King's Highway pt. 75: Mr. Mercedes

"In a don't-give-a-fuck world, he's about to become the ultimate don't-give-a-fucker."

The first I heard of Mr. Mercedes was in a YouTube video of an informal Q and A session with students at UMass Lowell. He described a "non-supernatural" story he'd just completed about a retired detective who begins to receive correspondence from the perpetrator of his biggest unsolved case.

At the time I saw that video I was either reading or had just finished From a Buick 8. In either his author's-afterword to that novel or when discussing Buick 8 in On Writing - I can't remember which - King mentioned drawing upon K.C. Constantine's series of "increasingly philosophical" detective novels for inspiration. I'd never heard of these, so I checked out a few of them after I finished my big King readthrough.

I enjoyed the ones I read, but there wasn't a whole lot of similarity between anything in them and Buick 8 except for the Pennsylvania setting. Fair enough - King never said Buick 8 was an homage to them or anything, just that they personally inspired him. But all of the above got mixed up in my imagination, and I'd formed the impression that Mr. Mercedes was going to be a Constantine-esque cat-and-mouse story between two guys on the same side of the retirement-age coin, working out the failures and successes of their respective careers.

I am not suggesting that King pulled a bait-and-switch; Mr. Mercedes is indeed how he described it in that UMass Lowell talk and elsewhere. But when I discovered that the antagonist was not a fellow retiree, it changed something for me. A story about a retired detective matching wits with a clichéd young domestic terrorist (not to mention a rather too familiar King antagonist) is all well and good, but I had trouble shaking this idea of a philosophical showdown between geezers on either side of the law, looking back on their lives / the same case over an equivalent distance but from different vantage points. Oh well.

Let me back up a little bit. Brady Hartsfield, the antagonist, is indeed as I described him up there, both a clichéd young domestic terrorist (he lives with his mother - and how! -, is a technological genius, and has a super-villain lair in the basement that he activates and de-activates by saying "Control!" or "Darkness!") and a clichéd King antagonist (with the kind of racial observations and hang-ups given to oh-so-many King villains over the years.) But I mean it less harshly than it perhaps sounds. 

Let me try and explain. Regarding the former, I believe there's something to the theory about the banality of evil, and it's probably to King's credit as an observer of human nature that he doesn't feel the need to over-distinguish Brady from his real-life equivalents, who are often all too clichéd themselves. Regarding the latter, I'm less forgiving; discovering a King antagonist shares the same cartoonish-racism of many other King antagonists is always an eyeroll. (As is discovering he has the same easy-to-identify-triggers-to-rage as every other one; I even wrote "EEEEEEEEEEEEE!" - i.e. the Crimsons King's narrative tic in Dark Tower 7 - in the margins of one section.) He's not written badly nor is it necessary for every character to reinvent the wheel; it's just less interesting to me.

That doesn't mean there's not some pretty writing around the character. The sequence describing how Brady's warped family situation came to be and the murder of his younger brother is riveting and greatly upsetting. (And serves to humanize the mother quite effectively.) As is this passage:

"Off you go, killers and killed alike, off you go into the universal null set that surrounds one lonely blue planet and all its mindlessly bustling citizens. Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That's all history is: scar tissue."

These moments from inside Brady's mind are well-crafted and go so much further than observations about the "whiteness" of certain black characters' names. Unfortunately, King is inconsistent, both in the quality of such observations and in the narrative voice. Near where the above passage appears is this reflection on the WTC terrorists:

"He thinks (without the slightest trace of irony) They spoiled it for the rest of us."

Is Brady making note of his own lack of irony? Probably not. Yet that is how it reads. I mean, why bother presenting things from someone's p.o.v. if you're just going to narrate over it like a Greek chorus? Or maybe I just can't stand when people point out the obvious. The irony of Brady's thinking is self-evident, or at least, one would hope it is.

