“A Permanently Transforming Present”: Zero Years and Lost Memories

After being triggered by the phrase “Zur-En-Arrh”, Batman falls prey to the forgetfulness he has feared for so long. He becomes an amnesiac – except this, too, is something he had planned for. Batman has created a “back-up personality” just in case he ever forgets everything. He dresses in the homemade, garish purple costume of his dreams and becomes a vicious vigilante, fighting on without memory. This is not the first or the last time Batman resists the threat of amnesia during his adventures. After Morrison’s run, when Batman was introduced into DC Comics’ rebooted “New 52” by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo in 2011, it was supposed to be a clean start: a new beginning for new readers. However, Batman seemed to be immune from the same “blank page” as the rest of the superhero universe, carrying on some continuity from before (Smith 53). Snyder and Capullo’s stories quickly imply that despite the reboot, tales familiar to long-term audiences had occurred, just as they remembered – for instance, the Joker’s “first” crime spree consciously references his earlier attacks on Gotham from earlier comic books. They also “rewrite” history by bringing older stories into their own new continuity: their Zero Year recreates the cover of Batman’s first ever appearance in Detective Comics #27; it also borrows a lightning-and-rain silhouette from Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. These are not narrative moments, just “intertextual allusions”, providing thematic continuity that will not alienate casual readers (Smith 61).

The origin story is supposed to be a fixed event that drives everything that follows, but even it is not immune to these shifting sands. Returning to origins is so popular that “Year One” – named for Frank Miller’s Batman stories – has become a kind of comic book shorthand. With no end point to these stories, it makes sense that they focus obsessively on their beginnings. The development of comic book narratives is characterised by Luca Somigli as “sameness with difference” (289). This origin story is retold and recreated, with new variations and details added each time. Were the Waynes seeing a movie, or an opera? Was Martha Wayne shot or did she die of a heart attack? Was the window open, or did the bat smash through? In Snyder and Capullo’s version, the infamous moment of bat-inspiration is given a high-tech twist as a hologram of the caves beneath Wayne Manor is also projected across the room. Some of these changes “stick”; others are forgotten. As long as his parents die – and he is confronted by a bat, an equally essential element in his creation (Walker 2) – Batman’s origin engine is forgiving of variation. The seemingly fixed event of an origin story is in fact constantly moving, and that “support[s] a permanently transforming present” (Pagello 729).

Yet the Waynes’ death is not the only origin moment that Snyder and Capullo explore. In fact, their run on Batman is obsessed with origins. They spend a whole year – Zero Year – in Batman’s earliest adventures in Gotham, much of it before he wears his costume. They give the Joker multiple origin stories through the mouths of Arkham inmates, making literal the Joker’s assertion that “If you’re going to have a past, better it be multiple choice” in The Killing Joke (Alan Moore & Brian Bolland 1988). Even Jim Gordon’s trusty trenchcoat is given an origin story, reinscribed as a symbol of the police corruption he stands against. Similarly, Snyder and Capullo’s Bruce Wayne is obsessed with remembering. In fighting the Court of Owls, we see his first foray into childhood crimefighting; in Zero Year, we see flashbacks within flashbacks of his time before his training around the world. But this Batman also has an encounter with amnesia. After dying to stop the Joker, Bruce Wayne is reborn. He remembers nothing. Alfred tells him his entire history – including the death of his parents – but neglects to tell him that he is Batman. He still lives in Wayne Manor, but has no idea that the Batcave lies in wait underneath. This Bruce Wayne knows his parents died, but does not “feel” its trauma; he does not see its iconography recurring everywhere; therefore he is cut off from his status as a superhero. Instead, he becomes a charity worker and Gotham activist. Alfred calls this reborn Bruce “the only true Bruce Wayne to ever walk the earth” (Batman #43). Bliss suggests that the Joker’s real power comes from his absence of an alter ego, and Batman’s grasp on reality from his “insistent struggle to keep his two identities apart” (Bliss 73, 49). The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, without Bruce Wayne’s memories, is a madman. Here Bruce Wayne, without Batman’s memories, is perfectly sane.

Eventually, of course, Bruce Wayne finds out the truth: he was Batman. Against Alfred’s wishes, he uses a machine in the Batcave to download all his memories back into his mind. This allows him to remember his origin story, become Batman again, and save the day. Alfred says it will kill him, like it did every Batman clone that he previously tried to “create” in the same way – because no one else can withstand these memories. This isn’t the first time that Batman’s trauma has become a dangerous weapon. Morrison had a psychic monster known as the Lump attempt to absorb Batman’s painful memories to create an army of evil Batmen with the same formidable drive. “This is what we want!” cries the villain. “Raw emotional energy! More pain! Motivation!” (Batman #683). But these memories are too much – the engine too powerful – and they are all driven mad. No wonder, then, that in World’s Finest #1 (Dave Gibbons & Steve Rude 1990), when Batman and Superman’s origin stories are presented side-by-side, Superman’s memories are framed as a hopeful rocket fired from a doomed planet, but Batman’s memories are a bullet fired from a gun. In fact, when he becomes the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, Batman describes his thinking process as being streamlined like a “silver bullet” (Batman #679).

