MattBrady
10-29-2002, 02:29 PM
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/BMGSGCv1.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/BMGSGCv1_t.jpg" width="175" height="255" alt="Golden Streets of Gotham cover" border="0" align="right"></a>If you take away Bruce Wayne’s wealth, would you still have a hero? Oh, still kill his parents, but without the wealth, would you ultimately produce Batman? Are you sure? The question was one that Jen Van Meter found herself chewing on, and her answer can be found in January’s Elseworlds one-shot from DC, Batman: The Golden Streets of Gotham, which recasts Bruce Wayne as Bruno Vanekow, the son of immigrants living in early 1900’s Gotham City.
As DC’s solicitation copy for the one-shot explains, Bruno takes up the mantle of The Bat after his parents are killed in a garment factory fire. But the end result isn’t something as simple as transplanting Bruce Wayne into the early 20th century.
Backtracking a little, long-time Newsarama reader may remember originally hearing about the project a little under four years ago, back when Van Meter had just received approval for the project.
“I wrote the proposal over four years ago,” Van Meter said. “Denny [O’Neill] was still at DC, and he and Jordan Gorfinkle were in touch with our household a lot, because Greg [Rucka] was working on “No Man’s Land.” They had seen my Buffy story and the Flinch story, and had asked me to send proposals.
“At the time, I was working on my dissertation, and was soaked in all this immigrant literature that I was working on for the degree. I was really, really attached to the proposal, but didn’t think that they would take it, because they’d probably think that it was a depressing story, because it was something with immigrants and labor unions, and stuff like that. So when I didn’t hear from them on it for a really long time, I figured it was what I should’ve expected. One day, out of the blue, six months later, Denny called me and said that everyone in editorial was happy with the proposal, and they were ready to go. At first, I couldn’t even remember which proposal he was talking about.”
O’Neill worked with Van Meter to polish the script for the book, her first long-form comic after writing a few 8 page stories, and it was sent off to DC, only to fall under her radar again. Around six months after turning the script in, Van Meter heard that Tommy Lee Edwards was attached as an artist.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_01.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_01_t.jpg" width="165" height="251" alt="page 1" border="0" align="left"></a> “Tommy was really excited about it, and did a good chunk of the design work and some pages, and then there were some conflicts and other obligations that came up for him, and we weren’t sure what was going to happen with it,” Van Meter recalled. “The next thing I heard came after Bob Schreck had taken over was that Tommy wasn’t going to be able to finish it, and they had found Cliff Chiang to finish the book. Looking at it now, I can’t image the book having been finished any other way. I can’t imagine any other artist coming in with what Tommy had started, and finishing it in such a phenomenal way. It’s just beautiful to look at.”
In broad strokes, the story seeks to explore a question Van Meter had: “If you have the same essential internal character as Bruce Wayne, and have the same things happen to you, but are destitute, what happens to you? How do you become Batman without the wealth or if you do become Batman, how are you different?”
Originally considering, but later rejecting a contemporary setting, Van Meter chose the immigrant community of the early 1900s as the best temporal location for telling her story, again, due to her familiarity with the time period. The overcrowded urban environment of the early 20th century provided an ideal location to explore her ideas – after all, if your parents die when you’re seven, and you’re destitute, the chances of you surviving, let along becoming the Caped Crusader are very low.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_05.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_05_t.jpg" alt="page 5" width="165" height="251" border="0" align="right"></a>It was that fact that led to Van Meter adjusting a little of the Batman canon for her Elseworlds story. “Once I decided that the death of ‘Bruce’s’ parents would be a poor person’s death at a time when it was really common to die that way – to a kid, the sad part of that is that to little Bruce Wayne in 1910, if his parents die in a factory fire, he accepts it, and that’s the end of the story.
“But an adult Bruce Wayne can say that’s wrong. So one of the things that had to be changed in the story is that his parents die much later in his life, so that his response has less to do with his own survival, and more to do with a reflection on what has actually happened.”
Another reason the chance to an older “Bruce” i.e. Bruno had to be made was that if the young Bruno was destitute when his parents died, there would be no Alfred looking after him, and making sure every need was taken care of. That part of Bruce Wayne’s condition, according to Van Meter, was crucial for the later emergence of Batman.
“With the traditional Bruce Wayne, part of what wealth gets him is the security and time to reflect, be lonely, and decide he must do something,” Van Meter said. “That kind of guilt and introspection isn’t something that a poor child would have access to, because their next thought would have been, ‘Who’s going to feed me?’