More successfully and consistently characterized is Hodges. He's a solid character with a gratifying arc. Traditionally in these set-ups, the retired detective is introduced (as he is here) in a despondent state, prevented from utilizing those gifts which defined his previous life; it's more than common to read "And then so-and-so realized something odd... he was enjoying himself" in these sorts of stories. King doesn't bother dragging this out. I didn't write down the passage, but Hodges is described as smiling and singing to himself - and swearing off the daytime talk shows - almost immediately after receiving the first letter. So many times in other works, this becomes the (tired) point of the entire thing - the revitalization of the retired hunter once the hunted re-materializes: life defined by the hunt or something. Not here. King strikes this note only to subvert it as the story unfolds. Hodges pays a price for his revitalization - something that also happens often enough in other works, but what can I say, I think Hodges's arc is the strongest bit of the book.

And at the climax, Hodges is sidelined by a heart attack, necessitating the direct action of Jerome and Holly. I liked this. I felt the whole cross-cutting / stop-the-bomb section was a tad too reminiscent of the similar section from Insomnia, but it wasn't a dealbreaker.

The New York Times review of the novel makes a lot out of King's playing around with the conventions of the detective novel genre. The above speaks to that, but I don't feel it ultimately went quite as far as that reviewer (Megan Abbot) describes. (In a post-Lebowski world, even the departures from the genre-norm have been pretty well streamlined.)

What's weirder about that review is that it doesn't even mention King's intermittent Stepin Fetchit Tourettes in the mouth of Jerome. (A direct lift from the Riddley Walker character in the unpublished The Plant.) You'd figure this sort of thing would make the NYT very uncomfortable. I don't necessarily have a problem with a white author creating a black character who self-knowingly lapses into "Fo Sho Massa Hotches!" dialogue; it's easy enough to imagine a young black character taking the piss out of an old white character (or even an old black character, or whomever) in such a way. It's just kind of irritating to read, again, from the mind of Sai King. But no less, than Beaver's dialogue in Dreamcatcher or Trashmouth Tozier's in It. And probably coming from a similar place, i.e. King's playful interest in language.

Jerome is otherwise a pretty cool character and well-drawn. It's cringeworthy when King (via Hodges) describes him as "a young Barack Obama," but it's also easily believable that a man of Hodges age and temperament would characterize any young black male in one of two ways, with that being the positive one. Whether that was the reason or whether it's just more of King's viewing non-white characters through his self-described lens of "white liberal guilt" is perhaps immaterial.

It did lead me to tweet this in reply in King, though:

I doubt he'll even see that amidst the thousands of other responses, and I doubt even more that he'd take such advice. But man - it'd be nice to see this sort of thing disappear from King's books altogether.

Kevin Quigley had this to say about Jerome in his review:

"Jerome Robinson, King’s first major young black male character since 1986’s It, is far more defined by his youth and intelligence than his skin color, despite Brady Hartsfield’s internal racist tirades and Jerome’s own insistence on defining himself in occasional stereotypical terms. However, this latter feels less intrinsically racial than it does an homage to the Hawk character in Robert B. Parker’s Spenser detective novels."

I haven't read those Spenser novels, but that's an interesting association.

As for Holly, I felt there was a bit of quirkiness-overload once she became part of the Scooby gang, but she had a vitality to her that was much appreciated.

Final verdict: I can't say I count this among King's best or something that really needed to be written. Judged against his other works, I found it rather marginal; judged against summertime beach-towel fare, it's probably better-than-average.

As per usual, King turns some phrases here and there that really stayed with me. Here are two:

(Describing the dude on the Jerry Springer-type program Hodges is watching before receiving the letter from Brady:) "On his face is the half-smart grin of a cool dude in a loose mood. Dream job: lifetime disability."

(Brady's description of his dead mother:) "...just pounds of silent flesh hanging from bone coathangers."

As for my checklist:

Is the protagonist from Maine? No.

Does someone entertain thoughts of suicide? Yep.

Is there a psychic child? No.

Are plot events foreshadowed explicitly by a dead character/ dream character/ psychic? No.

Is there a big-ass storm at the end? No.

Is there a racist antagonist? Yep.

Is there a misogynist antagonist? Yep.

Is there a falsely-religious antagonist? No.

Is there telepathy? No.

Is there a wisecracking sidekick with repetitive catchphrases? Yes.

Are there epistolary sections? Yes. (And as always I don't feel the letter-writing voice is particularly successful, though some of Hodges' wind-ups via the Blue Umbrella are definitely chuckleworthy.)

Is info deliberately withheld between chapters/ sections to build page-turning suspense? Yes.

