Citizen Wayne

 Tim Burton’s 1989 reinvention of superhero cinema, Batman, is a lot of things. In some ways it was the dawn of the modern blockbuster, the first truly successful “tent pole” blockbuster to capitalize on the success of Star Wars, in part because it transformed Darth Vader into a Dark Knight in black rubber. It was a gangster movie when it wasn’t really cool to be a gangster movie (and kickstarted that, too). It was Burton and Michael Keaton achieving the seemingly impossible, what no one could have expected from any of their previous movies.

And it was also kind of Citizen Kane.

Which is to say, it’s an unlikely example of truly exceptional storytelling. Most viewers are going to begin and end their thoughts on it as being a superhero story. That’s fine for them. For most people the simplest explanation is always going to be the best one, even if it’s simplistic and even inaccurate. The most interesting things can play to this kind of interpretation, but they have a lot more going for them.

Batman certainly does. From the moment we meet Billy Dee Williams’ Harvey Dent under a giant banner of his face, evoking Charles Foster Kane’s campaign poster, one can begin to ascertain Burton’s ambitions. Naturally you’d expect his Kane to be Bruce Wayne (there’s of course a later Batman comic written by Brian Michael Bendis called “Citizen Wayne,” where I borrowed the title for this post), but Burton and Keaton’s Wayne is such an anonymous individual he’s introduced without the other characters even being able to identify him. He’s the opposite of Kane. Wayne Manor, as opulent as Xanadu, is as foreign and curious to Wayne as his guests. He isn’t bursting with boundless ego, he’s secretly a vigilante who wants common street thugs to tell their friends about him. He’s an urban legend, not plastered across the newspapers of an empire he himself owns.

And even by Burton’s second movie, Wayne, and Batman himself, still kind of seems beside the point to the flashy villainy around him.

Wayne’s parents were killed in an incident much like the one Burton stages again at the beginning of Batman. Kane’s whole story is dominated by being forcibly adopted into wealth. Kane lives a life dominated by ambitions that are never really his, with a wild goose chase trying to solve the riddle of what was really important to him. Wayne’s mystery isn’t that hard to decipher, but it still drives him to achieve something even more impossible than Kane’s wildest dreams. And he never even pretends it’s possible. He doggedly tackles one problem at a time.

Kane’s love life is about buying love; Wayne’s is about what he never really believes possible, someone truly understanding him, a recurring problem that keeps looking like it has answers but, for someone like Wayne, probably as forever as elusive as his other goals.

You might say that this is beside the point for a superhero, but that’s what really makes the character interesting. In the comics, it wasn’t really for another twenty-five years that a guy named Tom King figures this out. In all the ways Bruce Wayne isn’t Citizen Wayne, it makes him so human it actually makes him seem dull, but he’s anything but. Even lost behind a mask, sometimes lost to it, he remains a fascinating case study of what can be accomplished if someone is truly motivated to use their resources for the good of others. Wayne runs his business well, but he never loses sight of doing right by those he encounters along the way, as if it means nothing at all to him, but really because it just seems so obvious. And as Batman, he tries to go that one step further. He’s as impossible as Kane, but in a way we seldom get to see the good guy, especially in the past twenty years, when it seems we’ve become far more interested in Kane figures, men driven to bad impulses as a matter of course, never thinking, sometimes even when it’s too late, that their lives have gone astray. And Wayne made a vow to do the right thing when his life had fallen definitively apart.

All of which is to say, even a simple idea can be complicated. A simple idea should be complicated. That’s great storytelling. That’s the whole idea. 

A Fruitful Day for Ideas

 Today turned out to be a good day to get back on the horse, or at least the beginning of getting back on it.

Since the death of my previous computer, I’ve kind of slowly gotten back to work. Looking back over everything I’ve already done this year, I see that I was busier than I sometimes allow myself to think, a lot of projects (some since lost, including the big revision project for a contest I’m reasonably sure I won’t be winning because Submittable wasn’t letting me attach the file but still somehow let me “submit,” and at the time I convinced myself it had somehow worked out despite the issues the site was having...) that were all in themselves well worth tackling, and all of which in some ways built on each other.

