Batman Year One by Frank Miller

 

Frank Miller's vision of Gotham City is grim. A dark and decayed metropolis where almost everyone in positions of power are on the take. A place where two brave citizens, police Lt. James Gordon, and Bruce Wayne, take a stand against the corruption and risk their lives to save the city.

In Batman Year One, which follows the first year after Bruce Wayne decides to do something to save the city he was born to, Gotham City is certainly not a place one would choose to raise a family, yet that is just what Lt James Gordon finds himself doing when he is transferred to Gotham from Chicago. His arrival coincides with Bruce Wayne's decision to don the cape and cowl of the Batman. Working separate, the two men begin their epic struggle to fight crime in Gotham City, Gordon from within, Batman from without.

This is a terrific book. One can almost hear the punches, the rabble of the streets, the gunfire; smell the detritus littering the streets, the damp decay of the city, feel the filth that permeates the air, and the suffering the citizens must face every day. There's no campy 60s Batman, quirky Tim Burton interpretation, or just sad Joel Schumachery here. Just gritty realism with fallible, mortal heroes and irascible villains.

I give the book four stars instead of five, because Miller never really takes us inside Bruce Wayne or Batman to let us know the pain he feels or give us a sense of the dual nature of his psyche, or the passion that drives him to risk live and limb to save citizens that repeatedly attack him. It obviously inspired Christopher Nolan and David S Goyer when they were writing Batman Begins, right down to them swiping elements of scenes from Batman Year One. It's not perfect, but certainly a major contribution to the Batman universe.

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A Father's Story by Lionel Dahmer

When serial killers are apprehended, we hear all about their crimes and the horrible acts they committed. And to a lesser extent, we are get a sense of the victims and their families, but very rarely do we ever hear from the family members of the killers and what they must go through as they are often turned into pariahs for what their children/siblings did. This makes Lionel Dahmer's book A Father's Story such an important work. However, as Dahmer repeatedly states, he has "an analytical mind" so the work tends to toward calculated prose, that gives very little emotional insight into what his experience was like, so that the book boils down to little more than a litany of events from Jeffrey Dahmer's childhood and trial, making it difficult to empathize with him or his wife.

Hoever, Dahmer should be commended for avoiding sensationalism and trying to capitalize off his son's crimes. The book is simply, as the title states, a father's story, sort of Dahmer's way of working through and trying to understand how his son could possibly be capable of the horrible acts he committed.

The book does give some insight into what may have caused Jeffrey Dahmer to become the killer the world know him as. Jeffrey Dahmer was born into a perfect storm of hereditary and environment. Lionel Dahmer bravely confesses his own early experiments with perversity, a long stint as a pyromaniac culminating in almost burning down a neighbors garage, attempting to hypnotize a girl when he was thirteen in the hopes of "having [his] way with her" and his own dissociative personality that was a lesser version of what developed in his son. Also, Jeffrey's birth mother, Joyce was greatly mentally disturbed (what mental disorders she exactly had, Dahmer never states) and was on numerous medications while pregnant with Jeffrey; and Dahmer correctly questions what effect all of this had on his son.

Throughout the book, we sense the immense feeling of guilt Lionel Dahmer feels that he somehow through his own genes and faulty parenting contributed to what his son became, and through this alone are given a glimpse into the suffering the Dahmer family went through.