The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 487: Batman and Robin #6, January 2010

I'm not a fan of Philip Tan's art, I'm afraid. This is not to say that he's not a good artist. He's certainly a far better artist than I'll ever be. But over the last three issues, I've found myself having to go back and re-read bits of the comics to try and figure out what was happening in each panel, and how one moves into the other. While the story, as I suggested yesterday, is taking a considered look at the grim Batman of the 1980s, Tan's art seems to be calling back to the early 90s, and the rapid-fire and not always coherent art of the Image founders. Now, to be fair, a lot of this issue (which consists pretty much of one long fight sequence) takes place at night, so of course it's going to be dark. But that shouldn't necessarily make what's happening unclear, just a bit shadowed. I'm sure I've seen his art elsewhere, but I can't off the top of my head think of a particular example, and maybe it was just this comic. Certain artists and writers work well together, and certain artists and writers are better suited to particular types of stories. I'm not sure this story was suited to Tan's particular talents.

I'm glad to see the end of this story. I've been pretty effusive with my praise of this extended Batman run, but this story leaves me cold. While I can see the various stories as meditations on the history of the character, I'm inclined to think that these meditations work best when they are utilizing new elements, rather than retreading older ones from the very eras they're considering. The first story arc, looking to the bombasticness of 60s Batman, used characters resonant of that era, but not from that era. This arc, considering the darkness of 80s Batman, could have told the same story without resorting to the use of Jason Todd. There's a difference between retreading history and repeating it.

Tomorrow we'll start on the "Blackest Knight" arc, which features one of my absolute favourite creations from this era of the DCU, Kate Kane, the Batwoman. While Dick and Damian were featured in Batman and Robin, Kate was briefly given the starring role in Detective Comics, and it's a really beautiful run. I'm sure I'll get to it one of these days.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 486: Batman and Robin #5, December 2009

Can I make a confession?

This particular story arc is not my favourite of the Morrison-era Batman. As I noted yesterday, it's calling back to the Grim'n'Gritty(TM) era of the DCU, and it's an era that I really don't have a lot of patience for. I give the same look to people who try to put some reality into superheroes as I do to people who try to put reality in Shakespeare's plays, or into Biblical narratives. The point of the characters is not reality - at least, not our lived reality. They belong to the Platonic world of forms, the archetypal reality, the place where everything is bigger and louder and better and faster. They need to function in a place of myth.

I know. I'm starting to sound like a broken record. But if there's one thing that Morrison accomplishes in this run, a thing that sadly seems to have been forgotten after his run, it's that Batman deserves his place in the DCU trinity precisely because he is this kind of archetypal character.

Anyway, Batman and Robin have fights with Red Hood and Scarlet. At one point Batman accuses Red Hood of speaking in catchphrases, as good a description of Miller's Dark Knight dialogue as I've ever heard. And The Flamingo, an assassin with a penchant for skinning and eating his victims' faces comes to town. Perhaps the best way for me to think through this series, at least right now, is that it's Dick Grayson's movement through all of the eras of the Bruce Wayne Batman, that he needs to move through the history before he can fully take on the role himself. It's interesting looked at from this perspective, especially in light of the Return of Bruce Wayne series, which envisions a series of Batmen throughout the history of the United States. Movements through histories. Maybe that'll be the subtitle of my eventual book on Morrison's Batman.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 485: Batman and Robin #4, November 2009

In case you hadn't gleaned it from that yellow writing plastered against the cover, the current story arc in Batman and Robin, "The Revenge of the Red Hood," is all about the propensity in the 80s and 90s to have comics "grow up." Consider that the Red Hood's associate in this arc is a red-headed young lady, rescued from the depths of crime by a brutal crimefighter. Shades of Dark Knight, anyone? What this story arc offers us is the question of whether or not growing up necessarily has to mean becoming more brutal. As someone who has, at the very least, gotten older, I've never felt that propensity toward extremity in my social interactions (just in my personal ones, really). I do see it occasionally in people I know, the movement toward a more black and white world view, toward a conservatism that I find quite disturbing. But the other side of the argument is that growing up should be a broadening, a lessening of brutality and a widening of compassion. While there's definitely arguments to be made about the role that vengeance or punishment play in Batman's identity, this presupposes a focus on the perpetrator of crimes, rather than the victims. And, more often than not, the perpetrators themselves are also victims. Batman is, as are the best of the superheroes, about helping victims rather than punishing perpetrators. And this is the difference, in this story, between Batman and Robin, and Red Hood and Scarlet, the difference between a mission that grows from love and one that grows from anger.

And, as usual, Morrison (aided by Philip Tan) gives us a wonderful meditation on this aspect of the superhero.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 10 - Final Crisis: Revelations, 2009

In laying out my lineage of the link between religious writings and comics, the utilization of words and pictures to communicate sacred stories, I touched briefly on the remarkable creation by Greg Rucka in the late 2000s DCU of the "Crime Bible." I've the inklings of a paper on it in my head, but that's not what I'll get into here.

There were numerous mini-series that comprised the "Final Crisis" event, and at the time it seemed to me that they were actually completely separate stories, all culminations of a sort, that were conveniently grouped under a single event banner. I'm still mostly convinced that that was the case. But FC:Revelations at least meshes this climactic confrontation between The Question and the Religion of Crime quite nicely with the events of the greater crossover. Having not read the Legion of Superheroes tie-in, or the Flash Rogues tie-in, I don't know how much they bring to the larger tale, but Revelations brings a more street-level view of the ascension of Darkseid to the DCU. That might be a strange thing to say about a comic that features both God's spirits of Wrath and Mercy, but our focal character of Renee Montoya keeps things nicely grounded. And the story also shows that while the (New) gods may move in mysterious and abstract ways, their presences are more viscerally demonstrated by the mortals whose lives they touch. We do not talk to our gods, but only to the texts through which they ostensibly communicate with us, and Rucka's tale of the Crime Bible across a number of years explores this notion quite beautifully.

I will note that I'm not a big fan of Philip Tan's art in this series, or at least of one particular aspect: every prominent female character had D-cup breasts. I'm seriously not sure how the Question manages to stay upright. Batwoman, who in most other depictions I've seen is illustrated as lithe and athletic, here falls into the voluptuous (at least chest-wise) cliche of superheroines. Even the brief flashes of Supergirl late in the story show her with some breasts of Power Girl-stature. Now, this is certainly not to say that there are not, in the DCU as in reality, women who have chests this large, nor is this in any way a denigration of those who do possess such breasts. But the proliferation of them in this graphic novel took me right out of the story every time they were there. Like Batwoman, Montoya is usually depicted as being a relatively slight and athletic character. To suddenly see these volleyball-sized protuberances on her was completely off-putting. Aside from this, Tan's art was nicely evocative of the end of the world aesthetic of Gotham in the days of anti-life.

As Final Crisis #3 skipped over, with the Flashes, the initial wave of anti-life, it's nice to see it filled in in this story, and to see that the Crisis isn't simply a battle of gods, New, old, and superheroic, but also a tale of people dealing with a world that is ending.