Night Cries: how Batman’s darkest tale epitomizes his character
Batman has been in the cultural zeitgeist for well over half a century. Numerous generations have grown up with the character in one form or another, from the baby boomers who sat down to watch the 1966 TV series all the way to the kids that went to theaters to see The Batman this March. Everyone has a mental image of who Batman is, and some people’s interpretations of the character are wildly different from others’. With this article, I want to shine a light on one of the Caped Crusader’s lesser known, yet absolutely excellent stories that has had a significant impact on me and explain why the character remains relevant 81 years since his inception.
Batman: Night Cries is a 1992 one-shot written by Archie Goodwin and illustrated by Scott Hampton. Often regarded as one of the darkest Batman stories ever told, the plot follows the titular character as well as friend and collaborator commissioner James Gordon as they investigate a series of murders that suggests a drug war is being raged across the streets of Gotham. On the surface, this premise is as standard and generic as it gets for a Batman comic; however, there’s more to the story here, as the two detectives soon uncover that these murders all pertain to the abuse of children, leading them to suspect a serial killer. It’s up to these two men to find the perpetrator and put a stop to his twisted form of justice, all while they deal with their own personal demons.
Before delving into the storyline, I think it’s appropriate to highlight Hampton’s contributions to crafting this comic. Hampton’s painted art in this book is, in a word, stellar. He masterfully establishes from the outset the haunting, melancholic tone that the narrative reflects. Hampton’s artstyle is reminiscent of a dream sequence, an interesting contrast to another Batman one-shot with Dave McKean’s horrifyingly nightmarish take on Arkham Asylum in A Serious House on Serious Earth. Hampton holds nothing back in his dreary depiction of Gotham, a broken city rife with violence and corruption that, unfortunately, even young children can’t escape from.
The story begins with Bruce Wayne being awoken by the sound of bats before immediately shifting focus to Gordon. What fascinates me about this story is that it’s as much a Jim Gordon story as it is a Batman story, similar to Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s seminal 1987 work Batman: Year One. The commissioner even gives his own narration, which appears to be mocking his father (more on that later). Gordon is supposed to be meeting with the Mayor; but, after hearing of a homicide murder uptown, he trails off to investigate and finds a family scalded and beaten to death. While at the crime scene, Gordon is alerted by another officer that his wife is expecting him and absentmindedly tells them to inform her he’ll be working late, an early sign of a troubled relationship, also not unlike Year One.
The comic transitions to Batman targeting criminals selling a new designer drug that’s been plaguing Gotham’s streets before shifting focus to Bruce Wayne attending an event that’s being used to help implement a safe haven for victims of child abuse. One of the program’s creators, Doctor Bryan McLean, confides to Bruce that their center hopes to treat children after the damage has occurred in order to “break the pattern” that occurs when abused people abuse others. He introduces Bruce to Josh Adams, a physical therapist with a connection to McLean through his army days.
Cut back to Gordon, and we see him once again lost in thought, though this time its at home in his bedroom as he stares into his closet. His wife, Barbara, wakes up and the two get into a disagreement over Gordon’s increased work rate and what they choose to call their adolescent son James Jr. This proceeds to escalate until the two are shouting at each other over the commissioner’s past infidelity and obvious lack of commitment in mending their relationship. This argument is abruptly cut short when James Jr., awoken and visibily upset, grabs his father’s gun from off the table and points it at Gordon. Gordon reprimands his son, who tells him that he heard scary noises that sounded like a “bad man bothering mommy”. The unhappy couple soon begin arguing again over Gordon’s recklessness in leaving the gun where their child could reach it before Gordon storms out.
It’s important to note the significance of Gordon and Barbara’s argument to this comic; the nickname Jimmy is one that Gordon greatly dislikes as it was what his father used to call him, and thus it greatly irritates him that his wife chooses to call their son by it. The reader understands from this that Jim Gordon’s relationship with his father was unpleasant, to say the least, which gives his earlier narration using the nickname in reference to himself added context and foreshadows events to come later in the story.
The next scene shows Gordon investigating another murder scene, this time with a woman hanged by a telephone wire and a man with his head stuck inside a broken TV set. The commissioner immediately makes a connection to the family homicide he saw earlier that week. Gordon is introduced to Kathy, a daughter of one of the victims, Anthony Rizzoli, and a possible witness to the murder. It’s explained that the girl hasn’t spoken in over a year, despite seeing multiple specialists. Kathy looks out the window and looks horrified, as if she’s seen a ghost; however, when the police search outside, they don’t find anything. Gordon tells them that he wants to check the grounds alone, an easy ploy to get his peers to leave so that he can meet with the source of Kathy’s terror: Batman.
Batman explains to Commissioner Gordon how Rizzoli’s gruesome death was tied to this new drug that’s been on the streets, leading to Gordon telling his superior that he belives there’s a drug war going on. However, rather than be praised for his detective skills, Gordon gets rebuked and told to “just solve the crime” rather than come up with his own theories, leading to a violent outburst from Gordon as he throws the papers on his table to the ground in frustration.
