Batman: Resurrection, By John Jackson Miller – A Book Review

John Jackson Miller’s Batman: Resurrection is a novelization set in the world of Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns of 1989 and 1992, respectively. It picks up a few months after the defeat of the Joker, as Bruce Wayne is plagued by nightmares of that fateful confrontation atop the Gotham Cathedral, haunted by questions of the placing and timing of the whole ordeal. Why were goons already in the Cathedral? What was the Joker’s ultimate plan, and is it possible he’d set a trap for the Caped Crusader in a ploy to cheat death?

The Novel, Batman: Resurrection

Inspired by his love of the film and run of Batman 89 comics by Sam Hamm and Joe Quinones, Miller introduces a few new villains and gives us insight into some we’ve already seen and some yet to be revealed. Max Schreck, Selina Kyle, and an unseen member of the Red Triangle Gang with an affinity for anchovies all make appearances. Alexander Knox plays a big role, and we learn more about the atrophy of Bruce’s relationship with Vicki Vale, clearing the stage for her absence in Batman Returns. The novel ends on a cliffhanger as a new player introduces themselves to Batman, paving the way for Miller’s follow-up, Batman: Revolution, slated to be released October 28th of this year. 

This is a fun read, and Miller has a great voice for characters. When one reads Batman: Resurrection, one needn’t imagine a face for Batman or Commissioner Gordon or Vicki Vale or Harvey Dent or any of the number of characters shown on screen in 1989, giving Miller more space to explore action over exposition. The interesting phenomenon while reading the book was finding the characters slipping out of their cinematic tethers in this reader’s mind. I knew I was supposed to hear Michael Keaton’s voice in this book, but Batman and Bruce Wayne speak far more often here than in the film.

As Batman sounds out his theories with Alfred or the Commissioner, I kept hearing Kevin Conroy in my head, as I’ve logged far more hours with his detective work than with Keaton’s. Then there’s the problem of Gordon, himself – played by Pat Hingle in all four of Warner Bros’ Batman films from 1989 to 1997. Gordon was largely a buffoon. He spoke very little, and the only sequence I can conjure in my mind when I seek out his voice is the scene where he’s duped by Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin. In Miller’s world, Gordon is confident, competent, and complimentary, to which I could find no analog on the screen.

It’s likely my own failings that are derailing Miller’s attempts to salvage Gordon’s reputation in the pages of Batman: Resurrection, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t share that aspect of my reading experience. The new characters introduced are fully realized and pose a fascinating threat to Batman, and we revel in following along as Batman refines his “wonderful toys” to aid in his fight against crime. Miller digs deep into the lore of the Burton universe, so to the extent that it appears he has deliberately and rightly omitted the Batman Forever and Batman & Robin entries. 

One of the more interesting aspects of reading this novel was the reaction of others while doing so. “What are you reading?” they’d ask. “Oh, it’s a novel set after Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman.” “I didn’t know people wrote novels about Batman.” “They do.” Silence. “I don’t get it.” “It’s a movie that you read. Or a comic book where you draw the panels yourself in your head.” Silence. “I still don’t get it.”

The Interview

I had the chance to chat with John Jackson Miller last October during New York Comic Con about Resurrection before I’d even had a chance to read it, and as I’m avoiding spoilers here, you’ll know just as much as I did as I take you through this interview.

Eric McClanahan – So Batman: Resurrection bridges the time period between Batman 1989 and Batman Returns. Is that correct?

John Jackson Miller – Well, “bridging” is not exactly the proper word. That implies that it takes you right up to the front door of Batman Returns. It is a novel set in between the films, and it’s the first novel set in between the films, so it takes place several months after Batman. We’re able to follow up on elements of things that happened in Gotham City in that film. Such as what happened to the underworld of Gotham following the fall of the Joker. What happened to Batman and his mission after the Joker is gone, because obviously in the Tim Burton world, Jack Napier, the Joker, was the murderer of his parents. So that’s been resolved. Has that not resolved his arc, and why not? We end that film with Vicki Vale dating Bruce Wayne and everybody’s happy… obviously that’s not the case as of Batman Returns. So we get to show a little bit about what’s going on there. 

We get to share some of the lasting impact of what happened in the first movie on the psyche of the city and the police officers and everybody involved. One of the things that novels make it possible to do is when you’ve got a major event happening, say The Snap in the MCU, or something of that magnitude, you’re not always able to follow up on what it does to the individual regular people because you’re in the middle of a feature film, and you’re not going to do a feature film to get into all of these things. Even with comics, as we have with Batman 89, you’re not going to be able to get into the inner lives of people to the same degree. Just the general citizens of Gotham City. Here in a novel we have a little bit more room to actually deal with what happened to all those people that suffered from Smylex poisoning that didn’t die. What did Bruce Wayne try to do about that? Because Bruce Wayne, unlike Bruce Wayne in other movies or other things, he’s not pretending to be a millionaire playboy or irresponsible person; the Michael Keaton Bruce Wayne is very much an active part of Gotham City life. We see him holding a fundraiser to save the Bicentennial in the first movie. We see him challenging Max Schreck in the second movie about the power plant, saying that he and the mayor see eye-to-eye and they’re going to stop him from building the power plant. So we have a very different Bruce Wayne and one of the things that he’s involved in is an effort to help the Smylex survivors. 

All of these things we’re able to get into. Like how is Commissioner Gordon, and how has his life changed? Because suddenly he has this vigilante that he’s consulting with. We have in these films a much different Commissioner Gordon than we’ve seen elsewhere.  This is probably the oldest Commissioner Gordon that we’ve seen anywhere. He’s a veteran of forty years on the force. I establish that he was in the Navy and then he walked the beat; he fought in the big one, World War II, and can he provide Batman with some… I don’t know about paternal advice, but definitely advice on how he deals with really difficult cases. Not catching who he needs to catch, or failure. He’s got something that he can share, as well. 

