Read today - will blog tomorrow - things are a bit busy this Saturday!
(What I should admit is that the busy Saturday was taken up by garage saling and playing Dungeons & Dragons for 8 hours. #geeklife)
A few weeks (months?) ago, I did some themed weeks, on War comics, Romance comics, etc. I still have a stack sitting, waiting to be read, of Western comics. It's a genre I'm not a huge fan of. Much like my distaste for Mob media, I can't really wrap my head around a genre of entertainment that hinges on the wholesale, unnecessary killing of other human beings. It's one of the reasons I like the superheroes that I do: one of the main credos of all of my favourites is to never take a life. Hence my disappointment with Man of Steel.
So even in this issue, set in old(e) Gotham, a frontier town, somehow, even though I'm pretty sure Gotham's supposed to be on the East coast, while Bruce is playing Wild West detective, he refrains from the use of firearms, relying instead on his customary Batarangs. (Let's not ask where they came from. It's a superhero comic). And, especially in the current cultural climate, it's important to note that non-lethal measures can be effective in subduing an opponent.
The other thing that works out quite nicely for this comic is that I read it on the opening weekend of the Calgary Stampede. It's an odd time in the city, a Wild West bacchanalia of sorts, but if you can turn a blind(ish) eye to the obnoxious drunkenness, it's a cool, and kind of unique (at least in Canada) way of celebrating a part of our heritage. Whether or not it's a part that should be celebrated is a question I'll leave to somewhere other than a comics blog.
Onward!
No comments:
Post a Comment