Batman in Azeroth

A very very long time ago, I stumbled into my local comic shop to spend some of my hard-saved money. This particular comic shop was one of the only ones in the area I lived at the time, and had a side hustle getting in role play game supplements and modules. I would regularly head there to update my growing collection of Role Master modules. One day though, something on the shelf near the doorway caught my eye.

Legends of the Dark Knight - Storm
This is where it all began...

Something about the rain, the lighting, and the mood caught my eye. I bought it alongside my roleplaying goodies, and when I’d read it, began quickly buying up as many Batman back issues as I could. I became hooked on comics, and started snapping up all the popular titles of the time, mainly Spawn, X-Men and Wolverine, alongside all the various Batman series (Shadow of the Bat, Detective Comics, Batman). Normal covers were fine, but I wanted all the shiny limited ones most of all.

While I eventually weened myself off the other franchises1, Batman was the one that I’ve stuck with for the longest2. I’m up to about 30 years of Batman collecting now. Kelley Jones' take on the Dark Knight is one I’d like to someday get a tattoo of. Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s stories have stuck with me since the first time I read them. I have statues, and Lego, and graphic novels all over the house…

So why the grump about Batman? And what the hell does the Battle for Azeroth have to do with him?

Much WoW. Little wow⌗

In a similar way to comics, World of Warcraft has been the biggest addiction hobby of my life. I started a few months after it came out, although I was very much not a hardcore player. But I certainly played a lot, and joined a guild that I felt comfortable hanging out virtually with. I didn’t ever raid, and wasn’t heavily into dungeons, but spent a lot of time doing solo content, and sometimes grouped with others to get various quests done.

Like all other players from that time, the first time I crossed into Outland was a mesmerising experience3. At that point, I became a bit more involved in the game. I changed guilds, started getting more involved in dungeons, and even began some light raiding near the end of TBC. When Wrath of the Lich King hit, I finally disappeared down the rabbit hole for good. Switched from mage to paladin tank, became raid leader, and spent nearly all of my free time logged in.

Like a lot of folks though, eventually, the sense of magic wore off. I was spending more time planning and administering the guild I was part of, rather than enjoying the game. It began to feel like a second job, and given the job I’m in, I needed something that felt relaxing when I played, not something that I felt I was obliged to do to keep other people happy.

At the same time, when Cataclysm launched, WoW itself changed. I won’t go into any detail here, it’s been written about by more people than I can count4. But in summary, the events in Cataclysm and onwards began to feel bigger. It wasn’t you and a small group of trusted allies beating the bad guy in a castle or dungeon. It became world-saving stuff. And as you saved the world in one expansion, the only way to get the next expansion to be even more exciting was to become even more important to the universe. Soon, you’re allying yourself with gods, fighting enemies who’ve lain dormant for thousands of years and want nothing more than to destroy EVERYTHING! And you, personally, are the only one who can do it.

The stories got bigger and more outlandish5. The lore retcons got worse. Time travel got introduced as a major storyline feature, which is always a bit of a red flag for this Grumpy Metal Guy. Everything just got a bit too much. I stopped playing for a while, came back for a little bit of Shadowlands (because it sounded awesome), but didn’t even finish levelling before realising nothing had changed. There was always a major universal event that you were the only one who could solve it. It was all just a bit silly after a while, and like a lot of people, it stopped being interesting.

How Does Batman == WoW?⌗

Batman storylines over the last couple of years have come to resemble later WoW expansions. Increasingly, they’re multi-issue storylines that involve massive plots that end up affecting all of Gotham in an existential way. One of the last issues I read blew up a large section of Gotham as the bad guys tried to make their point. But it feels like there’s always someone blowing up a big chunk of Gotham. Or poisoning the [air|water|food supply] to [kill|enslave|terrify] the poor helpless citizens. Of course, our caped hero is there with his team to save the day, but it feels like there’s a constant sense of escalation. Each storyline has to be bigger and more outlandish than the last.

And please don’t get me started on [Infinite|Dark|Super|Metal] Crisis on [Infinite|Dark|Multiple] [Earth|MultiVerse]. The storylines are so daft and vacuous in those things than only those with a directly implanted Wikipedia link can remember who all the random characters are and why the story is progressing the way it is.

So in short, and perhaps not surprisingly after reading for 30 years, Batman is starting to seem a bit like how I felt about the X-Men back in the 90s, or WoW more recently. Just not fun, or even remotely believable. And yes, I appreciate that I’m grumping about a man dressed in tights as a bat. But when judged relative to the earlier grittiness and storylines, I’m starting to despair that it’s only going to get worse.

So What Next?⌗

That’s a great question, I’m glad you asked! Although, frankly, I don’t have many good ideas (and even if I did, I’m relatively confident that Jim Lee is not reading this blog). I’d desperately like to see them return to storylines that concentrate more on detective work and less on biff-pow punch-ups with increasingly paper-like villains. Fewer “if I don’t get my way, I will blow up that part of Gotham over there, the one between the other blown up parts” threats. The Tom King Bat and Cat wedding storyline felt genuinely different when it came out as it centred mainly around the relationship between two people, and for me is the most memorable story over the last few years. So - more of that please!

But given the current writing style and direction, I’m not sure this is even remotely on the cards. Maybe I’m a Grumpy outlier and the masses are happy with this stuff. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been far more interested in Dark Horse or other smaller publisher’s output. These days, anything Hellboy related or written by Jeff Lemire is an instant buy. Same with Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillip’s work. Greg Rucka, although inconsistent in output frequency, still writes great stuff. Some smaller publishers are also delivering comics that are different and engaging.

All of which means that, for the first time in a very long time, I’m a lot less interested in the Dark Knight than I used to be. Which makes me grumpy. Perhaps I shouldn’t rush into getting that tattoo after all…

  1. For various reasons, but mostly they felt too shallow, and not much more than bang-biff-pow type stuff. ↩︎

  2. Spawn came a close second, but I dropped that a few years back, the storylines just weren’t that good, and the art style had long since changed from the days of Greg Capullo’s hey-day. ↩︎

  3. You know the bit I mean. That first flight across Hellfire Peninsula is forever etched in my memory. ↩︎

  4. And I can even count to more than the number of fingers and toes I have! ↩︎

  5. Outlandish. Get it? ↩︎