We get into those things, yet on top of it all, we have the villains, plural; we have only revealed one of the villains, and that’s Clayface. Who we’re introducing in the beginning. What we did with that is that we tried to make sure that it fit into the Burton-esque style. The first two films didn’t really have anything in the way of metahuman abilities. Batman has better technology than anybody else, and Joker has some great technology, too, but in terms of fantastical elements, nobody is reading people’s dreams in these movies. Nobody is trying to freeze Gotham City in these [two films]. It’s all in a world of practical effects. So I envisioned that our own version of Clayface, Basil Karlo, would draw upon the 1940s version of that character, where we could draw upon Gotham City’s acting scene, we could position him as this tragic figure who gets dragged into this against his will. We can visualize this as we’re reading what it would probably look like on screen if we were to do it – much more of a macabre Tim Burton freakshow kind of thing. He’s not the Clayface who’s the shambling mound in the cartoons with all of the special effects involved.

EM – Right. So no turning his arms into hammers or scythes?

JJM – It’s 1989. So, no. And again, that is an interesting thing to handle in this series, which again will be more than one novel: the Gotham City that we see in the movies, particularly with Anton Furst’s depiction of Gotham City in the first picture, is sort of this snowglobe that exists outside of time. It is a mix of the 1940s and 1980s. Really it’s our major characters who seem to be living in the present, in terms of Bruce Wayne’s fashion, Vicki Vale’s fashion, even Alexander Knox, who’s in a trenchcoat and a fedora but he’s got a tape recorder while a lot of his colleagues have flash cameras. There’s sort of that mix right there and I was always conscious while I was doing this book of trying to not have any moments that pull anybody out and say “Oh that isn’t something that would’ve appeared in ‘89 or ‘92!” My guiding star on this was something Michael Uslan said to me, back twenty-five years ago, almost: “The first two Batman Pictures [that he produced] were Batman in the thirties and forties. Batman in the thirties = Batman with a gun. Then, Batman in the forties = the beginning of the Rogues Gallery.” He went on to say “Batman Forever is Batman in the fifties, because we’ve got Robin. Batman & Robin is Batman in the sixties because it’s the Adam West version-”

EM – The technicolor craziness.

JJM – Yeah, the Julius Schwartz, sort of the sillier version. He said logically that if we made more movies then the seventies would be in the next one and the eighties would be Dark Knight and then the nineties would be the next one after that, and damned if that isn’t actually how it worked out, ‘cause we got Ra’s al Ghul in the seventies and in Batman Begins. We get The Dark Knight in the eighties and we get Bane in the nineties picture. [laughs] I don’t know if he intended that, but that conversation was back in like 2000!

EM – Prescient, yeah.

JJM – Well, if anybody would know, he would. He has been a supporter of this book and we’ve been very thankful.

EM – Excellent. It is great to get his blessing, as he is The Boy Who Loved Batman, so that’s the guy to talk to. Speaking to the city’s response to the Joker’s attacks and the wave of the Cult of Personality that he spread, do you see any correlation between that and our current political climate?

JJM – I’m trying very hard not to do anything that takes people out of the timeframe. I do like drawing on history, and I draw a lot on history, and tend not to do anything anachronistic that hasn’t happened yet. There was a whole surveillance piece in my Star Wars: A New Dawn novel, and people asked if that had to do with Edward Snowden, but it was just in the news at that time; the NSA spying and whatnot. And I’d say “No, this is from 1984. This is from George Orwell.” [laughs] So, I think that sort of thing can seem dated if you put it into a film or a narrative. But, there are elements that are mentioned in the first film, such as Corto Maltese, implying that some of the unrest in the world that we saw in the 1980s was also in the Batman world of the 1980s. Again, I’m trying to keep it in this snowglobe, this universe, as much as I can.

EM – I think I have time for one more question. You’ve dabbled in a lot of sandboxes: Halo, Mass Effect, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. I’m trying to phrase this in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m being an ass: Have you considered an original piece of your own world?

JJM – Yeah, I actually did a book of my own called Overdraft [: The Orion Offensive] some years ago – it’s out of print, and I committed that I would not bring it back until I had time to do a sequel. I was told years ago that if Star Trek or Star Wars are knocking at your door, you don’t say no. 

EM – Well, obviously.

JJM – I have other side projects that I’m working on at the same time. I have a nonfiction project that I’m working on in connection with my website Comichron, which is the sales chart site, and basically I’m in progress on various things. Certainly I have a lot of people saying that I need my own IP. I agree, but also, how often can somebody do a Star Trek novel hardcover followed by a Star Wars hardcover followed by a Batman hardcover? That is a hat trick which has not been done by anybody, and after twenty years of this, that kind of feels like a level up. [laughs] I am fortunate to have gotten the chances to be involved with these different publishers and various different franchises and the various different studios. I have a particular set of skills, as Qui Gon Jinn’s alterego said, and I truly enjoy working with this material. I have stopped doing material that’s a franchise that I don’t have an active interest in, because the readers can tell. 

EM – Well, thank you so much for talking to me. Have fun at the signing and enjoy the Con!

JJM – Thanks a lot!

Overall Grade: 8/10

Batman: Resurrection is good. It’s a swift read – at 413 pages. It whizzes by with the speed and intensity of, well, a great film. I’d recommend it to fans of the character, particularly of the film versions of 1989 and 1992. I will most certainly be reading the follow-up later this year and you can head right back here to Nerd Initiative to see if I think John Jackson Miller can catch lightning in a bottle twice.

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