Year One: Batman/Scarecrow #1-2

Year One: Batman/Scarecrow #1-2

Originally released in 2005

Written by Bruce Jones

Art by Sean Murphy

As we get closer and closer to Halloween, I feel like I should take a day to focus on a character who's arguably DC's best-known bringer of fear, Jonathan Crane, better known as Scarecrow.  This series focuses on his backstory, primarily the trauma that he suffered from being raised by his abusive great-grandmother, who makes her opinion on him and his situation in the family known before he's even born.

This two issue story takes place early on in Batman's career, as the title indicates, and it's a reimagining of Batman's first encounter with Crane.  The fact that the Scarecrow dresses up in a garish costume and spreads fear through Gotham at night doesn't sit well with Bruce, as he considers himself and this new villain more alike than he'd care to think about.  Robin considers this to be nonsense.

Crane's first encounter with Batman sees him as a thug for hire, but he's also in Gotham on a mission of revenge against people who wronged or abandoned him, like his mentor (a professor who didn't stand up for him when he was fired for bringing a gun into a lecture and firing it to make a point about fear) or his grandmother (who left the family farm on Georgia, leaving him in the "tender" care of his great-grandmother who would make crows attack him for her own amusement).

Speaking of which, the Keeny family mansion in Georgia (Keeny being Scarecrow's mother's maiden name) is a focal point of Crane's flashbacks, and it's haunting in its own way.  A gutted rotting corpse of a mansion, it's a symbol of the former glory that Crane's family had and how far they've fallen.

After analyzing a piece of straw that Scarecrow uses as a calling card, Batman and Robin travel to that mansion, where they discover that his name is Jonathan Crane. Unfortunately, there are seventeen Jonathan Cranes in Gotham alone, which makes me feel bad for the other sixteen.

During a fight with Scarecrow to save the father who abandoned Crane at birth, Robin is dosed with fear gas, causing him to hallucinate that both Scarecrow and Batman are Batman. In the confusion, Scarecrow gets away, but Robin's fear gives Batman plenty of cause for concern.

Scarecrow's next target is his mother, who has since remarried to an abusive drunk. Batman gets his own dosage of the fear gas, and the manifestation of his fears is understandable given his backstory.

The conclusion has Batman beating Scarecrow at his own game, using a DNA sample from a scrap of Scarecrow's costume to modify a fear gas sample to tailor it to Scarecrow specifically.  It's a bit of an unsettling conclusion - it demonstrates Batman's chemistry knowledge, but it also shows a willingness to fight fire with fire and use the methods of a psychotic supervillain. It throws into question Batman's goals of thinking like a criminal in order to catch a criminal.

While this story is only two issues, each issue is about forty or fifty pages long, so there's a decent amount of content here. Scarecrow's backstory is creepy at times, though some of it felt like the sort of thing I'd seen a hundred times before. If they just left it with the abusive great grandmother, that would be fine, but piling the rest of his family issues on top of that felt like a bit much.