Brian Azzarello’s and Lee Bermejo’s disorienting run together on Batman: Damned can be interpreted in many different ways, and I think that’s partly the point. I won’t be the authority on this story. I think the closest person to come to that — other than Azzarello himself — is Rich Johnston in his recent review, which connects the Damned to Alan Moore’s Killing Joke and Azzarello’s Joker from nearly a decade ago. Instead, I’ll share my interpretation, which is one I didn’t find elsewhere in the other reviews I read.
I’ll skip over the controversy of Bat Wang, the complaints about Azzarello’s relentless punning, the bitching about how flat the blood looks, and get right to the point of my review. I think that superhero comics, at their best, are always a mythology story. Batman: Damned is a mythological story about a man confronting fear, lack of control, judgment, childhood trauma, and desire. It features infidelity, weeping, attempted rape (a more sensible version than the attempted rape in Miller’s Superman: Year One), empathy, confusion, and all the other emotions that make being human so damn exhausting.
I reread the all three books of Batman: Damned in one day, and still struggled to be confident in my interpretation — until the start of my fourth go-around when I realized that the narrator implies that the hero is in hell, and that his quest is more about finding himself than finding out if the Joker is truly dead: “Literally bloody hell. I say that, havin’ a knowledge of it. An’ the depths we’ll go to ESCAPE it.” (If you’re curious about the heavy-handed Britishness of the quote, it’s because narrator is Constantine, who’s more a vehicle for Azzarello’s voice and style than anything else. That’s all I have to say about that.)
Once I accepted that Batman is in hell, and that the myriad of supernatural DC characters were there just to add to the story, the entire plot that follows from that moment in issue one onward became much more straightforward. The laws of storytelling become more flexible, leaving Azzarello and Bermejo plenty of room to craft creative transitions and moments of poetry.
The “Batman is actually dead this whole time” interpretation explains all the abrupt transitions in setting from hotel to cathedral to underground rap concert to graveyard to magic club. It means that the moment Batman falls from the bridge (which is what we’re misled to think actually happened) is really his descent into hell and the beginning of his judgment. It means Batman died on top of trash bags in the street after the Joker stabbed him, and he’s touring hell awaiting the judgment that finally comes in issue 3. Once he’s in the G.C.P.D. morgue, Batman fittingly decides his own fate, finally surrendering himself to death.
This storytelling technique isn’t what makes the books of Damned mythology or even part of the comics canon. It’s Batman’s true foe in the story: not the Joker, but Desire and Fear of Desire, the character otherwise known as Enchantress. She is a demon who strikes a deal with young Bruce: “no tears for fears.” This serves as Batman’s origin story. She torments him his whole life — from childhood to manhood — like death trying to claim him, to get him to surrender. Her presence is associated with Thomas Wayne’s infidelity to his wife Martha, and Bruce’s discovery of how this torments his mother. Even when Batman “defeats” Enchantress, she ultimately wins in the end. No matter how strong the hero, no matter how much money he has, no matter how long his wang is, he will always have to surrender to death.
Speaking of heroes, Lee Bermejo’s art is a herculean achievement. I place him in the elite rank of Alex Ross, and would even dare to say that I prefer Bermejo’s renditions of the human form, cityscapes, facial expressions, action sequences, and landscapes to those of Ross. I was especially impressed by the way he conveyed the aftershock when Harley Quinn’s bombs went off in Gotham, and how he illustrated the confusion Batman experienced while drugged. He made this story horrific.
It’s a real shame that people didn’t have more patience for Damned, and it’s an even bigger shame that the executives at DC cowered from the clear momentum that this book had.
Secret Society Comics 