Posted in: Comics | Tagged: coics dc, dc comics, entertainment

The Subtext Of Batman #48 by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.

We build things that are unstable. Whether that's lives or the newly named super heavy elements, , none of it lasts. Entropy is all.

In Batman #48 we see a gun. Chekov's Gun is a theatrical law that is a gun is seen in the first arc, it must go off by the third. That can be applied to anything introduced in an early part of the story, it must be used or why is it there? Sometimes just asking the question is enough. Maybe just the tease, as here is enough, but I doubt it.

Because here it actually is a gun. It must be fired. Maybe it already has. Is this *the* gun? the one that killed the Waynes? And either killed something in Bruce – or set it free? Was there a ghost of a bullet?

Batman is a character defined by a gun, yet one who rejects them. They are too real, too important he can't even pick one up. He is a creature of fantasy, who prefers the ridiculous nature of batarangs, of batmobiles, of Batcaves and utility belts. He is fiction, he is a  a man who should have died as a child, returned to us, he is a ghost. Because Batman isn't real.

And guns are.

Hollywood and pulp fiction have presented the gun as the equivalent of a magic wand. In Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's Batman you can feel its weight, in the hand, in the mind, in the story.

Things fall apart. But the grace is in the struggle to keep on going.

Batman #48. Act One. Two issues to #50. Act Three.

The gun is going to go off.

Comics courtesy of Orbital Comics, London. Who will see Simon Spurrier & Emma Price signing their new Image comic Cry Havoc next Wednesday January 27 from 5:30-7pm.

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