Samantha Small

T. Drake

The Monsters We Make

Comic Mini-project Companion Essay

April 17, 2006

Experience Design and Juxtaposition

            In this comic Mini-project I have chosen to incorporate experience design in the form of juxtaposition to convey what I have taken from the class text “Batman”, by Frank Miller. I have arranged scenes I feel are integral to the plot and meaning of the book in loose chronological order, linking them with the monologue that occurs on page 25 of the comic. I have spliced and diced the monstrous and the heroic, uniting them in my own fashion to express my own take on the argument Miller makes through “Batman”. Like other infamous experience design graphic art I utilize direct confrontation of subjects to compare or contrast using tools such as color, foreground-background relationships, and size to make my interpretation more of a comic in and of itself, but also to mimic the propaganda I’ve seen in class.

            The comic I’ve drawn begins with an aging but trusted protagonist, Chief Gordon. In the original comic, Gordon is retiring from the life of a crime fighter. His gaze faces away from the mutant population in my version to illustrate that he has given up the battle against the overwhelming strength of this newer, younger threat. In the second panel we see the ill-fated woman from the subway train on page 69. I depict her peering into her purse in the last few moments she breathes. Her figure is the only clear one in this panel, despite the fact that there is clearly passerby, which shows she is alone in the crowd. With this I meant to show the isolation of the everyman (or woman) in these situations of assault and inflicted harm by criminals in Gotham. The mutants are not present in this shot because I wanted injustice and desperation to be the locus, and not to imply that the mutants are the only antagonists in the story. Last but not least, a younger, thinner Batman haunts the left side of the page, his cape flowing forward to reveal the hands of a criminal running through a pearl necklace. This recalls the assault on Bruce Wayne’s parents. To summarize, this page represents injustice and the indifference of good men. The narrative is ominous, and challenging. It is daring Batman to return in the face of this indifference.

            On the next page, we see the Batman figure on the left clutching his head in agony or conflict, the narrative “You are nothing” hovering over him. The rest of the page reflects this pained chaos, with crimson running rampant in the center. This page begins to show the minor criminals in the story, as well as the theme of innocence lost. The face of the high-ranking military official who compromised his integrity to save the life of his wife is placed next to a gun, again recalled from the memory of the Wayne parents’ death. This is a silent description of his death, and below we see two images—one of Batman holding that once great man, and another of young Bruce Wayne clutching the body of his dead father. Here we see a poignant overlay of similar ideas, drawing us once again to Bruce’s past, where Batman gets his power. Again we see the pearl necklace in the figure of Batman, but also around the gun that seems to be killing the general.

            The Joker’s grinning, red lips and a Bat crashing through a window in Batman’s head display a relationship between the emergence of this vigilante and the return of Joker. This touches upon the idea that without Batman there would be no Joker, that a balance exists between justice and crime that is always trying to find equilibrium. Also on this page is a panel filled with the goggles of the new Robin. Reflected in them are the dead bodies of the poisoned boy scouts on page 140. A caption reads, “A thirteen year old girl… her innocence lost”. Again, we see the flag image overlapping the representation of something unjust, a loss of innocence like that of the upstanding general-turned-traitor. This also represents the loss of innocence in a nation, a nation where boy scouts, the hope of America, could be so coldly murdered. The narration of the quintessence of Batman continues on the lower right of the page, “You cannot stop me.” This perhaps refers to the emergence of the Batman persona itself, but also to the injustice in the world, as it is after taking in all of the above images that one reads that line, and often Batman is not the only entity that comes to mind after such a gruesome illustration. Pearls lie below the bat and shattered glass, as well as in the caption below Robin’s face.

            On the last page the narration and pearls are the remaining links to the previous pages. The pearls dance down the side of the page and disappear, uncontained by the Batman figure or a memory panel. We see the color red and black as Superman prepares to detonate the nuclear bomb in the sky. “You cannot stop me, but still you try” fits this image well. “Still you run” belongs to the rightmost image that harkens back the night Batman returns in the original comic book, the darkened expression of Bruce before he lets go of his charade of hiding from his alternate ego. The next two bits of narrative belong only to the blackness and remaining pearls in the upper left corner of the panel, the pearls which represent throughout the piece loss, regret, and guilt. At last we return to the beginning of the monologue, seeing Batman, Robin, and other figures in the darkness, bathed in the white of new hope—“The Time has Come.”

            Though I have chosen to make a comic out of something that was already primarily graphic, I have chosen to alter it to pass on my message and understanding the of Miller’s work. I wanted to show that the fight between good and evil is endless, and can only be fought with one’s own sense of right and wrong. One’s “pearls” of wisdom—memories of what it was to lose, to be wronged, to regret, and to be ashamed—are integral to justice as a whole. Vigilantism is justified in these terms, but in the end one man’s voice is weak. Man is weak. He cannot fight the beast inside. In the end Bruce bands together with the youth, the former mutants, to make his voice stronger. The journey of hope he is embarking upon, however, is as dark as the paint that surrounds him in the final panel of my comic.  

Works Cited

Miller, Frank. “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns”. New York: 2002.