"Two paths are open to you" - TAO by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson

 Part II of a continuing series of reviews on the greatest Batman monthly of all time: LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT.

As fate would have the Bronze Age revival of Batman coincided with a massive spike in interest about Eastern Philosophy and martial arts that is commonly known as "The Kung Fu Boom". Appropriately, as the decade progressed, the Dark Knight Detective added an encyclopedic knowledge of martial arts and meditation techniques to his arsenal that served him well in globe-trotting stories battling with Ra's al-Ghul and The Sensei. This wuxia flavoring has endured in the character to the present day across a manifold of interpretations: even BATMAN BEGINS, which took great pains to scale back and explain logically all the essential elements of Batman's character spends its first act in Tibet with Bruce Wayne studying ninjitsu with the League of Assassins.

Many Batman stories have used the spice of kung fu but few have embraced the substance of philosophy that underpins it. One notable exception to this is the 1993 two-parter TAO by Batman veteran Alan Grant and 2000 A.D. alum Arthur Ranson published in Legends of the Dark Knight 52 and 53. Comic books embracing Eastern Philosophy can be a dicey proposition when even academic philosophers in the West can be tin-eared to it, but Grant and Ranson carry forward just enough authenticity, along with gorgeously realistic art, to craft out a potent piece of popular mythology: to tell a story that reminds us to be good and steers us a bit from bad. The essence of the superhero comic.

TAO, like all LOTDK arcs, is set in the first two years of The Batman's career. A triad boss named Johnny Khan uses ruthless tactics to enforce his control of gambling in Gotham's Chinatown. As Batman tries to stem the tide of bodies in turf wars between Chinese gambling houses, someone is killing off Chinese fortune-tellers in the neighborhood and leaving their heads turned backwards. This last gesture leads Batman to deduce that the murders are, in part, a message to him from a wayward pupil of a Taoist master Bruce Wayne encountered when he himself was studying the philosophy in rural China during his years of training. Has his old enemy returned and, if so, why is he killing off fortune tellers in Gotham City?

The first thing we should highlight is Arthur Ranson's art, which is stunning, as evidenced by the selected panels throughout this review. I wasn't familiar with Ranson's work outside of this story when I read it and a quick scan of his Wikipedia article reveals him to be mainly a veteran of the British comic scene who feels that his style doesn't work for superhero stories. What it does work for is the mixture of gritty crime drama and Chinese pastoral legend that this story affords him, and watching him translate the familiar Batman tropes into his blend of photo-reference and surrealism is one of the great joys of the piece.

Check out his interpretation of Bruce Wayne, one of the most singular I have ever seen. There's no sign of the lantern jawed hero here-- this is an intellectual, an adept, a detective with a massive mental and emotional sensitivity.

Grant's script derives more than a little influence from the David Carradine Kung Fu television show in its structure: flashbacks of training juxtaposed to a current day problem the hero is facing that will require that very training to circumnavigate.

What marks the script out as particularly good is how it continues to engage and even surprise: genre fans are very familiar with the Eastern master tropes, but Tao has a view tricks up its sleeve with its own variations on the archetypes. Bruce is tempted to walk the road of personal power by appeals to the mission he has dreamt for himself and not with vague promises of power or control. The villains in TAO have a strong understanding of human nature and actually make an offer that Bruce has to consider because it plays to his good intentions.

TAO is a story of dichotomies: the modern and the ancient, Eastern and Western, male and female, style and substance, power and The Way. Ranson opens the second issue with a brilliant, non-verbal illustration of the central conceit:

  

The desire for personal power at the expense of everything else hollows out men and makes them caricatures of themselves-- all style and no substance-- it's only by corrupting the good that evil can replenish itself. The temptation to kill, to control, to dominate is the central one for the Batman character of this period and while it stems from the best of desires, to keep anyone from being victimized, Bruce knows that inevitably it would render him hollow, inhuman, a shell of what he has striven for.

This is not a Batman who makes declarations like "I'm Vengeance"-- this is a Batman in relentless pursuit of physical, mental, and spiritual excellence because the excellence itself is the only lever that can move the weight of sadness from his heart for not just his own primal tragedy, but the tragedy of senseless violence itself. 

In other words, he's found his Way-- even if it's beset on all sides by temptation and treachery that would break a weaker man. 

These are the ideas that bring me back, again and again, to this character who, in the right hands, is a gussied up and commercialized but still powerful and primal mythology for navigating life in the West in the 21st century city. Our very own King Arthur.