Pitch Month: Earth B-Minus

Hey, all:

Last time I gave you my old Constantine pitch, about which some of you were almost paralyzingly nice. And you came this close to this letter dissecting exactly that first sentence but instead I’m going to give you another pitch because that was my idea with the Easter pitch—to give you a month’s worth of pitches. (That idea hit a bit of a snag when I realized I’d forgotten most of them.)

So this pitch is currently tentatively (appallingly) titled Exile on Earth B and it’s both a DC pitch and (of course) a Batman pitch.

In a way, it couldn’t be simpler—some force, either malevolent or otherwise, tears Batman off his reality and slaps him onto an Earth where he is the only hero. And that’s it. How long the story runs really is dependent on all kinds of factors but let’s pretend I get to actually determine its length. For me, it’d be the kind of thing that would run, I don’t know, two to three years.

I don’t think I have to tell you that there might not be any better example of a property so tripped up by his own success as Batman. Batman is simultaneously a character who is a self-imposed loner and also the leader of an entire family of spinoff characters; he’s a hero who fights alone in the shadows while also being in two super-groups at once. He’s a man who has to rely only on his wits, skill, and training…whose best friend (or best frenemy, depending on the season) is a sun-powered extraterrestrial god

And for me, it’s worth remembering that in his publishing history that Batman wasn’t around that long before Robin popped up at his side, Superman and World’s Finest pops up after that, and they’re probably both in the Justice Society not long after. In other words, even though I personally think of “Batman the loner” as his natural state, “Batman the team player” was, until the 70s, more canonically Batman.

But “Batman the loner” really does make more sense to the core concept, doesn’t it? Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered, he decides to train himself in body and mind to fight crime so that it never happens to anyone else ever again, and in looking for a way to really make it work, seizes on the “criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot” and decides to “become a bat.”

All of that makes sense to me, the emotional math checks out. I can’t say if that’s because it hits that emotionally resonant place where myth lives or maybe I learned it as such a young age it feels fundamental.

I suspect, however, it’s the former because whereas there are a lot of questions little kids have about, say, Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy or Superman—stuff that just doesn’t make sense but that parents just insist you have to believe—I don’t know if any kid has those doubts about Batman. Batman just makes a shitload of sense, I think, to kids. Depending on how you look at it, the story behind Batman is either: if your parents die, you’re going to have spend the rest of your life making up for that— or it’s yeah, you can become the baddest bad-ass of ever but only if you lose your parents because you wouldn’t even have the discipline to brush your teeth every night if you weren’t pissed at your older brother for saying as much.

To me, Superman has that same logic—you can become the strongest, most powerful, most good person that ever lived but only if your parents and a whole entire planet die to make that happen. Both the story of Batman and Superman make me wonder if kids just don’t want—deep inside—anything half as much as they want to be adults and have power, but they’re aware that it can only happen if the status quo gets broken: Batman only gets to be Batman because Batman’s parents aren’t around; Superman only gets to be Superman because Superman’s entire everything isn’t around. (And maybe this is where the secret identity also comes in? You can be what you dream of being only as long as nobody recognizes you.))

So Batman as loner, as the world’s most capable hot mess, makes narrative sense to me in a way that Batman—team leader/father/general of a personal Bat army—doesn’t. That Batman makes commercial sense, which means the number of times where there are bat book crossovers or tie-ins just seems maddening to me.

Even if it doesn’t become a thing (I have to pay for), it’s still a thing: gone are the days when Batman just thought, “Dick’s away at college” and that was it. Now it’s a “Batman has to push away the people he loves because even though he trusts them and has trained them and lets them run around in their own books doing god knows what” because if you don’t have that scene, you have moments where the going gets tough for Batman…so he should call his elite squad of trained fighters in.

