow, it is the fear of Batman.

Obsessed with overcoming his phobias, Jonathan Crane dedicated his life studying fear, the psychology and psychiatry that makes it tick, but somewhere along the way lost his way and became the Scarecrow. Bruce Wayne is obsessed with fear too, but perhaps in his own way. Fear is at the heart of what makes Batman such an intriguing character, one that has been able to withstand the test of time for over eighty years now and still be relevant. His origins are based on the very idea of overcoming your fears – something that perhaps everyone can relate to – but since Batman’s world is steeped in heightened melodrama, as we have already established, a traumatised young boy’s idea of overcoming your fears is to weaponize it for his vengeful war on crime. “Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot. So my disguise must be able strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible…” Both Scarecrow and Batman understand the power of fear and the role it has played in making them who they are. “We are all products of what we fear,” as Scarecrow observes in the game. Arkham Knight, therefore, also becomes the culmination of Batman’s approach to using fear in his mission, and on that fateful Halloween night when the Batman dies, something even more terrifying rises from his ashes.

A character that never seems to run out of room for yet another deconstruction, Batman has had a lot of interesting takes over the years, across various mediums from comics to films. However, I have been particularly keen on those that weave the very medium into that deconstruction. Rocksteady’s Arkham Trilogy lets you be the Batman, of course, but perhaps more than that, they offer a look into Batman’s world in a way comics and films never could. Collecting interview tapes in Arkham Asylum is, essentially, reward-based exploration, but it enriches your understanding of the inner workings of the eponymous psychiatric hospital/prison; tracking down the “Payphone Killer” in Arkham City is a ‘race against the clock’-type mini-game, but one that uses clever level design to recount a villain’s origin story; and, well, in Arkham Knight, you get to do tank battles in the Batmobile.

From the surreal nightmare levels against the Scarecrow in Arkham Asylum to the ever-changing perspective and shifting landscapes during the final showdown against the Joker in Arkham Knight, Rocksteady continuously experiments with how the gameplay can be used to offer the player a peek into the broken psyche of the Caped Crusader, regardless of whether the player is a neophyte to the Batman’s lore or has been armchair-psychoanalysing the character for years. Rocksteady’s Arkham Trilogy works in its deconstruction of the Dark Knight because everything great about video games and the aspects unique to them are tuned to perfection and pointed, together, to service the story and how the player experiences it.

***

A slightly reworked version of this post was featured on Comic Book Herald. You can read the piece here.

In Panel Sight: Daniel Warren Johnson

With Daniel Warren Johnson setting his next book in the crazy world of pro wrestling, here's a look at some of the wrestling moves referenced in his previous works – from powerbombs to suplexes.

 

Extremity

Murder Falcon

Wonder Woman: Dead Earth

Beta Ray Bill: Argent Star

Darwyn Cooke and the Art of Genre Storytelling

One of my silly little “reading goals” for 2022 was revisiting all things Darwyn Cooke – from his early work on Catwoman to the Parker novels late into his career. Cooke is, in my opinion, a giant of the medium. Compared to his peers, he ventured into comics quite late, after spending years as a graphic designer for magazines in Canada and then as a storyboard artist in Los Angeles for various shows of the DCAU. But what that also meant was that he was able to bring in and apply the lessons learnt and experience gained from those industries into his comics. His character design is timeless – look no further than his character sheet for Selina Kyle / Catwoman – and his storytelling is sharp and crisp.

 

Going through Cooke’s works as I did, you can see a clear fascination for the look and style of post-war America – the architecture, the cars, the furniture – but, unlike most creators who choose to set their works in that time period, Cooke wasn’t shy to deal with the things America likes to ignore when it takes a look back at its “Golden Age” – racism, McCarthyism, war and its consequences. In fact, in the annotations for The New Frontier, Cooke’s epic for DC Comics that tries to bridge the gap between its Golden Age and Silver Age characters, he writes: “Any effort to insinuate the DCU into the real world of the 1950s wouldn’t have been complete without looking at the civil rights issues of the day. The problem was DC catered to white culture and there were very few black characters to explore this theme.” Cooke settled on John Henry, but that comment offers us a look behind the curtain, so to speak, at the man himself.

