Batman: Year 100 No. 3 p. 24 by Paul Pope

Paul Pope is another artist that came over to Japan back in the 1990's, but instead of teaching English like Seth Fisher, Takeshi Miyazawa and me, he worked for the manga publisher, Kodansha. He even got published. And while his art does have a manga aesthetic, especially in the way he tells his stories, the art itself has more of an inky expressionistic Milton Caniff quality to it. But like Caniff devotees such as Hugo Pratt and Alex Toth, Pope's style is unmistakably his own.

Like many of you, I first came across Pope's work on Batman: Year 100. The idea for the series was that, in a dystopian 2039, 100 years after the Batman first appeared in the Gotham night to solve the "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate," Batman returns from a long absence, like King Arthur returning from Avalon, to battle an oppressive government that keeps tabs on all its citizens (even to the point of knowing the results of your colonoscopy before you do) and that deploys a militarized police force in order to control the populace through state-sponsored violence.

The look of Pope's Batman is a mixture of combat realism and superhero fantasy with a smidgen of Nosferatu thrown in for good measure. Character wise, he is a Batman who bleeds and bends but never breaks. Pope's Gotham is the dark and gritty city of Miller and Mazzucchelli mixed with the bright neon elements of Tokyo's night districts.

In the page I acquired from Mr. Pope's agent, Felix Lu -- who also provided this scan, Batman has escaped from the Federal Police Corp. building, where he was searching for clues to the mystery he has set out to solve, but, before he can get away, he is confronted by Agent Mercer, a telepath who can be very persuasive. Also, in the bottom panel, the grandson of Commissioner Gordon, who has been beaten up by the feds for sticking his nose into the government's business, reveals to a confidante how, when he was younger, he looked the other way and let the government kill all the criminals in Arkham Asylum.

I like the stylistic touches that Pope uses here, including the minimalist, Toth-like fire escape that serves as the setting, the way he creates movement with Batman's cape, the rising steam/smoke and the stylized sound effect in the top panels, and, yes, the closeups of Batman, wearing his Nosferatu teeth and the supreme confidence he gives to his nemesis, Agent Mercer. I'm definitely glad to be able to add this page to my collection.

PS

I could not make out what exactly the gray marks on the left side of the page were in the small scan on Felix's site, but thought they may be handwritten notes or some such. After receiving the page, I discovered it was, indeed, the dialogue, including some on-the-fly edits.