Foreword

By Summer Gleason

Vicki Vale and I are very good friends. This was not always the case.

In my early days as a correspondent for Gotham Cable News, I first became acquainted with Vicki when we both worked at that station. We got off on the wrong foot when I was given a co-anchor position on Gotham Tonight, the station's investigative journalism unit. Vicki had been gunning for that spot for the better part of a year, and was understandably steamed when she was passed over in favor of a junior colleague. Indeed, her experience as a reporter for The Gotham Gazette combined with her fine work at GCN certainly qualified her for the job.

But real trouble flared up between us when she circulated via the office computer network an unflattering, photo-shopped image of me engaging in an indecent physical act. Her rationale for that nasty bit of smearing (as expressed by her in a meeting between the two of us, three station executives, and someone from HR) was that she was convinced that I was seeing her then-paramour, Bruce Wayne. I believe she heard this from one person who had heard it from another person who had seen Mr. Wayne and me exiting an expensive restaurant together.

The truth of the matter was that I had met Mr. Wayne to interview him about his company's acquisition of Kord Industries. The two of us neither were nor ever have been romantically involved. But I see in retrospect why Vicki had reacted so strongly to the rumor. Mr. Wayne, the quintessential billionaire playboy, used to go through girlfriends like one goes through tissues. Back then, his fat bank account and movie-star good looks attracted new wannabe lovers like flies to a bowl of egg salad. Vicki is one of the very few women ever to have been involved with him who even came close to becoming Mrs. Wayne. Therefore, she was understandably rattled at even the possibility that a competitor for his affections, a rival coworker no less, had flown in while she wasn't looking to scoop her prize out of her hands.

As you can guess, Vicki and I did not remain coworkers for long. She left the station a year later, her career in broadcast television failing to get off the ground, after which she went back to the Gazette.

Several years later, Vicki and I made up after becoming co-hosts on a program for CBS Philadelphia, and have remained close friends ever since. We always like to have a good laugh about the bad old days, as we not-so-fondly refer to the early aughts and the late twenty-teens. We are both lucky to have the privilege of indulging in such laughter. I have been kidnapped several times, once by the Joker on Christmas Eve. Vicki has nearly been collateral damage from the deadly escapades of any number of supervillains more times than either of us can count.

But back then, all this was no laughing matter, especially not for Vicki. The repeated, harrowing episodes where her life was endangered, either directly or indirectly as a result of the conflict between the Batman and his rogues' gallery, was nearly enough to drive her away from Gotham and to voluntarily end her career in journalism.

Taken together with the normal, everyday challenges of living in a big, east coast city and trying to maintain a good work-life balance, it could be hard on people like her and me. Navigating such challenges is difficult for any reporter in such circumstances, especially while living with such a strange animal as Gotham. But the consequences of living there at this point in its history proved to be as potent a cocktail as the mixture of psychotropic drugs my dear friend was prescribed after the incident involving a D-list supervillainess called "the Absence." (Vicki has given me permission to openly write about these personal details.)

So why did Vicki stay in Gotham? The Dark-Deco City, paired with Metropolis as one of New York's two ugly stepsisters, grew a national reputation in the thirty-plus years leading up to me working there as an open sewer of crime and corruption. Yet people still came and still come to live, work, and play in the City of the Bat, sometimes as a matter of necessity, but more often as a matter of preference. Why would anyone prefer to live in Gotham, you ask? I would give the same answer that Vicki gave me when I posed that question to her.

For all its flaws, Gotham is not the terrible, detestable hellhole that it has been portrayed as in cut-rate, sensationalist TV programs and gonzo-journalism tabloids. There's a reason its population keeps on increasing, and a reason it continues to thrive after all of the terrible, gut-wrenching things that have happened there, many of which were covered by me and my colleagues, including Vicki.

What is that reason? To quote Vicki: "Gotham's the biggest circus on earth. Circuses are fun. Who wouldn't want to live there?"