Cut forward in time and Gordon is meeting with a young boy who’s father was recently murdered. When questioned, he tells Gordon that it was the Batman that committed this crime, despite not breaking his father’s promise of “never telling anybody” about their secrets. The child bursts into tears as he asks why Batman didn’t come for his mother, who left their family, instead of his father, who would always play a game with him after his mother left. Gordon asks the child what game this was, and this is what he responded:
On my I initial read, this part of the story felt as if I took a punch to the chest. I had read descriptions of the one-shot that described it as a harrowing look at child abuse and warned readers of its content, but I simply was not prepared for these two panels to affect me as much as they did, on a deeply emotional level. The simple way that this child explained the cruel loss of his innocence at the hands of the person who was supposed to protect him, all the while not understanding the weight of these actions or the evil intent behind them…it is simply brutal, more than any punch, kick, or optic blast that I’ve read in a comic.
This is the first explicit mention or implication of child abuse in the story, and it is key to unraveling the mystery of the serial killer. The next page is images of Commissioner Gordon, again narrating from his father’s view, juxtaposed by images of a man taking off his belt in between Scott Hampton’s paintings of the color red and getting ready to strike an unknown party. Gordon then wakes up, implying that what we just saw was a nightmare, almost certainly about his father, and from this we gather that Gordon’s father was abusive towards him. James Jr. then walks in to show his father his new toy, but instead of entertaining the child Gordon roughly grabs him by the arm and yells at him about not interrupting him while he works. He raises his hand as if to strike his child, only to hear his father’s voice again in his head; he drops his hand, hugs his son tight, and reassures him that he’ll never scare him like that again before admitting to his wife that he needs help.
Jim Gordon, in all of the Batman media that I’ve experienced over the years, is rarely portrayed as a perfect man. As mentioned previously, Gordon blatantly cheating on his wife is a major plot point in one of the most celebrated Batman stories ever crafted. However, I believe it’s this comic that shows the protector of the law at his most flawed, and in arguably his most vulnerable position. From the start, we see Jim Gordon as a man who’s more dedicated to his job than to his family, a fact that would ultimately lead to his divorce from his wife. We see him referred to as a “bad man” by his own son. In a story that touches on the idea of abusers often being the products of abuse themselves, Gordon nearly hurts his adolescent child the same way he was presumably hurt by his own father, a fact that becomes all the more disturbing when you realize that James Gordon Jr. grows into a homicidal murderer in Scott Snyder’s 2010 comic Batman: The Black Mirror. Simply put, Gordon is at the heart of this story just as much as the masked vigilante he works with, helping to emphasize the theme of stopping the traumatized to traumatized others.
Later, the commissioner meets up with Batman, and the two start piecing the case together with new evidence that points to all the murder victims being child abusers. They conclude that there must be a serial killer targeting these adults who abuse children, and from this they interview Doctor McLean in order to understand why the abused boy mentioned previously would believe that Batman is the one that killed his father. This transitions into a scene of the same boy, now speaking with a female therapist. This therapist attempts to use hypnosis in order to coax the boy into admitting that he meant to say “bad man” instead of Batman, but he firmly responds that his answer is the same.
Gordon calls it a night, unsatisified but resigned to the fact they’ve done what they can for today, but the Dark Knight presses on. He sneaks into Kathy’s room at the Riverbank Clinic, immediately apologizing to the traumatized girl for scaring her before. Then, in perhaps one of the greatest moments in the history of the character, he unmasks in front of Kathy to reveal Bruce Wayne, the man behind the mask.
He consoles her, tells her he understands that she’s not ready to talk about the things she’s seen, but there’s a way for her to share what she knows about her parent’s deaths. He tells her that sharing painful memories can help them, and tells her she can draw a picture instead of talking; she takes a pencil, starts drawing on a pad of paper, and hands it to Batman. On the pad is a picture of a bat.
This moment is the highlight of the comic, in my eyes. It speaks to the sensitivity of Batman on the topic of child abuse, especially considering Bruce himself has his own trauma permanently attached to his childhood. Of course, Bruce has never been portrayed to have been abused by Martha or Thomas Wayne as an adolescent, but it stands within reason that an individual with a backstory as tragically linked to the past as his would have a greater sense of empathy towards children who were abused by the people that raised them, and you can see it in how he speaks to and consoles Kathy. He’s doing this to help solve a crime, but he’s also doing it for the girl’s sake, and he does it in a way that she has the choice to make and be comfortable with. It’s an incredibly moving scene, and one that will forever be etched into my mind whenever I think of the Caped Crusader.
Batman follows and gets into a confrontation with Josh Adams, the who explained how Doctor McLean would help keep U.S. soldiers in South America sane, even while they saw atrocities like children dying. However, these deaths would have a profound effect on McLean, who tries to help save children from being abused through the program he shares with his sister…but it simply isn’t enough.
Batman stops the abusers that McLean was planning to target, but its too late; the victim is already dead when he gets there. He chases McLean and finds the doctor with a bat mask on his face and a gun in his hand. He tells Batman about his childhood, growing up with a father that would abuse his sister and how it deeply effected the both of them. He sadly explains that there are “too many cries” for him to deal with before tragically taking his own life with the gun as Batman is too slow to stop him. The story ends with Barbara taking James Jr. on a flight away from Gordon as Batman cries out into the night in frustration.
This story cements the character of Batman as a symbol of hope for those accustomed to tragedy and abuse. It paints the vigilante as a grounded, empathetic human who fights for those not in a position to protect themselves. Using an issue that’s unfortunately all too present in the real world and addressing it in a mature and respectful way to ground the world of Gotham in the midst of the Jokers and the Penguins running rampant, Goodwin and Hampton created a classic Batman storyline that deserves to be discussed with the likes of The Long Halloween and The Dark Knight Returns.