Anyway, one of the things that was eaten was a new vision of Collider, a long-term project a quarter century in the making that’s the first Space Corps story I ever began working on. Today I did a fresh take of the outline as I recently radically reconsidered it, building on elements I developed during Terrestrial Affairs, the novella from a few years back. It’s strange how much can change but still the basic shape remains as first begun in the mid-90s. Realizing this was possible was part of the reason I didn’t completely freak out over my computer dying and erasing the last version.

I also tackled an outline for George & Gracie, the novella I’ll be including in my Christmas poems collection this year (which is another project being revisited, with the novella being a substitute for two shorter works I lost and don’t want to rewrite). These collections are for my niece, the Burrito, although this year I plan to send the results around to family, in the hopes they might actually begin to see me as a legitimate writer (and not as “gee wiz that dude who keeps trying to make that happen,” which is the recent impression I kind of got from my dad). Anyway, it’s something I’m really excited to tackle, and will be the first thing I work on actually writing.

I also came up two other ideas today, “Kingslayer” and “Old Brown’s Daughter,” though I won’t really talk about what exactly they are here, although they reminded me about an idea I had earlier in the year, “Old Wizards,” and how much that would be fun to get back to. (“Old” being in a title twice is probably a coincidence.) These are ideas that practically told themselves when I conceived them. You don’t take such ideas lightly.

Plus today was the second day of my latest comic book scripting project, Catman/Batwoman, which nominally is a riff on Tom King’s real comic, Batman/Catwoman. It’s going to be the shortest to date, twelve script pages. But nine panel grids every page! (For those who don’t know, “Catman” is an actual DC character. The “Batwoman” indicated is actually Barbara Gordon, the original and most famous Batgirl, who has never actually been referred to as Batwoman. Except in this project. Because: symmetry.)

IWSG October 2020

 This was the first Wednesday of October, which meant that I definitely did not need the Insecure Writers Support Group Facebook page to remind me that it’s that day where we blog...

Nope! That’s definitely not what happened!

(In my defense, I skipped...many, many months of membership duties. I was dropped from the rolls an’ everything.)

Anyway, we have a question to answer, as always:

What does the term “working writer” mean to you?

I can only interpret it as a writer, such as myself, who has a job and writes in their spare time, so that being a writer is not the title they use for tax purposes.

And I have been doing that for many, many years.

At this point I actually have a job that feels like it’s a productive use of my time, that people see me as some benefit other than as an anonymous face. I mean I don’t need my ego involved, but it’s nice. It just feels less like a job, sometimes, this way.

But strangely, sometimes I wonder if actual job fulfillment could get in the way of being productive as a writer. I worked on a lot of things over the past year, including the “bonus pandemic time,” but I wonder if it’s comparable to what I might have accomplished if I were working a less satisfying job. I know, it sounds crazy! Not being overly miserable at work is a bad thing??? I wrote all of my manuscripts (except one, which was during my first experience of unemployment, and then others that weren’t book-length so I’m not counting them) while working versions of soul-crushing jobs. It almost felt necessary!

And yes, it still sounds crazy. Maybe that’s just what I told myself, and what I’m continuing to tell myself. Maybe this is continued fallout from giving myself a little time before truly breaking in the new computer (I plan to get some work done over the three-day weekend, I swear!), I don’t know. Maybe!

I’ve certainly written some interesting things in the two years I’ve been at this job. I’ve written extended comic book scripting projects for the first time ever, for instance. I even spun off one of them some original ideas (because both were based on existing DC or Marvel concepts), and maybe I could work on that next, if I felt like doing that again. And besides, I feel like I’m getting closer to writing new manuscripts. I plan to write a novella for the rewrite Christmas package for my niece (there’s only one element from the previous one I want to revisit, riffing on something she was singing while MASTERING RIDING A BIKE AT ABOUT FIVE YEARS OLD) (not that I’m bragging for her) (and to be clear, a two-wheel, no training wheels bicycle).

So that’s what “working writer” means to me. Complicated. But interesting.