Comics Out July 25, 2007 (The Week Late Review)

[Last week was an awesome week to go to the comic book store, but I only got these yesterday, because I was in Oxford and found out that the only comic book store in town closed. Oxford University is amazing but Oxford the town is not great. Case in point: A University town that cannot keep a single comic book store in business. Ridiculous. Anyway I wanted to do bullet point reviews of last week comics.]

Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert's Batman #666. Last week in free form comments James wrote:

"Geoff is right. Once again, Morrison puts himself up against Miller's Batman, with a tale of an uncompromising, ultra-violent Batman of the future. We seem to be back in New X-Men territory here, with Morrison admitting defeat in the face of what can't be changed/escaped. Morrison's fun, "bare-chested love-god" Batman has literally fathered a violent, anti-heroic Batman of the future (see: The Dark Knight Returns), exactly what Morrison wanted to get away from. Furthermore, the only way Morrison's Batman can defeat the last of the dark, violent, impostor Batmen* and gain primacy/immortality is to sell his soul to the Devil (Miller). Try as he might, Morrison couldn't replace Miller, and it is Miller's Batman that has assimilated Morrison's, and not the other way around. The silver-lining here, is that (hopefully) Morrison can now concentrate on doing his own thing, and stop worrying about Miller. J. H. Williams III and The Batmen Of All Nations seems like a perfect opportunity to do just that.

*I quite liked that just as the last one was a version of Bane, this next one was a version of the Azrael-Batman, with his orange face-plate and flamethrower."

It is freaky how much James is on my wavelength here. He has said all I would have said, exactly. I would also add that the Yeats quote is lame, and reminds me of Morrison's bad use of Milton in Batman: Gothic. (It may serve only to call up that book as another alternate Batman).

Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo's Hellboy: Darkness Calls #4. There is a great moment in which a guy catches his own severed head a split second before it hits the ground and a perfect weird little girl character in this issue, one of the best I have seen. But her speech about her story exemplifies what bothers me about Hellboy -- chunks of Mignola's research just sit on the page, undigested, and Hellboy just sort of walks around it, doing very little. The art is great though, and keeps me hooked.

Joss Whedon and Paul Lee's Buffy the Vampire Slayer #5. The art is not perfect, and there are moments that do not quite work (the out of control truck), but I thought this issue was very moving, and also dialed down Whedon's silliness, which in three running comics now is getting to be a little much, even for me. Newsarama thought the issue failed to make us care about the main character enough, but I thought the intriguing jarring story structure kept us from quite following everything until the end, at which point it is too late to really know this girl. I thought that was genuinely sad, and well done.

Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker's Immortal Iron Fist #7. I have heard complaints that the narration takes the reader out of the story, that the narration is too dissonant. I disagree. It turns out that the narrator of this issue is a character, but for much of it I just heard Fraction's own voice, the voice of his blog. It felt a bit like a Mystery Science Theater experience; I imagine this is what Fraction sounds like if you were to watch a serious kung-fu movie on his couch with him. "She beats people up. For money!" This is a different kind of harmony, and it is also different from Joss Whedon's ironies, which is nice.

Frank Miller and Jim Lee's All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder #6. I love this book: everyone is right about what is wrong with it but it all works on another level, as I have argued (hit the Frank Miller link below to see what I said). In this issue Miller continues to do ABSURD things with story structure, warping it sideways. I double dog dare you to read Jack Kirby's introduction of the Black Racer in New Gods and tell me that Frank Miller is doing something fundamentally different in his use of Black Canary or the introduction of Batgirl. In both the story is absurdly interrupted by some new character the writer felt like introducing. Goddam Batman became an Internet catch phrase for how absurd this book is, so what did Frank Miller do? -- he used it twice in one issue. Blake said it best: Exuberance is Beauty.

Mike Carey and Humberto Ramos's X-Men #201. Humberto Ramos does not suck, but he is not the artist for me. I had to order this without seeing it, and did not know Bachalo would not be drawing it.

Comics Out May 16 2007

Frank Miller and Jim Lee's All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder #5.

I just finished my revision of an essay for a BenBella book on Batman that argues that Miller's All Star Batman is brilliant. You can read how I got from hating the first three issues to loving the series by clicking on the Frank Miller tab at the bottom of this post (which will also bring up me on Miller's Spawn/Batman and DKSA). This issue continues in the vein I described in that post: insane, but fun if you can see it at the right angle. If you can learn to love the absurd first line of dialogue in this issue, as I love it, you can learn to love Miller's All Star Batman. Go with the crazy. Live in the crazy. Trust Frank Miller's crazy. And leave gender politics at the door, cause Miller learned his from Micky Spilane.

Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's Ultimates #13. Gatefold insanity. This series wrapped up a lot like the last one -- a few issues ago I lost interest, having seen it before. They go for big, but the gatefold is the only thing that stays with me, and even that is just a gimmick.

Brad Meltzer and Ed Benes Justice League of America #9. Monkeys riding on dinosaurs. Awesome. An an allusion from the visitors from the 31st century to having just arrived after the "Middle Crisis" is audacious, and I admire audacity. Red Arrow has a nice moment standing in for the audience, who expect the inevitable conflict, and in the last page, we get what I think is a nice swerve from expectations. But basically I do not know who these people are. The bad guys are revealed in such a way that I am supposed to recognize who they are but I don't. I could not figure out what happened with the girl with the wings -- she had them? or didn't? and then it turned out to be someone else maybe? and then the real one showed up? or something? I don't know who they are saving. It is sort of fun -- I feel like I did when I first got into comics and had no idea who anyone was, but I could use some footnotes or a who's who.

Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert's Batman #665. Morrison continues to invoke the (almost literally) ghosts of Batmen past -- Miller's Batman being the main antagonist (the hookers are out of Sin City). Morrison is trying to demonstrate that his Batman is the one true Batman. It ain't really workin.

Hey, and my comic book store was giving away free flash drives with the LuthorCorp logo on them. This is my new flash drive.

Plus: Something big is coming Thursday or Friday. Stay tuned.

Review, recommend, and discuss this weeks comic books and comic book news.

Frank Miller's Batman-Spawn Crossover

As a side note to my discussion of Frank Miller's double reinvention of Bamtan in the 1980s and in the new century, I want to say a quick word about his Batman-Spawn crossover. (Joglikescomics has a pretty good discussion of the thing if you want to check it out). Realizing that there are two squarely defined Miller Batman periods -- the hyper-masculine Batman of the 1980s and the grotesque Batman of this decade -- I now finally get how his 1994 Spawn/Batman crossover fits into his artistic development. I always considered it a fluke. Now I see that it is the transition between the 80s Batman and the present one (it falls right in the middle of the timeline); and what better way to work on making Batman grotesque than with one of the artists famous for drawing grotesque out-of-proportion bodies, Todd McFarlane. McFarlane's cartoon loony-ness heads straight into DKSA. The little green note on the inside cover makes sense after all: "Spawn vs. Batman is a companion piece to DC Comics The Dark Knight Returns. It does not represent current DC continuity." If my comparing Miller's All Star Batman story to Jack Kirby's art seems superfluous -- Spawn/Batman is dedicated to Jack Kirby who died the year it came out; there is a full page picture of him on the inside cover. The ghost of Kirby hovers over the whole thing.

Frank Miller's All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder and the Grotesque

Thanks in part to Ping33, who has been commenting here, I have tried, yet again, to try to like Frank Miller's All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder. With the fourth issue, I finally succeeded.

As I discussed in an earlier post on Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Frank Miller has joined a handful of American writers -- like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor -- that go for the grotesque. I like Miller's absurd art in DKSA, in which, for example, Lex Luthor has huge hands as big as his torso, like a cartoon ape. He is monstrous and so he is drawn like a monster. Dark Knight Strikes Again looks weird and wild, stylish and unique, and these are good things. Batman must be invented again and again, and we should applaud bravery in this arena, and condemn unimaginative stuff like Batman Begins.

All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, written by Frank Miller but drawn by Jim Lee, has a story to match Miller's art in Dark Knight Strikes Again. Everything in the story is grossly out of proportion, like Lex Luthor's gigantic hands. And that's really wild, and a good thing.

The first issue has five full pages -- nearly twenty five per cent of the comic -- in which Vicki Vale dances around in bra and panties. It is the storytelling equivalent of drawing a woman with huge out-of-proportion breasts (a drawing style Jim Lee has some experience with): the time devoted to her is as out of proportion as Miller's women usually appear visually.

Exacerbated by the slow publishing of All Star Batman Robin has been in the car with Batman for 11 months of my life. And don't think it's just a publishing issue: even monthly, four issues is a long time to keep your two title characters in a car. Miller intended this. Drawing attention to the gap, Batman has grown stubble between issue one and two, though surely very little time has passed. That's how much of a man he is. Hilarious. Miller's jacks up his already famously hyper-masculine characters.

