This article contains spoilers for the events of Batman 50 (published July 4, 2018). Mostly because that’s what my opinion is on.
I must admit something, over the summer I pretty much gave up on reading comics. I dropped all the titles I normally follow and dove head first into other interests for the past couple months. Before there’s outrage about why someone who hasn’t been reading comics is writing about them allow me to explain myself.
Firstly, with comics I don’t avoid spoilers, it’s too much hassle and those spoilers often dictate whether I want to read that issue or not. Which was lucky for me because as comics are wont to do, DC decided to have a huge cross-title event this summer that I saved time and money by avoiding. The long-awaited Batman and Catwoman wedding.
You read that correctly, in early spring Batman proposed to Catwoman on a rooftop in Gotham with the wedding to be published in July. As a result just about every title that had a Gotham based character in it was to have a wedding special leading up to the big day. Like I said I tend to wait for reviews and spoilers before reading and that was certainly the right choice this time because the whole event was – to put it lightly – a hot mess.
Now I’m not naive enough to think that the wedding was actually going to happen, it would close off too many storylines that the writers seem too unimaginative to stop using, but I am annoyed with their reasoning for calling it off. Catwoman claimed that she couldn’t go through with it because it would make Batman happy and if he’s happy then he can no longer be Batman.
There is so much wrong with that statement I’m not even going to try to cover everything, just give it a google for about a hundred different hot takes if you’re curious, but I will give you one of the many things that bothers me about it.
As I mentioned above, this was a huge event with ten different titles relating to it featuring characters like Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood and even Harley Quinn. Fans went and bought these titles, excited for the wedding or at the very least to see what world ending event would interrupt it, only to be told that all of those other characters don’t matter because they don’t make Batman happy.
Nevermind a conversation between Batman and Nightwing regarding the best man position. Or that Batman has one blood son and at least two adopted sons as of the current timeline. Or the slew of friends and allies spread through Gotham City and the Justice League. It doesn’t matter because if any of those things brought even the slightest bit of happiness into his life he wouldn’t be Batman.
Then there’s the negative implications regarding mental health of “the Batman can’t be happy” statement that many more people with many more qualifications could fully explain. Or the implication that only people in a stable relationship can be happy. But I said that I wouldn’t go into those things.
Let me just bluntly state my point, thousands of fans dropped thousands of dollars on comic books that by the end of the event were completely invalidated just because DC’s writer’s can’t figure out a more creative way to stop a wedding in a world regularly invaded by aliens. With buffoonery such as this it’s easy to see why I gave up for a while there, although Gail Simone’s Catwoman/Tweety and Sylvester may have revived my interest.
😃 awesome