Gotham Nights (1995)

A lot of people have asked me why I turn to Gotham City for these kinds of stories - crooks and cops (and crooked cops) rather than vigilantes and capes. I think my primary inspiration was John Ostrander's Gotham Nights miniseries, especially the second one, which was published in 1995.

Ostrander is an important figure in the history of American comics. If I had to describe his stories with one word it would be "humanistic". Ostrander had a clear drive to humanize the larger than life characters that DC Comics created. In the noir world of Gotham City, he found the mystery and thriller elements that were so well established in pop culture they were easy to rely upon.

Here is my memory of the second Gotham Nights miniseries and how it is set up:

A guy owns a run down amusement park. He inherited it from his loving, deceased father, who everyone adored, a pillar of the community, popular with kids, the amusement park hugely successful.

Now it isn't. He is getting squeezed by corrupt city inspectors, criminals, etc., and the crowds just aren't coming. But he can't sell because it's his dad's legacy. He will let his dad down if he does.

The assistant/top operations person at the park is a woman who previously was his dad's young secretary. The guy's in love with her and she's in love with him but they can't get married until the amusement park is successful and he can "make something of her". She doesn't agree with this. She would be fine with just getting in a car with him and driving anywhere, together.

But she knows if that happened his failure would eat him alive. The park and his dad would haunt him forever. So she stays on and fights to help him.

The chief maintenance guy/engineer is a guy who was hired and promoted by the deceased owner. He didn't have any real prospects and the owner believed in him anyway. He loves the park, knows every inch of it, LOVES it and can't understand why the business end isn't working anymore. He resents the new owner for the park's failure and for not (he thinks) returning the love of the lady.

Robin is at the park with his teenaged pals, just having a good (slightly ironic, it is implied) time at the local amusement park.

Someone, we don't know who, sabotages the Ferris wheel and people are in danger. But more than that, the park's in danger and the maintenance guy's the suspect.

We want the owner to succeed.

We want the park to succeed.

We want the love affair to succeed.

We want the maintenance guy and the owner to work through their differences.

We want Robin to have a nice normal teenaged time at the park with his normal teenaged friends.

But the past, and corruption and greed, is just looming over ALL of them, and they'll only all get through if they can connect with each other emotionally.

Gotham Nights is so fucking good. Because with a setup like this, when Batman and Robin have to swing into action to save people, follow crooks, find clues, we want them to solve the mystery, we want them to solve it so badly, because of this triangle of ordinary people at the core of the story. The consequences of the world of crime and betrayal are real and heartbreaking. Ostrander's books are all like this. He has always found the true emotion beneath the heightened characters.

The artist was Mary Mitchell, who grasped the broader nature of the book to provide a world that was full of people, full of color and expression. Between Mitchell and Ostrander you believed every person you saw in every crowd scene was dealing with their own struggles, their own drama, heightened, of course, in that comic book way.

This is what I wanted for my RPG campaigns. And Ostrander's work convinced me that broader settings like Gotham City could be valuable. There'd been a lot of shitty Batman comics before Ostrander came along and there were plenty of shitty Batman comics after he made Gotham Nights such a masterpiece. But we believed Batman and Robin were heroes in Gotham Nights because we saw what they cared about and we cared about it too.

This is how I got inspired to make these games. I wanted to make the heightened comic book version of thrillers and noir come alive for the players. Gotham City was my way in.