Batman: Year 100
Batman: Year 100 begins with our hero being chased across the rooftop of an apartment building by a pack of dangerous-looking dogs while helicopters hover overhead and a police dragnet draws tighter. It’s a moment that’s effective for a couple of reasons. In the first place it throws us right into the middle of the action, which is set in the year 2039 (that’s a hundred years after Batman’s first appearance in 1939). What is Batman doing here? Did he invent a time machine? Get sucked into a dimensional vortex? Is this even the same, original Batman, now dimly remembered only as an urban legend or bogeyman? We don’t know the answers to these questions and indeed we never find out. It’s all just a given, and I think the comic is stronger for not trying to explain any of it.
The second reason I like this way of starting out is that it sets the tone for much of what follows. Batman is constantly being chased in this series, a wanted man in a dystopic future police state. The federal police (“wolves”) are the usual jackbooted thugs, but they’re only the foot soldiers of an oppressive surveillance apparatus that puts cameras in eyeballs and even includes the use of mind-reading telepaths. It’s all Batman can do to stay one jump ahead of these guys, and when they do catch up he really takes a beating.
One reason he suffers so much damage is that he’s not encased in his usual body armour. Instead, his costume looks like a lumpy pair of sweats. Paul Pope even deliberately made the sleeves too short so that his wrists poke out of the gap between the cuffs and his gloves, giving “a sense of his concealed human vulnerability.” This isn’t the mecha-Batman of Justice Buster or the more conventional massively-muscled All-American Batman. He looks more like a guy in burlap pyjamas, and I loved it.
In fact I loved almost everything about this comic. I’m constantly being impressed at how writers and artists can continue to make something not only new out of this old warhorse of a character but something really good. The story here is first-rate, with a really neat plot twist I wasn’t expecting, and while I’m not personally fond of Pope’s style of drawing I did get used to it and thought it made for an interesting complement to the violence the characters endure. Faces seemed slapped together out of clay, especially with regard to mouths, and when the beatings come they look like they’re being slapped apart again. There’s also a lot of room for ambiguity, beginning with the cover of the trade paperback which I had to look at for a long time to figure out. I think I finally got it, but there I felt like they should have gone with something different.
This collection of the full four-part series runs without breaks, which were so seamless I couldn’t identify them. Also included is Pope’s “The Berlin Batman,” which re-imagines Batman as a crime fighter in Weimar Germany. Batman in this story is the alter ego of “Baruch Wayne,” a wealthy socialite. I wasn’t blown away by this story, but it makes for a nice extra.
So there you have it. Off the top of my head I’d rank it only behind classics like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Loeb and Sale’s The Long Halloween in the running for my favourite Batman storyline. Maybe every ten years you can count on something this good coming out.
Alex Good 
WTH is going on on the cover? Also where’s the top of his head?
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I really hate that cover. I even said so in the review! It took me a while to figure it out. He’s crouching on a rooftop chimney, and he’s scrunching his head down between his shoulders. It’s just a terrible pic to put on the cover and I don’t know why they did it.
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with that cover, I’m surprised this sold at all. Or maybe it didn’t. Was this one of your “buy it cheap at the library” specials?
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It makes no sense to put such an awful cover on such a good comic.
I signed this out of the library, wasn’t part of their “getting rid of the overstock” sale.
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Oh, so this was a borrow.
Do you ever foresee re-reading it?
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Yeah I could. It’s got a really interesting story with some twists in it and things that aren’t obvious the first time through.
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For example….
this is actually Batman Murder Hobo!
Surprise!!!!!
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He actually looks a bit like a hobo here, with his baggy sweats and old work boots.
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Do you know the publishing date of this? This almost feels like a test run for that new batman series, Absolute Batman.
Which basically turns Batman into the Punisher, sigh…
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Came out in 2006. I didn’t get a real Punisher vibe here.
Haven’t seen the new Batman series. I’m usually about twenty to thirty years behind the times . . .
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Ahhh, ok, not a test run then 😀
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My guess on the cover is that the pose makes him look like a bat. Is he more bat-like in the story? More animalistic maybe?
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Not really. He does lean into the idea of being scary, even putting in plastic fangs at one point to look more like a monster. That goes back to the original idea where being a giant bat was supposed to scar criminals, and it was at least an interesting twist here.
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Plastic fangs. That’s funny.
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Ah, but if it’s some guy you think is a monster jumping out of the dark at you and all you see are the fangs it’ll put the fear into you.
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No, I meant funny in a good way. You didn’t mention if the book had any humor in it, and from the description it sure ain’t no comedy, but I’m always interested in whether the writers have a sense of humor.
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I read it a while ago now and I have no memory for these things, but as near as I recall it wasn’t funny at all. Just more off-beat.
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I want to corner Leonard Maltin and start throwing out random titles from his movie guide just to prove that no one can remember all this stuff. (But I’m afraid he might do better than I’d like.)
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Leonard always seemed a bit of a comical figure to me, especially as the resident movie guy on trash shows like Entertainment Tonight back in the ’80s, but I’ve seen him interviewed in more depth elsewhere and he seems like he really is pretty knowledgeable.
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Oh, yeah, he’s the proverbial walking encyclopedia (which, in his case, can be taken literally). I never did watch those shows you’re talking about. Sneak Previews was the only movie show I watched, and I pretty much stopped watching that one after Siskel died.
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