La Zona Muerta

It was a long time ago; we are talking 1988 or early 1989… but I distinctly recall sitting at the kitchen table. Mom walked by, telling me that she and Dad were leaving for the weekend, and that I needed to be good while they were gone. I nodded, picturing eating ice cream and watching all the R rated movies I wanted. She again emphasized that I needed to be good… and flopped a thick, square bound comic book in front of me. It was called Batman: A Death in the Family.

I didn’t read Batman at the time. It wasn’t due to any particular reason other than I was early into reading comics, and was spending my meager money on the Marvel side of the aisle, saving DC mostly for trips to the library. Batman, for me, was the wacky guy on TV with the booming voice and the paunch, so it hadn’t really occurred to me to read his (many) comics. And yet… here was this intriguing object; a book (!) with probably six comics’ worth of pages promising that Robin was going to DIE.

You have to keep in mind two things; one, trade paperbacks weren’t really a thing yet. There had been a couple of Warner Books trades by this point of really significant books like Dark Knight Returns and the first volume of Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing, and of course Marvel had flirted with trades in the late seventies, but this was not today, where the monthly periodicals almost subsidize the trade catalog. The other thing… when there WERE trades… you couldn’t just get them at the 7-11 spinner rack. And yet… that’s exactly what my Mom did. This thing was already dog eared from being crammed into a wire rack, was printed on lousy newsprint and was just an odd package in general… but here it was, fresh from the newsstand to me. My guess would be that DC rushed this out probably the month after the story wrapped up to capitalize on the media idea that Robin was dead (of course, the Robin everyone knew, Dick Grayson, was fine) or maybe to capitalize on pre movie hype. Obviously, no one knew that the 1989 movie was going to be the smash it was… I can’t even swear that the movie was on my radar at this point… and DC would milk everything they could out of it, with trades and graphic novels and a new series (Legends of the Dark Knight)… but that engine was not yet in place.

“Don’t read it all now,” Mom warned. “Save it so you have something to do later this weekend.”

Of course, shitty, little ten year old me didn’t heed her warning; I read that thing cover to cover as soon as they were out the door. There was an intriguing pull quote on the back:

“It would be a really sleazy stunt to bring him back.” – Denny O’Neil

Indeed.

I don’t know if the tale gripped me then; I can’t genuinely remember. I know I poured over the pages over and over; there must have been SOME resonance. I think, 35 years down the road, that it’s largely good… perhaps relying a little bit too much on plot contrivance and chance meetings and the like, but it does a good job in making you care for the plight of Jason Todd (in a way perhaps earlier issues hadn’t) and softens you up… for the kill. For once, a dumb scheme by the Joker pays off. Todd gets savagely beaten, tied up to a beam with his real mom and left with a time bomb counting it’s way down towards the inevitable. He frees himself, tries to disable the bomb… and fails.

THAT blew my little mind; I was used to Batman and Robin being tied up to bombs and escaping at the start of the next episode. Then, the book takes a turn into the super bizarre… the DC comics of the late 1980s wanting to be taken more seriously, sometimes tying into real life, sometimes not…

…and the Joker becomes the new ambassador to Iran, working for the Ayatollah Khomeini.

WHAT?

It’s as crazy as it sounds and it’s just… almost indescribable. Of course, the United Nations can’t bar Joker’s entry into the hall of delegates… of course Joker tries to kill them all… of course Superman (sort of) saves the day (there were still a lot of people who got blown up… oops) and Batman, while catching Joker… fails to apprehend him as the helicopter they stage their climatic “last” battle on spirals out of control. The story ends with Batman screaming “FIND HIS BODY!” to Superman as he knows that somehow, the Clown Prince of Crime has cheated death yet again.

Er, that’s it.

I read it again and again, not really knowing the ancilliary characters… missing the allusion to the events of the Killing Joke, all of that… but still getting the jist. Batman failed his ward in multiple ways and ultimately was unable to bring his killer to justice.

Wow.

I’ve talked about the story and the format… but nothing about the most important thing to my ten year old eye…

The amazing artistry of one Jim Aparo.

Of course, today, it’s easy to say that he came in doing a bit of a Neal Adams riff…or that he drew Batman for too long. A comics Youtube channel I used to enjoy once bagged on his art for the seminal Batman 497 (you know the one… the back breaky one), talking about how staid it was, how not dynamic…

And I just want to say that’s a load of horseshit. Jim Aparo was the greatest Batman artist of all time. Hell, he probably drew the character more times than any single human being. To me, both ten year old wide eyed innocent and to the jaded forty five year old misanthrope I grew into, the man’s art was dynamic, clear, powerful and fascinating. I didn’t just read Death in the Family all weekend long… I traced it, too. Over and over. That poor trade… the original is no longer in my possession… it finally became just a bit too dog eared… but man, I all but tore it up, rereading and appropriating the art over and over and over. Foreign climbs, realistic city streets, architecture, muscled dudes hitting people so hard that there were mid panel EXPLOSIONS… Jim Aparo was always dynamic, always pushing forward, even on an assignment he drew for multiple decades. If he ever burned out, he never showed it.

It was Jim Aparo’s birthday last Saturday… and I did this in homage to the story, the man and to ten year old me:

Yes, yes, it’s the La Pieta thing, homaged a trillion times. So what? It’s a poignant look at the infallible Batman’s first huge failure.

And Denny was right… when they did bring Jason back? It WAS sleazy.