Batman: Digital Justice

This graphic novel by Pepe Moreno is unbelievably relevant to my thesis. This novel was created entirely by using computers: CAD programs, vector illustration, 3-D modelling, text effects, and such paint programs as Image Studio, Studio/8, and Photo Shop. Not only is this graphic novel a product of information technology, this novel is about information technology. Check out the opening lines of the story:

"Gotham Megatropolis.

Sometime into the next century.

Welcome to Future Land! Take a ride on the Progress Express.

Around you is an apparently perfect world - but this is a "Make-believe World" with vengeance, a world with no soul and a heart that beats in binary code. One or zero - God or the Void.

A complex and wired world dominated by a tyrant code, a computer virus from long ago that has become the world's first Digital Dictator.

The only hope is a myth from the past, from a time of legend and superstition, long before the virus plagues.

A new kind of hero, a program of "clean" code and pure memory, a program written by a legendary Crime Fighter....

A Digital Hero, one that can restore digital truth and ....

Digital Justice."

This story is about how a Joker computer virus is controlling Gotham City and the reappearance of Batman and Robin in this futuristic Gotham has initiated Batman's code to defeat the Joker. Even more so than the OMAC project, every page of this story is filled with information technology goodness. Definitely purchase this book as this book will loom large for the 1990 depiction of Batman as well as serving a pivotal role in Batman influencing information technology.

Here is one last series of quotes from the book that are just absolutely classic and really do a nice job of summing up my thesis (use for the Shadow of the Bat section?):

Batman: It's over.

Catwoman: But is it?

Robin: Yeah? Who won? Good or evil? Technology? Humanity? Us - or the machines?

Batman: Mankind won.

Robin: Does that mean we have to take the costumes off? Go back to being....

Catwoman: No. We all still have a lot to do. We've gotten too dependent on technology. It would be too easy to allow the balance to shift back...

Batman: She's right. It's the balance that's important. Matter and soul...man and machine...they're interdependent. They can't exist alone. Humanity needs technology - but it also needs something else...something to believe in ... to trust. Something like the spirit of the Batman.