She has a point. Gotham was and is known for more than just extreme, flamboyant crime and extreme, pervasive corruption. It's known for everything about it being ratcheted up to eleven. It's more than simply bizarre and dangerous. It's cool. It's lively. It's adventurous. It's fun. That's true for its crime, its architecture, its music and performing arts scene, its nightlife, its religious community, its politics, its businesses, and everything else about it.

The truth is that Gotham City is not defined by the events of its recent past or by the depravity of some of its more infamous inhabitants, but by its entire history and all of the people who have ever lived there, be they ordinary or incredible.

I mean, where else but Gotham City can you go to a nightclub which not only has a wild party every night, but which for the longest time was owned and operated by a short, fat, ugly version of Lex Luthor who absolutely reveled in his status as a semi-retired mobster and supervillain? I refer, of course, to the late Oswald Chesterfield "the Penguin" Cobblepot, who ran the Iceberg Lounge in Tricorner for a good twenty-five years before succumbing to lung cancer.

I remember sitting across a table from him, accompanied only by my cameraman and a producer, in a VIP suite overflowing with dry ice and almost vibrating from the blaring dance music thundering up from downstairs. Old Oz, with a pretty girl on each arm and two very big men at his shoulders, regaled me about a tale from "the old days." He was leading a band of gun-toting toughs to relieve the Gotham City Zoo of its exotic bird population, when Batman and Robin intervened. There, the Penguin got into a duel with the latter. Penguin wielded a steel-weighted umbrella, and Robin an antique throwing spear on display in the African Wildlife exhibit. Just when he was about to bash the Boy Wonder's skull in, the Batman, who had been occupied with the aforementioned toughs, grabbed Oz in a half-nelson before throwing him into a nearby information kiosk.

With a twinkle in his eye, graced by pince-nez spectacles, he threw back a shot of vodka and let out a loud belch, before saying, "Oh, to be fifty-five again!"

It's not just Gotham's nightlife that attracts new residents to the city. It is also home to Amusement Mile, a long, coastal area filled with museums, amusement parks, marinas, bars, and restaurants that has gone through periods of decline, fall, and rise again along with the rest of the city. The area's local community association has turned the Mile's former status as a dilapidated home for various supervillain hideouts into an asset. They have set up a tour where gawkers can see things such as the actual room where Harleen "Harley Quinn" Quinzel almost succeeded in killing the Batman, complete with a recreation of the pool of piranhas over which the Caped Crusader was dangled upside down.

And then there's Robinson Park, where yet another supervillainess, the late Pamela "Poison Ivy" Isley, showed a glimmer humanity when she risked her life to harbor several dozen orphaned children during No Man's Land, leading to a dramatic stand-off between her and the police when she refused to turn the children over to the authorities after NML ended. It was almost a year before the city's Parks and Recreation department could get the park in usable condition again, and another two years before people stopped going out of their way to avoid it.

Today, however, a large plaque honoring Dr. Pamela Isley (note that I said "Dr. Pamela Isley," not "Poison Ivy") has been set up there at the behest of the now grown-up children whom she saved from certain death, with the support of hundreds more after the Queen of the Green sacrificed her life to stop a bioweapon unleashed on the Narrows by Jonathan "the Scarecrow" Crane in 2021. A statue of the late Dr. Isley now stands in that neighborhood. Her zeal, if not her methods, have since become an inspiration to preservationists and humanitarians across the world. Robinson Park is now outfitted with several lovely plant displays, courtesy of the Thomas and Martha Wayne Foundation, and continues to attract thousands of tourists a year.

The point of all this discussion of Gotham City's tourist attractions is that there's more to what defines that circus of a town than body counts and graffiti. Granted, such things were critical elements of its overall character for a long period of time. The senseless murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne was merely a catalyst for a long period of regression and rot that festered for nearly three decades.