Does someone not give "shit one" or say "happy crappy?" Pg. 318: "Hodges no longer gives Shit One about Donald Davis."

Does someone imitate or engage in "mammy" dialogue/ reference Little Black Sambo? Man!

Is it a ridiculously enjoyable read? Sadly, no.

Where does it fit into my rankings?

Somewhere in there. Keep in mind I rather enjoy Rage and Blaze, but that's where it feels right to place it.

Batman in the Bronze Age: Coda

For the past two months I've read nothing but 1970s Batman and Ernest Hemingway.

I didn't plan it that way, that's just how it played out. It actually allowed me to see some connections between the two that I never would have considered otherwise. Some enterprising autodidact out there should take up this line of inquiry - there's a surprising overlap of thematic concerns, shrugging off unbelievable and relentless personal injuries, PTSD, obsession and drive, colorful rogues galleries, and plenty more. I wish I'd taken notes as I went along, but it didn't make itself apparent to me until only a few days ago.

I originally wrote - or tried to write - an entirely different intro than the above, one where I did not mention Hemingway at all and where I tried desperately to work in a description of the Bronze Age as "those brackish waters between the seas of the Silver and Copper ages..." without sounding like Bob Costas (or whomever you like - grandiose instead of grand.) But I failed.

Besides, who needs another definition of the Bronze Age? The internet's full of 'em.

But then I read something from one of these Hemingway-on-writing sites that resonated with me about this series of blogs, and here it is:

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Better explorations of both the Bronze Age and the Caped Crusader's journey through it are out there, but I hope you got some sense of the good and the bad and how the weather was from these things. I discovered at least for myself that the Batman works quite well as a two-dimensional diving suit for Bronze Age immersion, suitable for operation at any and all depths.

Though I stopped at the end of 1979, the Bronze Age Batman continued for a few more years, until (most agree) either The Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One.

Image from here.

At Marvel, the passing of the Bronze Age was more subtle; later, it began rebooting its characters and compartmentalizing its history, but in the early-to-mid 80s, the characters you read in Amazing Spider-Man or Thor or Fantastic Four looked and sounded "more modern" but retained more or less the same continuity / personality as they had in the Silver Age. DC, on the other hand - and of course that includes Batman - celebrated the change in eras by explicitly dismantling everything that existed before to re-set the clock entirely post-Crisis, the once-in-a-lifetime move the company has repeated 5 times in the 30 years since.

As with heroin, rebooting in such a manner seems to require stronger and more frequently-administered doses once the first one is absorbed by the system.

Which means that all the stories we've looked at over the past two months were erased completely. Remember that for later in the program, if you would.

Unlike many of his cohorts, Bronze Age Batman received a few honorary burials before being relegated to non-existence. We've already seen one of those - the Adventure Comics storyline that killed off Earth-2 Batman - but for this last post, I'd like to look at 3 stories written by Alan Brennert, each of which comments on the passing of the Bronze Age in its own unique way. 

To amuse myself, I'm taking a page from Charles Dickens and presenting these as the Ghosts of Batman (Batmen?) Past, Present, and Future.

Let's begin logically enough with the Ghost of Batman Past:

Illustrated by Joe Staton and George Freeman. (Cover by Jim Aparo)

Possibly my all-time favorite stand-alone Batman story. Both Earth-2 Catwoman and Earth-2 Batman had been dead a few years when this came out in April 1983, so this was a bit of an anomaly at the time and still is. 

I know what you're thinking. "Hey! That says Golden Age Batman. What gives, you f**king lunkhead?!" First, really, so quick to anger! Eat more fiber. Second, yes it is a tale of Golden Age Batman, which is another way of saying "Earth 2 Batman." Third, it is very much a late Bronze Age reflection of all Batman, despite that Golden Age tag. Still friends? Good.

The story is told as an excerpt from Bruce Wayne's autobiography, written two years after the death of his wife, Earth-2 Catwoman. It has a "Reflection from Beyond the Grave" quality to it, aided considerably by the Silver Age look of the art. (Sidenote: Joe Staton never looked better than he does in this issue. It's almost as if he felt burdened by the hack deaths he illustrated in AC and felt the need to pay proper tribute in this Brave and the Bold. But I could be reading into things.)