Another point of note, as you go through Cooke’s work as I did – and perhaps this is something that becomes quite obvious when you consume a creator’s work in one go – is you can see how they were at three prominent stages of their career – the beginning, when they had just broken into the industry; the middle, when they were at the height of their powers; and the end. And while it would be interesting to compare those three eras of Cooke’s career, I am more interested in discussing something else that caught my eye.

You can break Cooke’s work into three categories, or genres, if you’d like: superheroes, crime, and the intersection of superheroes and crime. Specifically, I am interested in understanding how Cooke tweaked his storytelling, particularly the panel work, when he was doing a superhero epic (DC: The New Frontier), when he was doing a heist story (Richard Stark’s Parker: The Score), and when he was doing a heist story set in the world of superheroes (Catwoman: Selina’s Big Score).

We begin with Selina’s Big Score. Released in 2002, it is a 96-page graphic novel that acts as a prelude to the 2001 Catwoman series, of which Cooke illustrated the first arc (#1-4, “Anodyne”). Even though it is from a publisher that predominantly puts out superhero comics and features characters from that world, you could argue that Selina’s Big Score is, essentially, a crime comic book. That is true not because there aren’t any caped crusaders in this story, but because of how the book looks as you flip through its pages.

Traditionally, there are certain elements that creators tend to employ in a crime comic book story. You will see heavy shadows, tight panels, and the occasional shift in perspective with clever use of Dutch angles. While you will get plenty of those in Selina’s Big Score, it struck me how a big chunk of the book is done in a tight four-tier per page structure, almost as if Cooke chooses to limit himself to that. This is quite unusual because most comic book pages follow a three-tier structure: setup, beat, punchline. A four-tier structure, particularly the one Cooke employs throughout Selina’s Big Score, that of twelve panels per page, can feel overwhelming – there is simply too much going on on a page. It speaks volumes on Cooke’s command of his storytelling that it isn’t so in this book. You will see panels on panels, stacked one over the other, but it never gets in the way of the scene that Cooke is trying to tell on that page.

Consider the following page. This is early in the book, as we are introduced to the characters that make up the story and to the elements of the heist that they are trying to pull off. Here, Cooke establishes the location in the first panel and then uses shot / reverse shot to let us know that there is a certain level of distrust between the players here, as we watch this verbal tennis match of wits between them. You don’t even need to read the dialogues on this page to know who wins that tennis match; it is already conveyed through the characters’ body language. Chantel starts off strong, pointing at and pushing into Selina’s space, so much so that the cool and collected Catwoman has to rise up to meet Chantel’s challenge, gradually “moving” from her place in the lower-left corner of her panels to ever so slightly towards the right, ending on a panel with absolute focus on her, essentially outmanoeuvring Chantel at her own game and coming on top. This is reinforced in how Cooke keeps Selina on the centre of the page – it’s still her show. At the same time, on an already loaded page brimming with word balloons and subtle character work, he somehow also manages to dedicate an entire panel for a stylized introduction to Chantel, a common troupe of heist films.

Next up is the 2004 limited series The New Frontier. As I mentioned earlier, this is Cooke’s superhero epic that aims to bring DC Comics’ Golden Age characters – Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman – into the 60s and introduce its Silver Age characters – Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter. Much like how Cooke employed the tried and tested tools of crime comic storytelling but then built on those for Selina’s Big Score, he does so with superhero comics in The New Frontier. For example, while over the years, “realism” has become the norm in superhero comics, with artists adding as many details as humanly possible into the tiniest panel, the core idea hasn’t changed: You want clean lines that make it easy for the readers to follow the action, especially when you are doing big action sequences. Cooke does plenty of that in The New Frontier, but clean lines aren’t the only thing that make this book so good.

Cooke follows a strict three widescreen panels per page structure throughout The New Frontier. It feels like a cross between the then and the now, between the three-panel structure reminiscent of classic newspaper strips, that offered a clear setup, beat, punchline all in one go, and the “widescreen comics” popularized by Bryan Hitch in the late 1990s / early 2000s with his work on The Authority and The Ultimates.

