Oh yes. He did the exact same thing to Batman Family.

Well, I'm not going to get to it this weekend, but coming up next (probably on Monday), is an issue I've been looking forward to finally reading and reviewing, as I didn't even know it existed until it came up in a Mike's Amazing World Newsstand search a while back:



I chased down a copy and am very curious to see what Len Wein, Curt Swan, and Murphy Anderson bring to a store giveaway designed to promote literacy in Canada.

Batman: A Word To the Wise (Summer 1992)



"A Word To the Wise"

Script: Len Wein
Pencils: Curt Swan
Inks: Murphy Anderson
Colors: Adrienne Roy
Letters: Albert DeGuzman

Grade: C+

Apparently, if you lived in Canada in the 1980s, Zellers was a name as common as Wal Mart or Target is in the United States today. This was a special promotional book, commissioned to coincide with the release of Batman Returns, that was available only in the school supplies section of Zellers during their Back to School sale. Kids had to buy a pack of 50 sheets of Zellars branded lined school paper and then pay 29 cents extra to get the promotional book. Supposedly, this is still a very common book to find in Canada today, and there was even a French version published for Roquefort Raider and his fellow French Canadians.

The book/initiative was paid for both by Zellers and by "ABC Canada, the foundation to promote literacy in Canada," and the goals of both sponsors is readily apparent throughout the story:

1. Promote literacy as tactlessly and incessantly as possible:




2. Make money for Zellers:






It goes without saying that the creative team wasn't going to bring their A game to a project like this. There are several significant plot holes and logic lapses in the book that make it feel like it was written in one draft. Furthermore, while Len Wein's work on Batman at the beginning of this decade was often dark and psychological, and while he went on to edit my favorite stretch of Batman stories ever in which Gerry Conway and Doug Moench did much to develop Batman's complex psyche, persona, and relationship with others, what Wein turns in here is just plain hokey:



Batman constantly cracks corny jokes, perhaps the worst being when he informs The Joker that "your card's just been cancelled" while The Joker is trying to rob a library. But, in terms of so-bad-it's-good, I positively love how the librarian stands up to Joker in this scene:



Next month, in "Ms. LaSalle, French Canadian Librarian," Ms. LaSalle sternly reminds two teens of the Technology User Agreement they signed when she finds them looking up porn in the computer lab.


Oh, and there's also some very forced praise of Canada wedged into the plot with a proverbial crowbar:





Interestingly enough, this appeal to Canadian pride may have actually backfired. While Legends of the Dark Knight #27 strongly implied that Gotham City is located in or near Connecticut, Canadians certainly had the freedom to assume Gotham City was located somewhere in Canada. While Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Jim Starlin's Ten Nights of the Beast and Sam Hamm's Blind Justice all indicated either that Batman worked primarily in the United States and/or that Bruce Wayne was an American Citizen, I've argued extensively that none of those storylines necessarily exist in Post-Crisis continuity. Theoretically, no one reading Batman in 1992 had any reason to believe Batman wasn't Canadian until this storyline clearly established that Batman does not come to Canada often and doesn't know it very well.



But enough ripping on this story. The fact is, it does do one thing very right. Wein may be writing an oddly throwback version of Batman, the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1960s, but he definitely gets The Joker right. Back while Wein was still editing the Batman books, he and Doug Moench established that The Joker could have killed Batman a dozen times over and yet purposefully chose not to. It added complexity and depth to their relationship. Wein returns to that idea here, after Batman has, for some reason barged into the library after The Joker without a plan of any kind (I told you it was a problematic story) and is then utterly stymied by The Joker pulling a gun on him.





It's a deeper moment than it needed to be.


Also, this page was actually funny:




But Wein does create one significant blunder in his depiction of The Joker in this story:



Batman later gets his hand on this document and reads it carefully.

...meaning Batman knows who The Joker's ancestors are.

...meaning Batman knows The Joker's identity.


And we're just going to gloss over this??


Like I said, an exceptionally clumsy story, but it's both fun to laugh at and a very decent depiction of The Joker, and we haven't had one of those since the Mike W. Barr run five years earlier. Starlin certainly didn't get The Joker right in A Death in the Family, and don't get me started again on Chuck Dixon's depiction in Robin II: The Joker's Wild.