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_20.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_20_t.jpg" alt="page 20" width="165" height="251" border="0" align="left"></a> “That’s not to be me making the traditional character sound like a jerk – he’s always affected me profoundly. One of the reasons that I wanted to write this was to say here’s a story about this same guy, with the exterior stuff stripped away, and he has to still be this same guy in the end. He has to do the same things. There’s something heroic in him that comes before all of the wealth and resources, or there would be nothing. So, by stripping them away, you would find a person who would still find his way into the same position, that is, Batman, or in this story, ‘The Bat.’. Simply put, Bruno is Bruce, if he lived in another time, and had no money, and didn’t speak English well, and all these other things. At his core, he’s the same person.”
According to Van Meter, the story is framed by a contemporary interview with a 99 year-old, recounting the events of the time in old Gotham. As the story unfolds, Bruno, who was out west trying to make his fortune, returns to the city to learn that his parents are long dead, victims of a factory fire that’s still considered an unsolved crime by the immigrant community, whereas the establishment has closed the case.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_21.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_21_t.jpg" alt="page 21 " width="165" height="176" border="0" align="right"></a> “Bruno starts looking into the fire, and develops a rapport with people that he meets,” Van Meter said. “As a result, Bruno is a little more Robin Hood than the vigilante the modern Batman is. Where Bruce exists to make sure no one suffers the loss he did, and sometimes has to go outside of the law to make sure of it, Bruno wants to make sure that the people who allowed this to happen to his parents never do it again. As such, he tries to dismantle the things that the sweatshop owners, use to keep going.”
As with most Elseworlds, Golden Streets of Gotham has a few other familiar faces in it as well. “There is a woman named Selina Kyle, and a woman named Barbara Gordon in the story, as well as a cop named James Gordon and a man named Jack Smart.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_48.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_48_t.jpg" alt="page 48" width="200" height="164" border="0" align="left"></a> “For people who know Batman, it’s taking that setting, and trying to figure out where these character types would fall. Gordon comes the closest to being in the same spot, because he’s a cop. Essentially, for someone who had never read Batman before, it’s a turn of the 20th century thriller set in the intersection of the Bauhaus theater movement, the labor union movement and the immigrant community.”
“All in all, it’s a fun exploration of who the core Bat-characters are, and what is attractive about the, regardless of the kind of the story they’re in,” Van Meter continued. “That’s the cool thing about Elseworlds, because you get to play around with these great characters that are compelling even when they’re not in costume, or even themselves.”
As DC’s solicitation copy for the one-shot explains, Bruno takes up the mantle of The Bat after his parents are killed in a garment factory fire. But the end result isn’t something as simple as transplanting Bruce Wayne into the early 20th century.
Backtracking a little, long-time Newsarama reader may remember originally hearing about the project a little under four years ago, back when Van Meter had just received approval for the project.
“I wrote the proposal over four years ago,” Van Meter said. “Denny [O’Neill] was still at DC, and he and Jordan Gorfinkle were in touch with our household a lot, because Greg [Rucka] was working on “No Man’s Land.” They had seen my Buffy story and the Flinch story, and had asked me to send proposals.
“At the time, I was working on my dissertation, and was soaked in all this immigrant literature that I was working on for the degree. I was really, really attached to the proposal, but didn’t think that they would take it, because they’d probably think that it was a depressing story, because it was something with immigrants and labor unions, and stuff like that. So when I didn’t hear from them on it for a really long time, I figured it was what I should’ve expected. One day, out of the blue, six months later, Denny called me and said that everyone in editorial was happy with the proposal, and they were ready to go. At first, I couldn’t even remember which proposal he was talking about.”
O’Neill worked with Van Meter to polish the script for the book, her first long-form comic after writing a few 8 page stories, and it was sent off to DC, only to fall under her radar again. Around six months after turning the script in, Van Meter heard that Tommy Lee Edwards was attached as an artist.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_01.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_01_t.jpg" width="165" height="251" alt="page 1" border="0" align="left"></a> “Tommy was really excited about it, and did a good chunk of the design work and some pages, and then there were some conflicts and other obligations that came up for him, and we weren’t sure what was going to happen with it,” Van Meter recalled. “The next thing I heard came after Bob Schreck had taken over was that Tommy wasn’t going to be able to finish it, and they had found Cliff Chiang to finish the book. Looking at it now, I can’t image the book having been finished any other way. I can’t imagine any other artist coming in with what Tommy had started, and finishing it in such a phenomenal way. It’s just beautiful to look at.”