He does an especially good job conveying the various phobias the Scarecrow throws our heroes' way.

If you recall, it was revealed that Bruce and a reformed Selina Kyle married and had a child (the Huntress) in a few panels of Adventure Comics before it was also revealed that Selina was killed, thus providing the Huntress a convenient tombstone over which to swear her oath to fighting crime. Brennert obviously felt these deaths needed a little fleshing out and justification, bless him, and so we get this poignant, lavishly-illustrated tribute that masquerades as an "unknown case of Batman."

He performed the same kindness for Batwoman in The Brave and the Bold 182, which I decided not to cover, but there's a good write-up here.

The story (after a prelude with Commissioner Gordon, where we discover the Scarecrow is out and about) begins with Bruce Wayne at former girlfriend Linda Page's society wedding, where he entertains the sort of soul-searching familiar to anyone who spent their adolesence listening to The Smiths or The Cure.

The Scarecrow disrupts proceedings and releases his trademark hallucinogenic gas, causing anyone who inhales it to live their deepest fear. The Batman gets a good whiff of it and begins to have a full-on Beverly-Crusher-from-"Remember-Me" style freakout.

It's all handled pretty well, with omnipresent narration alternating with the Batman's pov in the captions.

If it was just this Scarecrow / Batman's inner-fears-made-manifest story, it would still be cool, but as we see at story's end, this Scarecrow plot is simply the hook for the story of how the Batman and Catwoman got together. He recruits her as an ally since everyone he knows and loves has "disappeared."

As we saw with all the concussions, this sort of thing wasn't talked about a lot in Batman back then, so it was ahead of its time.

When Catwoman begins to disappear, too, the Batman is forced to make a choice. It's tempting to read this whole bit as literalizing the perceived out-of-step-ness of Golden Age characters in a Bronze Age set-up.

As the Batman notes, they don't even bother finishing the chase for the Scarecrow. Which is perhaps a dereliction of duty on the Batman's part, but he's earned it.

I found all of this very romantic when I first read it, and I still enjoy it as one of the better depictions of comic book romances. All the more remarkable in that it existed in just two single issues: proverbial grains of sand on the beach. (A sidenote: whenever I say "proverbial" to myself, I hear it in my head as if Leonard Nimoy was saying it. I don't know. There it is.)

And these last few panels bring it all home:

It is precisely because of all of the above that when Catwoman #1 (2011) premiered, I was particularly offended by how stupidly the topic was re-introduced in New 52 continuity. Let's have a quick look. (Enlarge for an exasperating a better view.)

Good lord, where to begin... First the art. Horrendous. Anatomy itself is insulted, or at least I am on its behalf. Second, the Sex and the City style of narration: so ridiculous to put these characters in that context. Third, if anyone thinks for a moment that it is at all appropriate - not from a moral standpoint but from a characterization one - to write the Batman as the sort of guy who's going to have a rooftop quickie, that person belongs absolutely nowhere near the Batman. It fits the Catwoman's character a bit more - she seems like the sort who might get a thrill out of such a thing and hey more power to her, whatever - but the Batman? Particularly in the shadow of all the above? ** Massive fail at every level from Dan Didio on down to the editor (Rachel Gluckstern) to the writer (Judd Winnick) to the artist (Guillem March).

** Not that it really was - lot of water under the Bat-bridge between The Brave and the Bold # 197 and Catwoman #1.

I remember reading at the time that people who objected were simply "slut-shaming." Maybe. But not the Catwoman, dumdum. And it was more "dumbass-shaming." Because maybe the World's Greatest Detective shouldn't be acting like one of these dudes you see on "Caught on Camera." (And maybe Selina and Bruce deserve better than some Brazzers sketch? I don't know. Maybe I'm missing the joke and sound ridiculous. It's been known to happen.)

Anyway, back to the Ghosts business. Superman got a similar sort of farewell to "The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne" in Alan Moore's and Curt Swan's excellent "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow." I've gone back and forth on that one over the years, but I enjoyed it much more than I ever had previously on last re-read. Which was only a few months back. What changed? I'm not sure. Beyond my scope here, just worth mentioning. If this had been a Superman in the Bronze Age series instead of a Batman one, that would undoubtedly be the story I'd choose to end on.