So, Exile on Earth B: Batman is put on an Earth where Joe Chill didn’t just put kill Thomas and Martha Wayne, he put a bullet in the head of young Bruce Wayne. And he’s there for…a while. (Part of me instantly goes to a duration of five years, but I wonder if two or three years wouldn’t be enough for a monthly comic.)

Before I get into the nuts and bolts of it—or really the lack therein—I should mention variations of this pitch has long been attractive to me. I remember as a teenager sketching out ideas for an Iron Man pitch that was, in some ways, similar: Tony Stark and a crack team of Stark International scientists, engineers, and supporting characters embark on trying to set up a power plant in the Savage Land. I remember thinking it’d be somethiing like a cross between a Michael Crichton book and an Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp, but it’d also, again, give an excuse for Iron Man to be away from the Avengers—to be away from everybody—and give him a bit of breathing room that I felt like he needed. I still like this idea, by the way, and think it’d be a potentially interesting way to do an Iron Man story about both sides of the industrialist myth: as both pioneer and colonizer

And a decade or two after that, I had an idea I can barely remember now, about a Doc Savage style character who gets exiled by a mysterious force to another world. I think the mysterious force was actually his father? Like, maybe in order to train our burgeoning mortal miracle, Clark Savage Sr. trained young Doc by putting him in some kind of virtual reality-but-also-reality type world that would make him be the greatest…or kill him.

As much as I enjoy multiverses and appreciate their place within comic book history, that’s not really what I’m going for here, isn’t really my thing. I dig the exile planet, the bottle world, the world that exists as solipsism: filled with people, it’s for one character and one character only. I remember reading about the gnostic conception of our universe as a fake, a trap for the devil and feeling a tingle in my bones, a tickling in the soul.

And so there’s not much more to Exile on Earth B than that—a gnostic planet trap for Batman.

It wouldn’t be one of those easy lay-ups where Batman keeps encountering all of his cast and rogue’s gallery: Whoa, Dick Grayson’s a Romani gangster! Harvey Dent is Gotham’s mayor and his wife is Selena Kyle! The candidate running against him is Barbara Gordon! Alfred is a panini cook! Jason Todd is a rapper who goes by the name “Jazz-Tee”!

There’d be none of the regular cast or villains at all. It’d be returning Batman to the most primordial of pulp heroes, where the most uncanny thing in the book is Batman himself.

(Though I do have to admit, I like the idea that there is also The Phantom Stranger. It takes a while for us to find out but he is indeed our Phantom Stranger—because if you ask me, the cardinal rule of The Phantom Stranger is that there is only one in all the multiverses, in all the anything anywhere, and he can turn up any place at any time—but he is not forthcoming as to what he knows.)

But apart from The Phantom Stranger waxing cryptic, it’s just one man versus a city, every hand turned against him, and the only thing going for him is that even though the city is different in so many ways, there are things that are still the same, things he knows that nobody else knows: Gotham’s secrets and Gotham’s shadows. That’s one advantage…and other is that he’s Batman.

Also, I don’t know what you’d do back in all the other batbooks: to my mind, it’s either (a) all of the batbook characters don’t remember Batman at all except in fragments of dreams they can’t remember, or (b) Batman is in their world (and/or maybe in Detective Comics) but the reader alone knows something isn’t right. (I do like the idea that the readers are trying to solve the puzzle of whether the Batman they’re seeing is the real one just being written in a deliberately weird way or if he’s not Batman at all, that the readers are the detectives of Detective Comics.)

And I don’t know what the in-story why of it, which would have to be something pretty big to satisfy a three to five year arc.

So, yeah, not that great of a pitch, I guess? But it’s all I’ve got for you now.

If everything works out, I might have one or two more of you before the month is out? And if not..well, maybe I can talk about Dragonball or something?

(Because holy crap Dragonball is good.)

Anyway! I hope you’re well! I’ve got between thirty minutes to an hour left in my weekend and I’m gonna go suck the marrow out of it now. It’s almost gone!

Cheers,

-Jeff