Minor Details:

- I include this issue here in my reviews because that's where Mike's Amazing World places it, but I suspect that was done because the book was released in 1992 and had no other date information on the cover, thus leaving Mike's Amazing World to date it as January 1992, but this was released to coincide with Zellers Back to School sale, so it likely would have been released in August. Batman Returns was released in June of 1992, and this book was certainly designed to coincide with the merchandising onslaught that followed the film's release.




- To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time we see a television screen on the Batmobile dashboard.



A minor and (perhaps) unimportant detail, except that we just saw nearly the same layout in Batman Returns, and that screen ended up playing a pivotal role in the film's climax:




All in all, I liked this one. The aspects of this story that were bad were so bad they were good, and I appreciated finally getting a good depiction of The Joker again, even if Curt Swan can't seem to draw The Joker to save his own life:

As a Canadian reader who would have liked to have believed otherwise, it seemed pretty clear that there was no way Batman was operating out of Canada.  

- Member of The Justice League of America

- Gotham doesn't really feel Canadian.  Hopefully no one will take offense, but I can see Gotham acting as a stand-in for, say, New York which had a reputation for being unfriendly and crime ridden, but I don't really feel it fitting comfortably into a map of Canada.  To put it another way, Year One had Gordon moving to Gotham from Chicago after cleaning up police corruption over there (and presumably, making a dent in other forms of crime) and moving on to a greater challenge in Gotham.  I just can't see Gordon saying "Cleaning up the cease pool of Chicago was one thing, but even that didn't prepare me for the soulless, vile, scum operating out of the sewers here in... Canada".  Not that we don't have violent crime here (as a Winnipegger I get to boast that I live in the murder capital of Canada) but, I don't know, 'Tough cop from Chicago goes to Canada to clean up crime over there' sounds like an 80's comedy film and not Batman: Year One.

- Crime aside, Gotham feels like it has greater history than a city located in a country founded in 1867 would have.  Didn't Dark Knight/Cark City establish that it had roots to Thomas Jefferson?

- If Batman were Canadian, the comics would play that up.  Of course, you're not saying he is - only that it's plausible - but with Wolverine's Canadianisms ('bub', probably said 'eh') being used as comics subtle reminder that 'Hey, we have a Canadian character here!' a character who isn't stereotypically something probably isn't that thing.

- Some post-Crisis stories/moments which make it clear Batman is American:
                    Death in the Family with Batman's CIA pal, Ralph Bundy advising him to follow The President's orders.
                    Batman 432 - Batman vs. the CIA
                    Detective 601 has a police officer make a remark that if he were to try to catch up to Batman while he's speeding off in his Batmobile, he'd be in Canada by that time.
                    Detective 614 closes with Batman standing in front of a US flag positioned atop a Gotham building.  Had that been a Canadian flag, I'm sure a lot of readers would have done a double take.
                    Any number of Jim Starlin stories where he tries to inject politics into things.  "Federal agents" (Canada has The RCMP), "State laws" (Canada has provinces), references to real world events                        involving "our government" ie. Iran-Contra in Death in the Family, but I'm sure there are others.

I'd love it if Batman were Canadian, but I'm afraid it wasn't to be...

And I'm thrilled you reviewed this issue.  I got it when it came out and am hoping to share my thoughts when I re-read it.  Lots of good memories of it, though.

Zellers was a big name Canadian store along with other such companies as K-Mart and Woolco which Americans may or may not have been familiar with.  Actually, a lot of Canadians today wouldn't be all that familiar with them either given the fact that they no longer exist, but man, do I remember this comic of which I had multiple copies of and read every one of them despite the fact that they were all identical.

I love that this is unashamedly a comic book.  Curt Swan proving that he could still produce a full-page comic of high quality material despite what the Supertitles wanted you to believe and on a character he isn't readily identified with to boot.  Admittedly, I don't like Carmine Infantino's cover despite the fact that he was still doing some nice work on the Batman newspaper strip (though I think it might only have been printed in Comic Shop News at this point).  He is hand's down, my favorite cover artist, but, yeah, this just isn't doing it for me.

