When asked about the best significant other to pair up with Batman, the first choice I’ve gotten from nearly everyone I talk to is Catwoman.

I understand the symbolic pairing.  His sense of order and her lawlessness.  His grim quest and her indulgent enthusiasms.  Their two avatars complementing each other.  That really works in the comics.  I can totally get on board with them as the two those two people who can’t keep their hands off each other. 

But in every other way, I just don’t feel the pairing at all.  They don’t work except jumping across rooftops flirting with each other.  Whenever they interact in any other way, all I can think about when I see the two of them together is how he’s too good for her while she is, simultaneously, too good for him.

Professionally, he’s too good for her.  He’s a guy who works tirelessly to rid the streets of crime, to look out for the truly helpless, to make sure that no one else has to feel what he felt as a child.  She’s a klepto with some social skills.

But then, at least she has those social skills.  Good god, imagine dating Bruce Wayne even if you knew he was Batman.

“I don’t know Bruce, what do you think the Penguin is up to?”

“Gee, Bruce, that’s okay.  I don’t mind you missing dinner again.  It’s only been sixteen days in a row.”

“Wow.  That’s a picture of a really cute kid.  So how did you get estranged from this one?”

Even aside from all of that, honestly, what a boring, judgmental, withdrawn, sullen, self-righteous, and humorless prick Batman is.  I love him.  I got into comics reading Batman.  But he’s a trial to be around, and I can’t ignore that.

Selina Kyle, on the other hand, has consistently shown, wit, humor, empathy, charm and a joie de vivre that would make her a fantastic date and a great girlfriend.

So while these two are equally weighted and eternally paired in the public consciousness, and while they really do know how to steam up a fight scene, I’ve never been a fan.  You?

We took the plunge and recorded the inaugural 4thletter! Fourcast! this weekend. Esther and I sat down in my apartment and talked about comics for a while, and our gift to you is thirty-four minutes and five seconds of good stuff. I’m not 100% happy with the mix, as there are a few audio peaks spread throughout, but we can work those out as we go along.

We’re looking at a biweekly schedule for now, and bringing in a few surprise guest stars down the line. We also need to rope Gavin into the mix, but that’s a problem for another day.

We begin the first of many Fourcasts with a talk about Batman: Battle for the Cowl, Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance starring the Super Young Team, and what character really hooked us into comics.

If you want to subscribe, hit up the podcast-specific RSS feed or grab the normal one. Tell your friends, give us an iTunes review or three, and drop us some comments. If you want to subscribe on iTunes, click here! If you have suggestions or want to donate some music… drop me an email.

No idea, but Gav told me to do this.

From the ever-classic rap battle.

Rafael Grampa’s Batman & Robin, that is. I found this via Sean Witzke, who found it via Grampa’s flickr.

I dig it.

I’d like to start by thanking everyone for their responses to my post last week about how sexiness is used in the comics industry.

Believe it or not, that post was going to be longer.  I was going to add an extraneous bit about how Batman or the Joker would never be shown in the poses that Harley Quinn or Catwoman were in on the covers of those books, and how that was an example of sexism.

Now I can’t decide whether it is or not.  Not because I think that Batman would be posed the way that Oracle was on any of the covers of her comic, but because the artists, when drawing female characters one way and male characters another, are simply following the rules of society in general.

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I recently saw the solicit for Batman in Barcelona: Dragon’s Knight, the upcoming one-shot from DC.

When a string of bizarre murders hits Spain’s beautiful coastal city of Barcelona, The Dark Knight makes solving this crime his top priority. Full of international intrigue, high adventure and even higher stakes, BATMAN IN BARCELONA: DRAGON’S KNIGHT showcases The Caped Crusader in a different type of Gotham – but one no less dangerous!

Barcelona is like Gotham?  Because Gotham is an urban hellhole, plagued by every kind of crime, disease, corruption, poverty and natural disaster.  Has the Barcelona Tourist Bureau heard about this?

I was recently going over David’s post about DKSA, and his point about how it exorcised some of the grimness and misery that DKR introduced into superhero comics.  While I think that he makes a good point, and one echoed by Miller himself, when he described that in DKSA he was comparing superheroes to the pantheon of Greek gods – with their failings, their enthusiasms, and their various eccentricities.

However, I have to disagree with David.  Not because I don’t think he has correctly interpreted the way DKSA changes the tropes set up in DKR, but because my difficulties with Miller’s Batman aren’t really about his grimness.

David concludes his essay with this:

Where we’ve had paranoid and grim Batman for the past fifteen years, Miller gives us one who’s faking grim but skipping like a schoolboy on the inside. Where we’ve had an utterly miserable Batman who figures out ways to trap his friends, Miller delivers a Batman who believes in the strength of others and trusts his fellow warriors.