“An Act of Self-Rescue”: Remembering as Heroism

Only Bruce Wayne can turn his trauma into heroic action. Images of his origin story are not just memories or repetitions. They can act as a pictorial equivalent of a magic word – “SHAZAM!” – allowing Bruce Wayne to transform into Batman, just as the bat crashing through his window did the first time. As seen in Batman: Year One (Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli 1987), before the bat, Bruce Wayne was a hapless vigilante; afterwards, a creature of the night. In fact, this occurs in the present day transformations of Bruce- to-Batman in both of Frank Miller’s influential Batman stories from the 1980s: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Batman: Year One. Images of the falling pearls, the firing gun, the fearsome bat: they are Batman’s very own “Shazam!”. Caruth recalls Freud’s own puzzlement at recurring traumatic dreams, which cannot be seen as unconscious desires; they are simply “the absolute inability of the mind to avoid an unpleasurable event” (Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History 59). But Batman is not avoiding these flashbacks, hallucinations, and other imagery. He needs them. They do not cripple him; they empower him. Glen Weldon writes about Bruce Wayne’s response to childhood tragedy, the oath that creates Batman: “That oath is a choice. An act of will. A deliberate reaction to shattering injustice. More crucially, it’s an act of self-rescue” (4). In the autobiographical graphic novel Dark Night: A True Batman Story (Paul Dini & Eduardo Risso 2016), the writer is viciously robbed and beaten and imagines Batman coming to him. Batman simply tells him to “use your anger as fuel to finish your next assignment”. Trauma, again, is explicitly Batman’s narrative engine.

For Eco, Superman’s timeless dedication to the status quo is the appeal of his stories – or, as Eco puts it, “nonstor[ies]”. He states: “[T]he reader continuously recovers, point by point, what he already knows, what he wants to know again: that is why he has purchased the book” (“The Myth of Superman” 159). Such repetitive, persistence adherence to the status quo is presented as a moral failing of superheroes. Superman cannot change the world as the demands of his own timelessness prevent him from doing so, and therefore his stories will never be truly progressive, a quandary that has made its way into Superman comics themselves, as in the famous Superman #247 (Elliott S. Maggin & Curt Swan 1972): “Must There Be A Superman?” Here aliens find Superman guilty of “crimes against humanity” for propping up the status quo. “Surely,” they say, “you must realize your presence on earth directly contributes to the Terrans’ cultural lag?” Morrison, meanwhile, has his Superman defend the Justice League as “keepers of the status quo”, according to critic Geoff Klock. Superman says to Wonder Woman: “I can only tell you what I believe, Diana: humankind has to be allowed to climb to its own destiny. We can’t carry them there” (Klock 137).

Snyder and Capullo’s Batman survives the memory-dump, remembering everything, and instantly becomes a superhero once more. His act of sacrifice, in choosing to remember, is presented as inherently heroic, not only for the new “sane” life he has to give up, but due to the painful memories themselves. Snyder, earlier in his run, also depicts a pre-Batman Bruce Wayne going to Arkham Asylum for electroconvulsive therapy – hoping to “start over” – but changing his mind at the last moment. It’s a smaller, more earthbound moment of the cosmic decision Batman makes in the epic Infinite Crisis (Geoff Johns et al 2005-2006). Here, crushed by the weight of his failures, he is given the chance to start over by a Superman from an alternative timeline … and he refuses. He decides to carry on, dragging all his painful continuity behind him. Superheroes don’t just do the right thing; they know the right thing to do (Fingeroth 17). Batman knows that remembering is a heroic act. That’s what a superhero does: fights off the oneiric haze and remembers. It explains why he’s so angry and betrayed when he discovers the Justice League’s magician, Zatanna, has wiped some of his memories in JLA #119 (Geoff Johns et al 2005). “Zatanna used her powers to erase parts of my memory the league found… inconvenient,” Batman explains. “Making it difficult for me to trust anyone. Including myself.”

Unfortunately, no matter how Batman tries to remember, details of his past slip away. Looking back again to James Bond’s ongoing adventures, Umberto Eco suggests why the neurosis caused by Bond’s first murderous act did not carry into his later stories. Fleming instead, chose to move from a “psychological method to the formalistic one” and, in doing so, kept Bond free to keep killing without any real accumulation of psychological angst (“Narrative Structures in Fleming” 96). Batman does not kill; he does, however, forget the dead. Silver St. Cloud had her throat slit in The Widening Gyre (Kevin Smith & Walt Flanagan 2009-2010). Vesper Fairchild was murdered to frame Bruce Wayne in The 10 Cent Adventure. These women, and many more, receive no memorials in the Batcave to remind audiences that they existed. Their deaths were, for the most part, simply forgotten. It does not take a Crisis on Infinite Earths to remove something from continuity. Any story seen as unimportant, as embarrassing, as problematic can be “wilfully pushed from memory” and made “imaginary” again (Wandtke 8).