Batman: Night Cries

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Something that sets Croc apart from a lot of Batman's other villains is the fact he wasn't exposed to toxins, caught in a freak lab accident, given special drugs, nor did he perform experiments on himself. He was born like this. Peter Tomasi's run on Batman had the writer humanize Damian in ways that even Grant Morrison's more subtle characterization wasn't able to do alone. So, after Damian's death in Batman Inc., Tomasi dedicated a completely silent issue to the character in Batman and Robin #18. From Alfred's weeping at the Wayne Family portrait, with Damian's figure still unfinished, to Bruce's near inability to keep functioning, the issue reaches a climax when Batman finds a letter Damian wrote to his father explaining why he needed to help his father and how much he loves him. Bruce finally breaks and nearly destroys a whole room, collapsing onto his knees and holding Damian's costume in his hands. The Dark Knight is the perfect comicbook hero to craft the story with. He works in the street at night, he's human and grounded. The dark and and horrifying truth flawlessly blends with his tragic past. Thus the result is an effective delivery of message which does not feel contrived.

So Batman and James have to team up to hunt down a serial killer. It sounds simple enough and we've seen it a million times in Batman titles. But this serial killer is hunting and murdering people who've touched, hurt, molested children. This makes it question if stopping him worth it based on the disgusting behaviors of the victims of the killer. Damian's death and the resulting fallout in the Bat-Family. Batman & Robin in particular has an arc with Bruce going through the five stages of grief, where he further alienates and hurts his allies, still bearing wounds from Death of the Family.If that isn't enough to lose sleep over, there's also always high wonderful levels of Body Horror involved. Shapeshifting abilities aside for infiltration purposes. He can morph various parts of his body into deadly solid matter or weapons. Even capable of smothering his victims within his very body... shudders* Batman is able to bring down even the gods of fiction. He can easily take down mafias and regular crimes on the streets of Gotham. But in Night Cries, Batman painfully recognizes the sad fact that eradicating child abuse, a silent and real villain, is an insurmountable task. It is the monster that even him and Commissioner Gordon cannot escape from.

Goodwin makes this a fairly personal story for Jim Gordon, getting inside Gordon's brain with a condescending voice of narration that I'm led to believe is his interpretation of his father. That added element of Gordon dealing with the cycle of domestic abuse, and the ramifications on his marriage and young James Jr., really get to the heart of the damage that child abuse can cause and continue to cause without dealing with the root issues. There are also dark mirrors of Bruce Wayne as well to add more to the fuel. Thomas Elliot a.k.a Hush is the perfect closest to a doppelganger to Bruce. The irony that these two share when they were once childhood friends to one another's families and to each other. At the same time, both suffered the losses of their mothers and fathers. The only slight difference? Bruce lost his family through heart-wrenching tragedy. Thomas on the other hand lost him through his means. He sought personal independence due to the many years of abuse from his father and frail mother and wanted to obtain his inheritance sooner. He cut his parent's tire breaks on their car and manages to kill his father, yet his mother was saved by the exceptional operational skill of Dr. Thomas Wayne fueling his hate for the Waynes. Years later he finished what he started by suffocating his mother in cold blood with a pillow, all as the world thought that it was just a simple household accident. He murdered them just to obtain the family fortune. And he resents Bruce because he obtained his true loss BEFORE his own family's demise. Hush's sole purpose in life is to destroy both the Batman and Bruce Wayne and will stop at nothing to accomplish his goals. Batman: City of Crime, by David Lapham, Ramon Bachs, and Nathan Massengill, follows Bruce Wayne as he investigates the disappearance of a young girl in Gotham City. This leads him to untangle a whole conspiracy among the elites of Gotham who have been replaced by The Body, soil-made beings who have been taking over the city for years. Just a great Batman story from start to finish with some hauntingly beautiful art by Scott Hampton.

Video Games

All of the possible origin stories for the Joker told by the insane patients were a bit unsettling. Two-Face. Harvey Dent's bout with his "evil" side of himself holds many classic struggles of one's internal thoughts. Not only is he unpredictable, well organized, and wily, but he's also shown to be adept and highly dangerous. From his obsession with the number two (.22 caliber guns, second place trophies, the 2nd National Banks, etc.) judging people's fate by a flip of his scarred sided coin, to being a creepy Stalker with a Crush with Renee Montoya. Everybody knows of his horrific mangled left-sided face. But when you delve deep into his character and history, one can understand and summarize on what drove him to become on who or what he is. All because of one instance during court by a certain thug Salvatore Maroni testifying during the infamous "Holiday" murders.

He consoles her, tells her he understands that she’s not ready to talk about the things she’s seen, but there’s a way for her to share what she knows about her parent’s deaths. He tells her that sharing painful memories can help them, and tells her she can draw a picture instead of talking; she takes a pencil, starts drawing on a pad of paper, and hands it to Batman. On the pad is a picture of a bat.One particularly creepy, but rather unknown, adversary of Batman is Jane Doe. She is, as quoted by one of her personas, "a cipher, she's incomplete, her life is empty, so she covets the lives of others. She takes their lives so she can have their lives." In short, she learns people's traits, kills them, then wears their skin and acts like them. If that, and what's really under her skin doesn't unnerve, it's also worth noting she's primarily responsible for turning Warren White into The Great White Shark, who would go onto be one of Gotham's most feared mob bosses. And now Snyder's added the Joker to his run. And thus we're greeted with a terrifying, horrifying image of Joker ◊ holding his cut-off face, as it was cut off at the beginning of the New 52 reboot of Detective Comics, teasing his return. And the storyline title? it's called "Death of the Family". That's right, somebody close to Batman will die again. Scott Hampton’s meticulously painted artwork was the major selling point of Night Cries when originally released in 1992. This was in an era when not every Batman comic was subsequently reprinted in a collection, meaning an all-new story was even more of an event, and that feeling was accentuated by child abuse being a significant plot aspect. In The Man Who Laughs, we see the effects of the Joker's venom from Batman's perspective. Even though he gets better soon (as it's all part of a plan), the loss of sanity is terrifying. And you can't help but wonder if he was ever fully cured... Artist Scott Hampton also brings into play a unique layer of abstraction and morbidness with his artistic vision, consisting of a style entirely painted with detailed and expressive strokes. Focused mostly on drowning the story in darkness, expertly utilizing shadows to plunge the narrative into an appropriate and sinister atmosphere, it conveys a certain sense of urgency and tragedy that is difficult to achieve otherwise. He also does an impressive job in capturing emotion in his characters, rarely missing the mark despite the awkwardness of doing so with paint, while also utilizing brighter colours to express gentler moments, kinder faces, and pure innocence. All in all, his artwork is impressive and remained complimentary to the haunting narrative in this graphic novel.