DKSA is an exorcism. It takes all of the grim and gritty from DKR and the ensuing years and turns it on its head. It’s a push toward day-glo superheroics and away from miserable heroes. The moral of DKSA is “Superheroes are cool!”

My problem with Miller’s legacy isn’t, primarily, the grimness and misery.  That may sound strange, considering I’ve written essay after essay about my love for the lighter side of comics, and my desire for more comics to embrace fun and imagination over dark storylines.  However, it’s not the misery itself I object to, but the balance between light and dark.  I enjoy some angsty melodrama and some brutal violence as much as the next gal, I just feel like modern comics is stuffing me full of pretzels and not offering me any water, if you know what I mean.  I few more light-hearted stories, comics, or comic lines would be refreshing.

However, it’s not Batman being a miserable and paranoid that bothers me when I’m reading DKR.  It’s Batman being, how shall I put this?  A double-barrelled bastard.  Yes.  I believe that’s the technical term.  Read the rest of this entry �

I am no man. I am Superman.

Frank Miller is kind of famous for being the guy who brought “Batman can beat up Superman” into the modern comics world. The fight in DKR is iconic and a classic, and probably the root of multiple fanboy arguments. Miller revisits the fight at the end of the first chapter of DKSA, where Batman and friends completely outclass, outmaneuver, and outfight Superman. Batman ends the fight with four punches from gigantic green gloves and tells Superman to get out of his cave.

There is contempt there, but I don’t know if that’s the right word for it. At one point, Batman says, “Look. Up in the sky. Gosh, we’re all impressed, down here.”

Batman, and possibly Miller’s, contempt for Superman is born out of expecting a lot out of the character. Superman is the most powerful being on Earth, but he spends his time fighting cackling supervillains and upholding the status quo.

Batman’s point of view, and one that Spider-Man shares, is that if you have power, you have no excuse not to use it. Superman has great power, and therefore great responsibility. He can fix the world, fight the real villains, and he’s made himself into a tool of the status quo. For Batman, that’s inexcusable. A man who can is a man who must.

In a sense, DKSA is about Superman growing up and finally coming into his own. The first of two key Superman moments comes toward the end of chapter two, after Supergirl has revealed herself and decimated Brainiac’s robot. He starts with an anecdote about being a child and trails off. “Lara. What sort of world have I given you?”
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There were a few comics that hooked me when I was getting back into comics in 2003. Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates, Frank Miller’s Daredevil Visionaries Vol. 2, and, probably more than anything else, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again. The first three are generally well-regarded. They gave all involved a higher profile, tilted the direction of established characters permanently (when’s the last time you saw a not-depressing Daredevil story?), and left their marks on the comics industry.

And then there’s DKSA.

I came to DKSA backwards. I’d read Sin City, 300, and some of Miller’s miscellaneous Dark Horse work over the years, but I hadn’t touched his Batman work. Year One and Dark Knight Returns were just phrases I’d seen on book jackets, rather than works I’d actually read. I had the benefit of not coming into DKSA with 15 years of expectations for “Dark Knight Returns 2,” and found a book that I enjoyed greatly.

I’m sure you have already heard what DKSA gets wrong ad nauseum. Instead of that, I want to talk about what DKSA gets right. I think that it’s a deeply flawed work, but one which delivers plenty to talk about. It’s fascinating to me how much it gets right, despite being a dervish that’s attempting to hit seven or eight points at once. I don’t think that Frank Miller has gone half as crazy as people think he has, but I do believe that he looks at what bad writers made of the legacy of DKR (and Watchmen) and feels at least partially responsible. DKSA is, at least in part, Miller exorcising those demons and showing another direction things could have gone in.

You can even see it in the surface-level visual look of the book. DKR was fairly subdued and realistic. DKSA is garish, cartoony, and loud. There’s something even in its approach to comics that’s a violent reaction to the past. If you look at the book, it doesn’t look like your average superhero book, either. Frank Miller is playing in the same wheelhouse as Humberto Ramos, with the big foot style and perspective playing a large role in the storytelling. So, what is Miller trying to say or do, besides give older fans narrative whiplash?

For the record, any images or text is from DKSA or the Miller x TCJ interview I transcribed the other day.
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Article by Fletcher “Syrg” Arnett.

Note this classy cover by Greg Horn. We’ll be covering those in the next update, don’t you worry. But when we last left Marville…

Ah yes. I also forgot to mention there is no love plot. There is no pining or anything. I don’t know why the hell they added that to the blurb, probably because almost nothing from the first issue is going to carry over into this one and they needed to fill space. Also space-filler: the Kingpin blurb, but we’ll get to that.

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