On to the Ghost of Batman Present:

Specifically:

Illustrated by Dick Giordano.

Robin and the Batman find themselves mystically drawn to Crime Alley, whereupon the Phantom Stranger appears in his usual manner, offering the Batman an unusual opportunity:

Stranger claims he is simply doing this as a friend. Which in retrospect is a little silly, sure - I mean, in an Infinite-Earths-scenario, the Batman could do nothing else but save his parents and thus himself, over and over and over again, and he'd still be getting murdered/ young-Bruce-traumatized an infinite number of times...

But who cares? Off they go (the Batman insists on going alone, but Robin jumps into the swirling dimensional rift before he can be stopped) Kirk-and-Spock-in-"City-on-the-Edge-of-Forever"style.

Some of my favorite moments come during Robin's exploration of this alternate Earth.

There is, however, Sherlock Holmes, as you'll see in a little ways down.

Robin begins to suspect that for the good of the many, perhaps Bruce's parents should be allowed to die. The Batman somewhat understandably refuses to entertain the idea but leaves young alternate-Bruce under Robin's watchful eye just the same as he goes around town hunting for Joe Chill.

Quick aside - Robin in the window, there, really cracks me up.

Surveillance Fail. Perhaps the Batman never taught him the whole hide-in-the-trees-from-a-distance technique that he himself employs.

Naturally, Robin has a change of heart, and... well, let's let the screencaps do their jobs.

It's a great what-if/ time-travel sort of story, and I genuinely enjoy the fact that while the Phantom Stranger's stated aim is not very logical, the Batman jumps at the chance just the same. It would be a nice touch if it was established that in addition to protecting Leslie Thompkins once a year on the anniversary of his parents death, he hits up the Phantom Stranger to let him save his parents on some random earth.

In the epilogue, we learn that young alternate-Bruce seems destined to become the Batman just the same.

I love this panel.

And finally, for the Ghost of Batman Future, let's go all the way to 1989:

Specifically:

In case you forgot, Deadman's power is that he can temporarily possess people as part of an afterlife deal with Rama/ God, and he's an anguished sort. Christmas finds him taking temporary command of various people's bodies - in some cases, using them to correct their own awful behavior, Sam-from-Quantum-Leap-style, and in other cases simply hovering about in other people so he can enjoy the physical sensations of Christmas. This cheers him up considerably, until he realizes:

As he understandably bemoans his fate, he is visited by a mysterious woman:

"Magic and I have never been boon companions, I'm afraid." In old DC-code, that means she's from Krypton. Could this be Supergirl? Reintroduced into post-Crisis continuity? No, it couldn't be. Supergirl not only died in Crisis, it was repeatedly established that she never existed.

I sense a message to the reader, here...

See that was the weird part about the late 80s at DC. It wasn't enough to reboot everyone and everything, there seemed to be an awful lot of going out of the way to reiterate how totally, utterly forgotten and consigned to oblivion forever pre-Crisis characters and circumstances were.

You might even say they beat you over the head with this message, repeatedly.

Which made the DC guard at the time seem a little like Orwell's Ministry of Truth or the Committee of Public Safety from the French Revolution, un-history-ing whatever it wanted to. And it had the effect on me personally of drawing my attention more and more to pre-Crisis DC, if only to figure out what had existed that they felt had to be so pointedly (and repeatedly) "corrected."

It all seems silly now - I mean, the same year (1989) DC began publishing alternate-timeline stories but brand-repositioned them as "Elseworlds" - but at the time, something like this was very hit me as an anti-regime act smuggled to the viewer under Christmas cover.

Making Deadman the vehicle for it not only made sense but was about the only way you could do this at DC in '89.

So, while Earth-2 Batman does not appear at all in this story, he very much does, if you take my meaning.

~

Before I go, let me mention two of the other stories in this Christmas Special. I bought it at the time it came out but hadn't looked at it in years and had completely forgotten about John Byrne's contribution, an Enemy Ace Christmas tale that just may rank among the best things he's ever done:

Considering Byrne's c.v., that's saying a lot. (Finished art by Andy Kubert)

Definitely worth checking out. Also worth checking out and much more germane to this blog series is this story by Gray Morrow of the Batman's career from the perspective of the Bat-cave itself.

It seemed an appropriate note to end on.