“Dark Night: A True Batman Story”

“I’m gonna go with my normal policy that applies to someone’s story of personal trauma and leave a star rating off this one because it’s sort of hard to feel like you’re not rating what the person went through.

This memoir addresses something a lot of us struggle with: what’s the point? If I’m a person who writes dumb books (finally something I can speak on with authority!), when something big and serious happens in life, it really knocks you down a notch. It makes what you do feel really pointless.

And that’s where Paul Dini was at: after a personal trauma, it’s like, “What am I doing writing Batman cartoons?”

It’s not like being a builder where you take your kids to a building and you’re like “I built this shit, you ungrateful bastards.” I’m not sure who I’m calling ungrateful, my kids or the people in the building, but whatever.

When you do something silly or frivolous, you have your days where you doubt, well, the entire course of your life.

If I was a doctor, surely I’d have really helped someone by now. Or maybe not a doctor, just like someone who came up with a pretty good workout machine or something.

I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong to have those thoughts. But we’ve all got our levels. I’m not going to save someone’s life with my bullshit, but that was never the goal. It’s more about making someone else’s life suck a little less because THEY aren’t a doctor. They get down, feel like their life is worthless, then maybe get a laugh from something I did.

Doesn’t save their life. But hell, you don’t wanna be a doctor anyway. Those guys are assholes.”