Alexander Knox, Vicki's colleague at The Gotham Gazette, who moved to Opal City following the earthquake which precipitated No Man's Land, correctly stated in one column that this decline was only stopped thanks to what he called "the Grey Trinity." If not for Police Commissioner Jim Gordon, Kane County District Attorney Harvey Dent, and the Batman, the city would certainly have gone the way of Hub City, Detroit, and San Francisco. And indeed, things were very, very bad in those years, even after the Bat arrived on the scene.

Hundreds of other people were caught in the middle of the since-ended war between the Batman and the city's criminal element. How can I not mention the crippling of Barbara Gordon, daughter of Commissioner Jim, after a bullet from the Joker shattered her spine? How can I gloss over the victims of the Scarecrow, Jervis "the Mad Hatter" Tetch, and Victor Zsasz? How can I overlook the destruction and mayhem orchestrated by such criminal masterminds as Bane, Roman "Black Mask" Sionis, and Harvey "Two-Face" Dent, the last of these a great hero gone bad thanks to a final act of malice from the Maroni crime family?

The short answer is that I can't ignore these terrible things. I won't try to. But I can take them in context.

Simon Lippman, another reporter and columnist from The Gotham Gazette, once wrote that the majority of Gotham City's residents, whether they reside in the East End or Bristol, Tricorner or Cape Carmine, Burnside or the Hill, don't and didn't think very much about these bits of trouble, not even when these troubles reached their peak. When this sort of thing was a problem, they were not often concerned with, nor were they often affected by, the antics of a few dozen colorful malefactors who devoted their energies to executing equally colorful criminal schemes.

Why, then?

It is because only about five-hundred Gothamites, out of a total population of 3 million, over a period of thirty-plus years, were actually caught up in these stupefying events, which more-often-than-not were only meant to draw the attention of the Bat. As one colleague of mine once said, "Batman is a lightning rod for psychotics. And we all know what happens to buildings without lightning rods."

The events of Knightfall, the Contagion, No Man's Land, War Games, the Battle for the Cowl, the Judgment on Gotham, and even the Night of the Owls were, admittedly, of a much greater magnitude than the repeated incidents involving Batman and Gotham's supervillain population. But for the most part, their origins were almost totally disassociated with these actors (Contagion, No Man's Land) or were brief flashes-in-the-pan (The Battle for the Cowl, Night of the Owls) which held the interest of Gothamites and the media-consuming public at large for a relatively short time before they ended, were subjected to brief analysis, and then quickly forgotten. At the risk of exhibiting poor taste in metaphors, one used to see this pattern replicated every time a school shooting made the news.

As Dr. Cohen writes in this book, Gotham City is not defined by the relatively short period of time where it was marked by spurts of chaos and the activity of costumed figures both malicious and heroic. It is defined by regular, everyday Gothamites who have walked in the shadows of gods and heroes and have retained their courage and humanity. Whether those times have been peaceful, frightening, or triumphant, Gotham's rising and falling fortunes have never completely stamped out the overall spirit of either the city or its people.

And those people are a huge part of what makes the city great.

The people of Gotham City, very much like its most famous citizens, have the capacity to turn themselves into either the greatest of heroes or the lowest of fiends. The average, unobtrusive man does not last long in Gotham, at least not outside of the suburbs, and perhaps not even there.

As a midwestern Methodist who reads her Bible and goes to church every week, I am the sort of person who firmly believes in the tragic vision of humanity. I believe that people are inherently inclined to do evil if they are not disciplined to be good. Vicki, a lapsed Catholic who generally disagrees with me on everything except journalism, the Batman, and Gotham City, allows me this one point when we talk.

She, even more than me, has had a front row seat to some of the worst that this world's peculiar brand of civilization has to offer in terms of evil and vice. For her to refuse to acknowledge this tragic vision in the face of everything she's seen would violate the strongest element which every good reporter must hold in his or her heart-of-hearts: Honesty.

But here's the thing about that tragic vision when applied to Gotham City. When good people come to Gotham, they tend to get better. When bad people come to Gotham, they tend to get worse.

