Batman: The Widening Gyre, No. 1

Batman: The Widening Gyre, #1

Written by: Kevin Smith

Art by: Walter Flanagan

“This is better than anything I have ever written before.”

That’s Kevin Smith’s own assessment of his work on Batman: The Widening Gyre. In fact, if we are to listen and adhere to what Smith says about this series, and about his work in comics as a whole, then we really should see him for what he tells us he is–a masterly storyteller able to pay homage to classic characters like Daredevil, Green Arrow, Spider-Man, and Batman while at the same time infusing them with new life, new energy, and new storylines–again, if you take Smith’s word for it.

Smith’s Daredevil work was controversial, at best. His work on Green Arrow and Batman: Cacophony was not so much controversial as it was unremarkable–those series didn’t sing, didn’t pop off the page. And I think this is what both infuriates and excites potential readers when they learn that Smith will be tackling a new series, another iconic character–he knows his stuff, perhaps as well as anyone on the planet, and he is a tireless champion of all things illustrated. But he just can’t seem to get things together as far as producing exciting, coherent content is concerned.

This is a man who can pick and choose his projects. Given that power, however, I wonder how well history will judge his selections. Many of us are familiar with his public persona–he is dreadfully funny, highly capable of satire on the one hand and bathroom humor on the other, and he is, i think, more than anything, just a damn good talker. (If you’ve never heard him interviewed, I recommend you start by listening to his appearance on the Kevin Pollak Chat Show.)

So why did Smith pick Batman?

(In fact, he picked him twice–Cacophony and The Widening Gyre, both of which were illustrated by a longtime Smith collaborator, the very capable and talented Walter Flanagan.)

The most apparent answer, to me, is a combination of hubris and awe, seemingly disparate and mutually exclusive reasons, to be fair, but in this case, I think they hold true.

Smith is quite obviously in awe of Batman as a character, as an icon, as an entity, yet he seems to be unfailingly resolute in his belief that he can effectively tell the Dark Knight’s tale, a belief that never quite comes to fruition.

I find The Widening Gyre to be, at its core, tired and creatively impotent. Smith’s  take comprises an oft-used mixture of classic villains–an almost absurdly overly sexualized Poison Ivy shares the stage in this one–and compatriots (Dick Grayson appears both as Robin and as Nightwing).

And we get some typical Batman elements–stoicism, an almost zen-like approach to combating horrific villain after horrific villain–and I give Smith credit for correctly and appropriately portraying Batman as an immovable sentry, as Gotham’s last, greatest hope for shelter from the storm of violence and madness that in a very real sense predicate life in that tortured city, not only for victim but for villain and for vigilante. It is oddly appropriate, too, that the story comes to a head with Arkham Asylum serving as its locale, a place where madness is the norm, a place where Batman must continually come to terms with the successes or, as he sees them, the failures of his storied career.

So what goes wrong? And why does the story seem so jagged, so poorly conceived, so poorly executed?

I think the first problem, and perhaps the most glaring one, is that Smith introduces characters into the story in really bizarre ways–they almost come out of nowhere, but not cleverly or suprisingly. Take Batman, for instance. He just sort of shows up. And he doe so atypically. One panel shows the bad guys burning the face off of a Rabbi in a temple; the next panel shows Batman coming out of nowhere with a flying kick to the back of one of the assailants. Where did he come from? Was he watching the whole time? Why didn’t he help sooner? Surely, he could have saved the life of the unfortunate burn victim…

A slew of characters, including Robin, Alfred, Killer Croc, the demon-man Etrigan (who serves as the primary foil in this issue), and an unnamed vigilante all just pop into the action, and the reader is left to wonder how, and why, and to what purpose or end. Smith has admitted in interviews that he was smoking copious amounts of marijuana while writing this story, and I can’t help but wonder whether he was just too damn stoned to realize what a mess he had created.

I found Walter Flanagan’s artwork far superior to the context in which it was placed. I enjoyed his renderings of Poison Ivy and Nightwing, and found his action sequences and background art particularly intriguing.

Alas, Flanagan’s fine efforts are wasted, as  Smith’s disconcerting, almost chaotic brand of storytelling ultimately renders the issue almost unreadable. There is little pleasure to be found in the pages of The Widening Gyre, and I place most of the blame, if not all, squarely on Smith’s shoulders.