The Dark Knight strikes fear into the hearts of criminals. But in Kevin Smith’s comic Batman: Widening Gyre, he was so afraid he actually wet himself.
Kevin Smith is one of the biggest names in the comics world, so there was huge excitement when it was announced he was going to write Batman. He had previously written several classic superhero and indie comics, so fans were eager to see how he handled the Caped Crusader.
The first story he wrote, Batman: Cacophony, was a three-issue miniseries about a war between the Joker and the Greek crime boss Maximilian Zeus. Unfortunately, his second Batman story, The Widening Gyre, had quite a number of problems, not least of all that it retconned one of the most notorious scenes from Batman: Year One and had the Dark Knight wetting himself.
Kevin Smith rose to prominence in the ’90s after making the low-budget comedy film Clerks, which helped pioneer mainstream indie films. His second film, the buddy comedy Mallrats, included a scene with Stan Lee discussing his love life and answering questions about the reproductive anatomy of Marvel heroes (quite different from Lee’s MCU cameos, to be sure). Defying the usual stereotype portraying nerds as antisocial basement-dwellers, he showed nerds in a positive light, helping make them more accepted in mainstream culture. He was also one of the first major Hollywood directors to write comics, paving the way for others.
Smith’s first work for DC Comics was Green Arrow: Quiver, which resurrected the dead hero and is still regarded as one of the Emerald Archer’s greatest stories. He continued writing Green Arrow, creating the villain Onomatopoeia, a serial killer who targeted superheroes and only spoke in sound effects. Onomatopoeia returned in Smith’s 2008 comic Batman: Cataclysm.
Batman: The Widening Gyre opened with a celebration of the Jewish New Year, Yom Kippur. The events are described with solemnly profound prose that captured reverence for the holiday and Jewish cultural heritage as a whole. This was interrupted when the brightly-costumed Nazi villains Baron Blitzkrieg and Atomic Skull burst through the synagogue’s skylight. In a matter of moments, the story went from a tone of serious reverence to garish absurdity, worsened by the fact that Dick Grayson (still Robin in this early flashback) stood atop the Bema (podium) while irreverently holding a century-old Torah scroll as he quipped about Nazis and Jewish traditions.