Crowdsourced Batman: The Movement #1 Review

Somewhere, the kids from Anonymous are shitting themselves with glee, because with The Movement, they’ve got their own comic book. And they’re superheroes and everything. Except they have custom facemasks instead of the omnipresent V For Vendetta masks, because not even those guys want to face the wrath of Alan Moore.

Okay, lemme take a step back. I was not a part of 2011’s Occupy movement, because I have one of those job things, but I walked past the Boston incarnation at Davis Square every day because they were between the job thing and one of those bar things. And while you can argue about that movement’s (Movement! Get it?) motivations, success or failure, it was pretty clear to a daily passer-by that, at face value, it was a group of people who were committed to battling corruption, policing themselves and providing their own version of social services. Also marijuana, but mostly those three things.

Write Gail Simone’s The Movement #1 takes those three concepts, throws in the social crowdsourced vigilante justice of Anonymous, mixes them up with a healthy dollop of superpowers, drops them into a DC Universe city so filthy and populated by killers, filth and dirty cops that it makes Gotham look like the city from Logan’s Run, and tries to show us what Occupy and Anonymous might look like in a place where something like that might not only be needed, but where no one can stop them.

Which is an interesting concept, but is it any good?

Welcome to Coral City, where rats are rampant, a serial killer who takes your eyes is running wild, and where the penalty for being caught with drugs by the cops is a slap on the wrist if you’re a dude, and one on the ass if you’re a girl. That is, unless the cops are seen and taped by the masked members of Channel M, a hacker group named such because calling them “Anonymous” would mean DC’s Web servers would be a host for My Little Pony gifs in about 20 minutes (seriously: don’t fuck with those guys). But it’s not like Channel M’s vigilante justice matters, because even when the tapes are released to the press, the cops are unwilling and unable to police their own, leaving filthy cops on active duty… which is great news when word comes in to Captain Meers (the one cop who’s even willing to try and discipline the handsy cops) that the Cornea Killer has claimed another victim between 10th and 20th Street. Which is really excellent timing, since there’s also a kid there with just enough superpowers to back up his delusions that he’s possessed by the devil. Enter The Movement – Katharsis, Tremor, Mouse, Burden and Virtue – who repel the cops, tell them to stay out of the Tween neighborhood and… well, that’s about it.

For a story that is, for all intents and purposes, about the Occupy kids and Anonymous being not just real heroes, but necessary, requires a setting and general societal antagonism so profound that the seizing of ten city blocks seems like a reasonable response. Let’s face reality: to a large part of the American population (hi, Dad!), Occupy was comprised of a bunch of middle-class wastrels while Anonymous is filled with treasonous hackers hellbent on taking down the national security apparatus. And The Movement #1 is effective in setting up that environment. Starting with dirty rapist cops and a city government unwilling to police itself, let alone anyone else, and moving to a filthy city, overrun by vermin and random violence, Simone sets up an environment where crowdsourced vigilantism makes a lot of sense.

The tricky part is, with the establishment of a place where this kind of citizen uprising can take place and make sense, there’s not a lot of room for character development for anyone but the dirty cops and, arguably, One Good Cop to act as Commissioner Gordon for The Movement (I’m assuming at this point, but considering Meers is the only one willing to try and discipline the rapist-wannabe cops, it’s probably a good assumption). We learn that Virtue can read emotions at a distance, that that Mouse can control rodents, and that Tremor can Geo-Force up the dirt and that Katharsis can kick your ass… but there’s zero information as to why. So where we get a ton of information as to why the city is diseased, we don’t know why these people have decided that they’re the cure. Yet.

But you know something? That’s okay. The best action stories set up a villain that you want to see get a good asskicking, and Simone does something in 20 pages that is no small feat: she makes an entire city and its institutions a bad guy you want to see whipped on. Sure, she does it with simple things that everyone hates – dirty cops, threatened rape and a system that protects people like that – but it serves to make me interested enough to see how this organization intends to clean things up to get me to check in again next month… and to see what happens when these city organizations paint The Movement as terrorists for the straights in the ‘Burbs.

Freddie Williams III’s art is… a little busy. It’s certainly solid enough, with realistic figures and expressive faces, and the man draws a mean rat, but there are stylized ink lines everywhere. Scratched into the negative spaces, used to indicate motion, even used as actual panel borders in one or two places. Clearly that kind of heaving inking hand isn’t my favorite, but his storytelling is clear – even in the pages where his panel borders are irregular and sketched, it’s easy to follow the action – and his pacing is appropriate.

The Movement #1 walks a weird line. It is pure setup, and it uses its real estate to show us an entire city and its institutions as the bad guy. It does it well enough that I’m interested to see where it all goes in the coming few issues, and well enough that I was rooting for these completely unknown heroes, even though so much time is spent making a city of evil that the heroes are nothing but ciphers at this point. As setup, it’s effective and compelling enough to make me come back for a while… but I really want to know more about these heroes, and how Joe Blow from Falmouth feels about superpowered vigilantes taking over a piece of the city. Because if Simone’s honest about what happened with Occupy and the captured members of Anonymous, well, it won’t exactly be with flowers and free booze.