In broad strokes, the story seeks to explore a question Van Meter had: “If you have the same essential internal character as Bruce Wayne, and have the same things happen to you, but are destitute, what happens to you? How do you become Batman without the wealth or if you do become Batman, how are you different?”
Originally considering, but later rejecting a contemporary setting, Van Meter chose the immigrant community of the early 1900s as the best temporal location for telling her story, again, due to her familiarity with the time period. The overcrowded urban environment of the early 20th century provided an ideal location to explore her ideas – after all, if your parents die when you’re seven, and you’re destitute, the chances of you surviving, let along becoming the Caped Crusader are very low.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_05.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_05_t.jpg" alt="page 5" width="165" height="251" border="0" align="right"></a>It was that fact that led to Van Meter adjusting a little of the Batman canon for her Elseworlds story. “Once I decided that the death of ‘Bruce’s’ parents would be a poor person’s death at a time when it was really common to die that way – to a kid, the sad part of that is that to little Bruce Wayne in 1910, if his parents die in a factory fire, he accepts it, and that’s the end of the story.
“But an adult Bruce Wayne can say that’s wrong. So one of the things that had to be changed in the story is that his parents die much later in his life, so that his response has less to do with his own survival, and more to do with a reflection on what has actually happened.”
Another reason the chance to an older “Bruce” i.e. Bruno had to be made was that if the young Bruno was destitute when his parents died, there would be no Alfred looking after him, and making sure every need was taken care of. That part of Bruce Wayne’s condition, according to Van Meter, was crucial for the later emergence of Batman.
“With the traditional Bruce Wayne, part of what wealth gets him is the security and time to reflect, be lonely, and decide he must do something,” Van Meter said. “That kind of guilt and introspection isn’t something that a poor child would have access to, because their next thought would have been, ‘Who’s going to feed me?’
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_20.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_20_t.jpg" alt="page 20" width="165" height="251" border="0" align="left"></a> “That’s not to be me making the traditional character sound like a jerk – he’s always affected me profoundly. One of the reasons that I wanted to write this was to say here’s a story about this same guy, with the exterior stuff stripped away, and he has to still be this same guy in the end. He has to do the same things. There’s something heroic in him that comes before all of the wealth and resources, or there would be nothing. So, by stripping them away, you would find a person who would still find his way into the same position, that is, Batman, or in this story, ‘The Bat.’. Simply put, Bruno is Bruce, if he lived in another time, and had no money, and didn’t speak English well, and all these other things. At his core, he’s the same person.”
According to Van Meter, the story is framed by a contemporary interview with a 99 year-old, recounting the events of the time in old Gotham. As the story unfolds, Bruno, who was out west trying to make his fortune, returns to the city to learn that his parents are long dead, victims of a factory fire that’s still considered an unsolved crime by the immigrant community, whereas the establishment has closed the case.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_21.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_21_t.jpg" alt="page 21 " width="165" height="176" border="0" align="right"></a> “Bruno starts looking into the fire, and develops a rapport with people that he meets,” Van Meter said. “As a result, Bruno is a little more Robin Hood than the vigilante the modern Batman is. Where Bruce exists to make sure no one suffers the loss he did, and sometimes has to go outside of the law to make sure of it, Bruno wants to make sure that the people who allowed this to happen to his parents never do it again. As such, he tries to dismantle the things that the sweatshop owners, use to keep going.”
As with most Elseworlds, Golden Streets of Gotham has a few other familiar faces in it as well. “There is a woman named Selina Kyle, and a woman named Barbara Gordon in the story, as well as a cop named James Gordon and a man named Jack Smart.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_48.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/DC/GOLDENSTS1_48_t.jpg" alt="page 48" width="200" height="164" border="0" align="left"></a> “For people who know Batman, it’s taking that setting, and trying to figure out where these character types would fall. Gordon comes the closest to being in the same spot, because he’s a cop. Essentially, for someone who had never read Batman before, it’s a turn of the 20th century thriller set in the intersection of the Bauhaus theater movement, the labor union movement and the immigrant community.”
“All in all, it’s a fun exploration of who the core Bat-characters are, and what is attractive about the, regardless of the kind of the story they’re in,” Van Meter continued. “That’s the cool thing about Elseworlds, because you get to play around with these great characters that are compelling even when they’re not in costume, or even themselves.”