As noted, The Joker is well presented here and perhaps what I love most about this issue - four years after the degradation he underwent in A Killing Joke and Death in the Family ensured that the character would likely never again return to the level which once seemed assured in the mainstream titles, here he is written as his classic self highlighted by some clever moments.  I like his acknowledgement that 'fake fists up his sleeve' tricks are beneath him, but since he's a performer playing to an audience who always reacts positively (or negatively) to it, he has to keep it in his repertoire like Sinatra having to belt out 'My Way' for the thousandth time.  The little "it really would make sense for me to just shoot you since you're going to follow me the moment I leave, but since I look forward to our little skirmishes, I'll just gas you instead" bit was a nice acknowledgement of comic book conventions without really mocking them.

I can't help but wonder if Wein wrote something fun like this to counter the misanthropic torture porn soul at the heart of Killing Joke/Death in the Family or if I'm just reading too much into it.  Whether I am or not, I think you can see why I would suspect that there's something of a "The Joker doesn't have to sexually assault and cripple Batgirl or bludgeon a child to a pulp to be threatening and I'll prove it" vibe present.  A female librarian in a wheelchair confronting The Joker?  Surely, Barbara Gordon must have crossed Wein's mind when he came up with this.  Children going to another country to chase after The Joker?  Isn't this what Jason Todd did?  Even The Joker's brainy crony bears more than a passing resemblance to Dr. Moon who teamed up with the villain to torture Catwoman.  It almost feels as if Wein included these elements to evoke a "uh oh, I wonder where he's going with this" feel from anyone buying the mainstream titles just so he could say "I just had The Joker pull out that camera and reach for that librarian's blouse because he wanted to brush some crumbs off it before he took a picture of the fine Zellers outfit she was wearing.  What do you think I was going to have him do?"  

Yeah, seeing The Batmobile parked at Zellers and Batman fawning over the mountains of Canada is a bit much, but what can I say?  I'm a sucker for fun comics.

Wow, ok then, I guess I read that wrong.  

I had heard the "cripple the bitch" comment before and while I dislike a lot of Moore's writing, he strikes me as a very decent, honest individual.  I hadn't realized (or had forgotten) that the comment came from Wein though.

Perhaps I'm taking things a little too off course here (I mean, this is a Zellers tie-in comic book, after all) but I did find this quote from Wein confirming Moore's claim:

 "I have always regretted making that comment. I was a good deal younger at the time, and it was meant ironically. And, no, the decision was not made lightly. When Alan suggested it, I fold him I’df have to discuss it with then-publisher Jenette Kahn and get back to him. We had a lengthy discussion, decided it was something that had newer been done before to a major character, and agreed to lest Alan go ahead. I called him back, made the now-regrettable comment, and we want ahead. I still think crippling Barbara was a good idea. I thought she was a much more interesting character as Oracle than she ever was as Batgirl."  

observationdeck.kinja.com/midweek-trivia-1773399048

Not sure what "meant ironically" means.  I had heard that permission had to be granted before Moore could paralyze Barbara Gordon given how potentially valuable the character may have been to the company and that getting this permission was like pulling teeth.  I can certainly envision a situation where Wein was responding to a seemingly never-ending chain of events with Moore calling his liaison at DC (presumably Wein) if he could paralyze Gordon, Wein would ask his boss, Wein's boss would say "I haven't decided, call back later", Wein would relay that message to Moore, Moore would call Wein back later, Wein would again ask his boss, his boss would say "Still no decision, call back later", Wein would go back to Moore, Moore would call back, Wein would... etc, etc, etc. and getting more and more frustrated by the constant back and forth he was having to do as an intermediary between Moore and his boss until finally, DC says "you have our permission" and Wein responding with "FINALLY!!  AN ACTUAL ANSWER!!" and "cripple the bitch!" coming out as a sort of over-the-top way of expressing "What a pain in the ass this character's been to me running from office to office to office for the past several weeks" in a non-serious way.  Not that I would ever want to make excuses for misogynistic behaviour, but at the same time, I like to think the best of people where I can.