Take a look at the page below. Even without the context, you get a clear idea of what’s going on here. The first panel sets up not just the location, so you know where we are in the story’s world, but it also informs you of the sheer scale of the things at stake here. You see this grisly mixture of fire and water – of burning human and alien flesh falling into this great wave off the Atlantic – punctuated by a red superhuman streak. The second panel is the beat, that adds to the plot and gives you the additional details you might need to fully contextualize the scene here.

It looks deceivingly simple, but this is something that is incredibly hard to pull off right. It is a testament of Cooke’s mastery over his storytelling that he makes it look so easy. Almost every page in The New Frontier is either a standalone or stands on its own in the scene Cooke is trying to tell over multiple pages. Even when he breaks the three-panel structure, he follows the same structure within the panel he broke it for. At the same time, restricting yourself to a particular structure/layout throughout a book also means that when you do break the mould for a splash or a double spread, it hits the reader with twice the impact. Once you realise that you also start to understand why Cooke may have chosen to stick with that three widescreen panels per page structure so vehemently throughout The New Frontier.

Finally, we look at the Parker novels. In 2009, IDW Publishing contracted Cooke to adapt four novels from Donald E. Westlake’s Parker series. Parker is Westlake’s – the grandmaster of crime fiction – most famous creation, starring in over twenty novels Westlake wrote under the “Richard Stark” pseudonym. While all four of Cooke’s adaptations – The Hunter, The Outfit, The Score, Slayground – are excellent in their own right, I want to discuss the third book in that series, The Score, since it is a heist story, front and centre, much like how Selina’s Big Score is, except that it is not set in the world of superheroes.

Coming off Selina’s Big Score and The New Frontier, the first thing you notice as you flip through the pages of The Score is how it looks like it is the best of both worlds – Cooke still does tight panels because it is a crime comic book story, but perhaps also applies the lessons learnt from his work on superhero comics to open it up when it fits. The heavy shadows are even heavier, the stylized introductions even more stylized, but the overall panel structure feels looser and, dare I say, less restrictive. A “looser” structure, so to speak, also allows Cooke to experiment and, I would argue, adapt from his source better.

Let’s consider an example. Take a look at this page from The Score. Much like the page we discussed for Selina’s Big Score, this is early in the book, before the heist. Notice how Cooke plays with the layout here. We open with a wide panel that introduces three new characters in one go. Parker knows Grofield and Wycza already, so we get a tight on the three of them in the next tier of the page where the central idea of the scene is reinforced with the panel right in the centre of the page: "Are you in, Parker?" This panel is flagged by two on either side, offering a stylized introduction to the characters we just met – again, as we established before, a common troupe of heist films. We go to a wide again where, essentially, it is two scenes in one. We get the continuation of the chat from the previous panels and we see that the players are being called into the next room.

Cooke could have broken this page down, into a nine-panel grid, for example. Here, the first tier could be: panel one, Paulus escorting Parker into the room, ending with that “I’ll go grab some beer and we’ll get going"; panel two, tight on the players Parker already knows; and panel three with a peek into the hall, a tease of the things to come. The second tier remains the same, while the third tier is broken down in a somewhat similar fashion as the first one: tight on Parker as we learn he is still unsure of participation in this job; Grofield joking to no one in particular; and the last panel that acts as scene transition to the next page, with the players turning their heads around on that "Gentlemen, can you come in here?" call. You can see that it could work, and while I do love me some nine-panel grid, doing those two scenes in wide panels feels more natural, as if many things are happening at the same moment.

These are some very specific examples, with a particular eye towards the way he structures his page and breaks it down into panels for stories across different genres, but there is a lot of cool stuff lurking under the pages of Cooke’s impressive body of work. There is a lot you could learn about this medium and how to use the elements of it to your advantage. For example, hunt down Detective Comics #439 (1974) for "Night of the Stalker!" by Steve Englehart, Vin and Sal Amendola, et al. and then see Cooke remake it as "Déjà Vu" in Solo #5 (2005) for an absolute masterclass on how to do more with less.

***

A slightly reworked version of this post was featured on Comic Book Herald. You can read the piece here.