From Batman to Atropos

In "Night on Earth," a 2003 issue of Planetary, an occasional serial written by Warren Ellis for DC Comics and (most often) illustrated by John Cassaday, the series' three main characters who function as a kind of archeological team go to Gotham City to track down John Black, a young man suspected of perpetrating some very gruesome deaths in the city.  The organizing conceit of this issue is that in this particular universe, Batman doesn't exist, but the man the Planetary team is tracking has been subjected to insidious experiments that have left him with the power, and pain of cycling through alternate universes, so when the team finds Black he has something akin to an epileptic seizure and cycles everyone into a parallel reality, one in which the caped crusader does in fact exist.

When a muscle-bound, ninja-style fighting Batman shows up on the scene, the trio are at a loss as to what to make of this guy in the fetish costume;  Jakita, the character most likely to be played by Angelina Jolie in the movie adaptation of the comic book, takes on this interloper while her compatriots try to catch Black as he stumbles down an alley. When they catch up with Black, he seizes again, and Jakita finds herself in a candy-colored universe with a slightly portly guy in a slightly baggy leotard who looks a lot like Adam West, who played Batman in the television series that ran from 1966-1968.

As Jakita tries to recover from a blast of "Bat Female-Villain Repellent" the Drummer, one of her team members, sees "some kind of transvestite hooker running down the alleyway at us" while it dawns on Elijah Snow, the other member of the Planetary triumverate, that they're encountering different iterations of this mysterious "cape guy."  Elijah has the bad fortune to come face to face with a Frank Miller-esque, Dark Knight version of the character as Black cycles into yet another universe;  and the team members find themselves having to renegotiate the terms of Black's capture and custody with figures whose solutions to the problem at hand range from long-term treatment at Arkham Asylum to an immediate bullet to the brain.  I'm thinking about the ways in which comics offer an example of how to consider the radically different iterations one can have of one character, one life in thinking through some editorial and ethical issues in cutting footage to fit a key moment in a documentary in which how we choose to frame a few seconds of video can have the effect of casting a kid's life as a downward spiral of violence or as a wellspring of creative production.  Tune in next week....