Look at the proportions of issue three: the first 15 pages are dedicated to the Black Canary, an aside that violently interrupts the Batman-meets-Robin story with fish-net stockings and nonsense; the book ends with two pages about Superman; in between we get a full page shot of the Batmobile, a full page shot of Batman and Robin in the Batmobile, and a two page splash image of the Batmobile underwater. (The advanced tech of the Batmobile is also intentionally out of whack with Miller's "Year Two" framework). Those three images, which have minimal dialogue, hardly advance the story at all even though they are the only images that star the title characters. It is even more audacious to do this only three issues in.

The hilarious greatness of all this hit me when I saw, in the fourth issue, the six page glamour shot of the Batcave, followed by one more single page glamour shot of the same thing: in a 22 page comic book these pages -- two images of the same thing -- take up nearly a third of the book. Even the title, eight words long, is, like Lex Luthor's hands, completely out of proportion. It's hilarious. (But notice the continuity with Dark Knight Strikes Again: The cave is making the robot T-Rex that Batman will use to attack Superman in that book.)

The writing is not just repetitive, its absurdly repetitive. To quote from the first issue (copying the book's repetitions rather than repeating myself), Robin says "They're always there for me. They always catch me. Mom and dad. They always catch me. They're always there for me. They're always there for me." The identical sound of "They're" and "there" makes it much worse; this is intentional. In the next scene Vicki Vale says "I'm having a date with Bruce Wayne. I'm having a date with Bruce Wayne. I'm having a date with Bruce Wayne. I'm having a date with Bruce Wayne. How cool is that? I'm having a date with Bruce Wayne. How cool is that?" Cut back to Robin: "They're always there for me. They always catch me." Cut to Vale: "I'm having a date with Bruce Wayne. Hot Damn." Miller wrote those words on paper before they were put in word balloons in the comic books. Try typing them out on Word, as I just did, and you will see that no one can write like that and intend it to be taken seriously. Miller knows what he is doing (which should not surprise anyone who has read Dark Knight Returns).

Complaining about the weird proportions of, say, issue three, or the dialogue, I realized, is like complaining about the weird proportions of the eyes of anime characters, or how ugly Rugrats looks. Miller is developing a new kind of story here, one to match the grotesque proportions so many superhero characters are drawn with, one to match his own visual weirdness in DKSA. Jack Kirby's weird art style leads right here, to Miller's weird story style.

Frank Miller. Batman. The Grotesque. I get it now. Batman has been done to death, even by Miller himself. So this is the next step. Absurdity. Great superhero creators reinvent the genre. Frank Miller reinvents the genre TWICE.

Frank Miller's Dark Knight Strikes Again and the Grotesque

Frank Miller's 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns defined the Batman forever. In 2002 Miller wrote and drew the sequel, Dark Knight Strikes Again, which got a lot of mixed press. The 1986 book certainly had elements of parodic art, but the overall tone was serious and operatic; the sequel dangerously veers between, and combines, the sublime and the ridiculous. I think the result is fairly brilliant and fun, but I understand why people didn't get it. The art is garish and (intentionally) loose and sloppy; the coloring is insane (but again I think audacious and fantastic), often falling outside the lines in huge swathes of large, pixilated blocks. I want to grab just three moments (and, for now, avoid talking about his recent All Star Batman run, in which he has, at least for the moment, lost me).

Superman and Wonder Woman have sex in the air over seven pages and then fall to earth together, smashing into the ocean and knocking over an aircraft carrier in the process. Miller is a big fan of pulp novels, and though the scope of the pulps is very different, he keeps that overwrought sensibility: where a pulp novelist would have written "and the aircraft carrier was knocked over, the planes falling into the ocean like toys," Miller draws them like little toy planes.
The image is childish because it is the visual equivalent of a cheesy (but lovable) metaphor.

Similarly Lex Luthor is a monster, and so Miller draws him as a hulking ape. He doesn't go for "cool" dark shadows (as Spawn would) because he doesn't want us to be in awe of Luthor, he wants us to fucking hate him.

In the scene at the end of the first issue, Batman beats the crap out of Superman with a pair of Kryptonite gloves; the issue ends with the words "Get out of my cave." The image is grotesque and the colors match as the movement of the gloves is captured by pixilated green swathes, a bold choice by Lynn Varley -- one of the best colorists in the industry along side Laura Martin (nee DePuy) and Jamie Grant. There is an American literary tradition of showing the grotesque, including William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Conner, and we should judge Miller's Batman in this context, and see his portrayal as a good thing. The word "grotesque" comes from "grotto," a cave, because we imagine that cave dwellers, like Tolkiens's Golem, become deformed and weird; it was only a matter of time before Batman, in the Batcave, was shown in the same way.