This is a continuation post to: Putting the Bat-Family up for adoption
That is to say, this will be part philosophical speculation about endemic metaphysical qualities, and part fanfiction on my part as I match those qualities to stories, characters, and events I think go hand in hand with them.
Gotham: The goth sister to the silver city of Metropolis, Gotham is home to The Dynamic Duo, The Birds of Prey, and a variety of mafia and villain gangs.
The dynamic of Mafia gangs and the villain gangs that replace them is a key escalation in the overt mythology of the DC universe. The Batman represents the trend of American’s taking the law into their own hands when the frontier becomes populated by the evil, the cowardly and the superstitious. Similarly, the appearance of the Joker, Two Face, and the Penguin represent a transition from the old guard of organized crime to the new frontier of lawless organizations which confront the modern citizen. This is not new rhetoric, but it bears repeating as we look at what events occur in a controlled and linear timeline within Gotham City.
The inflection point of organized crime becoming costumed crime must take place around the same time as the emergence of The Batman. The Batman I think is commonly accepted to occur as a phenomena over the course of about three years. The first two he spends largely still figuring out the Batman thing, there are enough Batman Year One titles out there to span his entire 100 year history at this point, so we won’t belabor this time period too heavily other than to say that by the end of year Two, he has a Robin and by the end of year three they are widely known as the Dynamic Duo of Batman and Robin.
As Costumed Crime emerges as the norm of the day, so does it occur on a wider scale across the country. We have to assume that at this time villains like Lex Luthor and the Flash Rogues make appearances and we can think of the implications on a more personal scale to Gotham. Batman The Animated Series does a good job of addressing this vis a vis the amount of blood they were allowed to show on TV. Laser weaponry, armored super-cop SWAT teams, the classic GCPD Police Blimps are all part of an effort to scale policing to match the threat of crime. When it was second generation European migrant gangsters laying down discriminate fire with automatic weapons they bought on contract from intelligence agency operators looking to suppress communism on the domestic scene, it was acceptable to police them with the prejudice of normal weapons and surveillance tech. But normal weapons and surveillance tech don’t really get you anywhere with the guy who commits a terrorist attack every 2nd of the month with half his gang dressed in black and the other half in white, with an ultimatum delivered backwards at two times speed across police radio. You are up against a new type of thing altogether. The “grunt fantasy” of DC Comics is imagining the plight of the Gotham City hoodlum and the Gotham City beat cop. They are in equal measure changed thematically for the time they live in.
The Gotham City thug is no more a guy who has to be of a certain descent in order to place in a gang as a made man, nor does he really have to do time in order to cement his place in the hierarchy of criminal Gotham as was common in real life. The Gotham City thug can walk into any number of seedy underground bars and there is a guy there recruiting for a Two-Face gig. There are undercover cops and investigators all around but it doesn’t matter because the Two-Face gang deals with them with such prejudice that nothing ever really comes out of their investigations, they’re too scared to really effectively do their job. Who wants to end up cut in half between two meat hooks, one sided roasted and the other frozen? So the Falcone Crime families and the Triad networks disappear and are replaced with the Penguin Crew that operate out of a semi-legitimate club (the biggest one in town) and wear tuxedo outfits. Once or twice a month they go out and do a robbery where they steal a gem named after a bird, and its a 50/50 whether Batman catches them in the act. I think in order to achieve a “realistic” scale with Gotham City we assume that Batman cannot be literally everywhere at once- even if that is what it feels like- and villains doing Not 9/11 have some modicum of success in their ventures and only get brought down in longer plots that run aground of The Batman and his allies.
So the streets of Gotham are populated in part by a dwindling sector of “normal” organized crime, and we can even stray from the classic image of mafioso clad in broad shouldered suit and say that more modern organizations like a cartel or black street gang runs amok, and I think the place of these organizations in the scheme of the greater criminal element is that they basically pad the airwaves and clog the signals of the police and heroes of the city. If Batman has to stop normal armed robbery and kidnapping its just that more likely they will get away with the things they are trying to get done. Similarly, we can decide that only certain Batman villains are really capable of or care enough to establish their own criminal network. Man-Bat does not have a gang. Bane, does have a gang. I think that a surprising majority of Batman’s villains would have a criminal network of some size at their command and you could look at it as being logistically necessary considering the scale of their crimes. The Mad Hatter I think has a gang, but they are probably all mind controlled. You can look at it as being sort of comedic that there must be a sort of micro-gig-economy for freelance thugs in Gotham but like all things Batman you get more bang for your buck if you play it straight.
This organizational methodology also helps us place characters who can be typed as “assassins for hire” in Gotham, Deadshot, Deathstroke (Who IS a Nightwing Villain btw) Cheshire, Lady Shiva and any other from the League of Assassins coterie and other places can fall into place as outsiders hired to help either even the terrain between traditional crime and costumed crime, or in support of customed criminals or conventional criminals against the heroic element.
Longer term, the idea is too that there is a third transference: By the time that Bruce Wayne is dead, and the Batman passes on to Damian to uphold, the costumed criminal element is as on the retreat as “regular” organized crime once was. My proposition for Damian is that Damian’s time is full of the truly esoteric terrors that have long haunted Gotham underneath the surface. Perhaps my most radical position for the modern Batman reader is that the Court of Owls should be a problem for Damian and not for Bruce. In the time of Damian vampires, haunted cults, and meta-alien-shapeshifters are the order of the day. The truly strange things which require: Investigation. We are instituting a policy of Detective work in Detective Comics. Radical stuff. Damian over the course of his career as Batman is very cavalier about replacing the weak parts of him that make him a less efficient Batman. The long term lesson to learn for him is that The Batman is a phenomena rooted in radical humanism and that material transhumanism and philosophical ascendant practices are trappings of The Batman and not infrastructure. But let’s not lose the thread on Gotham.
The Gotham City cop is in the same boat as the Thug really. The GCPD cop in the time of Bruce Wayne is divided in two camps: The old school guys who can’t get over Batman and the crazy crooks, and the new school dudes who rock the improved armor and weapons and look for the Bat signal in the sky as a sign that some action is on the way. This cop has alot to contend with. Organized criminals are rocking the armaments of a small military or an alchemists lab depending on what the night brings you. Any night in the week could have you face to face with the suffering victims of Professor Pyg, or an empty exhibit at the Gotham Zoo. The GCPD cop has to be a special kind of guy.
Gotham City must always be a “Dark-Deco” designer urbanscape. It is completely necessary that it has as many penthouses as it does crime alley’s, and must have room for the “Iceberg Lounge” as a relatively obscure but popular club run by a known costumed criminal. It adds to the mystique, if anything, its marketing. Pattinson’s Batman understands this. I am a fan of a Gotham which is impenetrable to other costumed superheroes in the long term. Superman can come around for a weekend for a “Worlds Finest” adventure, but it isn’t somewhere he can operate long term. It should be as impenetrable to Superman as it is to King Farraday, who can’t comprehend the scale of corruption, negligence, and pure grit it takes to operate as a cop there. We will get a taste of this when CHECKMATE tries to operate in Gotham, and quickly finds out that although the profile of the Batman has changed- he still isn’t to be fucked with. From this convergence we will get the resurrection of Azrael, and a fearsome ally for Damian’s Batman.