But average, ordinary, unobtrusive people? The same people whom I just said wouldn't last long if they didn't stick to lily-white suburbs like Gotham Heights and Mount Drexel? Those people?

Those people have a choice.

They can either give in to the reality of the tragic vision and sink into the depths of evil, or they can find the spark of goodness and decency that can be detected in every human soul if you look for it hard enough, and then throw some gasoline on that spark.

In Gotham City, anyone can become a hero. Anyone can become a villain. But nobody can stay there for very long and remain in-between. They'll have to leave eventually. I've seen people try to subvert this principle. I tried. Vicki tried. But we both failed.

And, quite obviously, that is a very good thing.

It would be the height of pompous grandstanding to say that I became a hero. Vicki? She's a hero. I didn't stay in Gotham City. Three years after the Batman's last patrol, before the grand restoration of the city under both him and Mayor Dick Grayson, I was mugged on my way home from a Jitters in what was supposed to be a gentrified, cleaned-up Burnley. My purse was stolen and my nose was broken in the incident, I having not carried pepper-spray on my person since two years after the Battle for the Cowl. That was the straw that broke this camel's back.

I have now returned to live in my hometown with my husband and four children. He's an accountant and I teach a journalism class at a local community college. I've written a few books and take the occasional speaking engagement, those books and speeches having helped pay for our kids' college. Those kids are all doing well. I'm ordinary, average, normal. But not a hero.

This is not to decry ordinary, average, everyday Joes and Janes. There's plenty of those in Gotham City, and I think the city is more accommodating to such persons than it perhaps ever has been. And it's okay to be average. It's okay to be normal, as normal as anyone can be in any context. It's just very hard to stay that way in Gotham City. It's hard to avoid becoming either a hero or a villain.

But the heroic people whom Gotham considers ordinary are in fact champions worthy of the Justice Society of America. They're just heroic in ways that go unnoticed.

Perhaps it's the Big Belly Burger assistant manager who gives free coffee to the homeless vagrants who frequent her store. Or maybe it's the retired Navy veteran who volunteers as a basketball coach at a Neon Knights center serving at-risk kids. You might run into an accountant like my husband who donates his time to balancing the books for his local parish. I even once interviewed a motorcycle club manager, an ex-con, who went door-to-door to raise money to help restore a historic church in need of major repair. The Wayne Foundation eventually took up the cause, and now the church is a thriving religious center in Park Row.

That's what makes Gotham unique. Even its most ordinary citizens are in fact courageous heroes or despicable villains. And by the grace of God, there are now, and probably always have been, more of the former than of the latter. Because for every Arthur Reeves or Judson Pierce, there's ten Leslie Thompkinses or Marcus Drivers.

Vicki Vale is one of those ordinary Gothamites who can be rightly called a heroine. She still lives in Gotham City, and is still going strong as an Editor-At-Large for the Gazette. She will freely admit to anyone that she can be catty, self-centered, and obstinate, flaws which have been dulled with age.

But anyone who knows her would have to be an absolute dolt not to see that she is also courageous, industrious, kind, loyal, and above all, honest. These traits are only compounded within her every day. In a way, she's very much like the Batman, or Bruce Wayne, or whatever you might like to call the prodigious individual who has broken the hearts of many while also breaking the back of evil in our time.

But Vicki didn't start that way. Gotham City made her that way, and it helped that she was born in Gotham. People who were born there (and, like those who inhabit New York, they are relatively few in number) tend to become the greatest of its heroes and villains.

That's what makes Gotham unique. It is a machine that takes raw human beings, and shapes, welds, and hammers them into something new. And whatever comes out of that great, black-grey engine is always a bigger, more extreme version of what it would have been if that same raw humanity had never been consumed by it.

Dr. Cohen has given me the honor of writing the foreword of this book, which describes how that machine came to be. He is a valued colleague whom I often had on my old show as a commentator, and I am glad to be personally acquainted with him. The world could use more like him. More like Vicki. More like the Batman.

More like Gotham.

Summer Gleason

Battle Creek, MI

May 2043