Oh, Batman. Is there no end of your willingness to fight the good fight on behalf of all Americans.
(from batman #02)

Another amazing early Batman short.

(from batman #05)

Thanks to SomethingAwful forums user snackmar for these scans. They’re absolutely nuts. Gavin hooked me up with this Superman page that he described as “one of [his] all-time favorite Superman moments.” It’s from Superman: Sunday Classics from 1941.

I was pleased to see Kevin Smith returning to the DCU, with Batman: Cacaphony. Smith’s style is wordy, distinct, and irreverent, and I look forward to seeing him injecting a little humor into the Batverse. I’m also happy to see that Onomatopoeia, the Green Arrow villain, will be returning. Onomatopoeia has the right set of characteristics for a comics villain; a superhuman set of skills, a recognizable goal, and a quirky gimmick.

The only thing that bothers me about Onomatopoeia is that he fits too well with the villains we see these days; he’s deadly, he’s more out to get the superheroes than to commit crimes that might benefit him personally, and he’s the best, baddest villain ever. Poison Ivy moved from thief and environmental terrorist to random sadist and mass murderer with the powers of Swamp Thing. Two-Face now knows how to spar and goes on random killing sprees. Even Croc manages to do a lot of damage. Damian kills off villains and beats up Robin. Talia manages a national web of terrorists. And Hush – don’t even get me started on Hush.

There seems to be an unfortunate rate of inflation going on in comics. No more talented bank robbers or minor thugs. Everyone has to be the biggest, baddest, darkest, most formidable opponent Batman has ever encountered. It’s not that I don’t understand that it looks a little silly to have Batman go from a life-altering confrontation with the Black Glove one month to chasing down a safe-cracker the next, but it would be nice to see some variation.

I really dig Geoff’s blog. It’s one of my must reads for a variety of reasons. We have similar tastes, except when they are almost polar opposites, he’s a great writer, and he’s smarter than I am. Below is an excerpt from his post about ASBAR #10, which is an overall great read. Scott, one of his co-bloggers (is there a word for that?), absolutely nails a lot of what I like about ASBAR #10. Also, Miller/Lee Barb Gordon rules, from the Miller-style dangly earrings (scope the logos) to the entire demeanor. She’s a teenager.

Now I just need to get back to posting in Geoff’s comments and conversating about all this. I’ve been too busy to do so lately. I’m done with a big project, though, so I can come back with a bang.

Remarkable: Comics Out September 24, 2008 (All Star Batman)

First of all, Miller is acknowledging his own part in what would become the “Grim and Gritty” era of comics while simultaneously ridiculing it by having Gordon dismiss it by calling Batman a ‘Jerk.’ It’s also important to note that Gordon’s assessment of Batman as a ‘Jerk’ is important for how Miller views Batman; he has always felt that Batman should NOT be your buddy. He’s supposed to be scary, he’s not your friend but he’s the first guy you’d want to have your back in a dark alley. This informs so much of the way that Miller has portrayed the character, particularly in this series.

Miller gives us an interesting bit of background on Batman and Catwoman: they knew each other and were romantically involved in their adolescence. Hmmm, two people who share a young romance and grow up to be on opposite sides of the law? Sound familiar to anyone?

Batgirl is back in this issue and I get the feeling that Miller likes her a lot more than Robin and is using her as a sort of Carrie Kelly stand in. I also love that she is the ‘Fucking Batgirl’. I love the contrast of this with ‘The Goddamned Batman”. “Goddamned” is a very adult swear; it is a blasphemy and, as such, it carries weight. “Fucking” is a child’s curse word; it is shocking for the sake of shock and exactly the kind of thing that a rebellious youth would say to rail against the world.

I also like how, later in the issue, Gordon decides not to come down hard on his daughter because, as far as he’s concerned, she’s being hard enough on herself but, just a few issues earlier, you’ll remember that she was boasting about how great she was at bullshitting her dad. She’s playing him like a violin.

I don’t care if this clip is over a year old. I just discovered it and I can’t get enough of it.

It’s been a while, but here’s another bunch of memorable segments from comics past and present altered in the name of comedy and, sometimes, spite. To start, here’s something form the end of What If: Annihilation.

Next up, the Sinestro Corps War ends in a way that legitimately made me kind of sad. What kind of monster am I?

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The Big Three of DC, Wonder Woman, Superman and Batman, have always had a certain status in the DCU. Part of this comes from popularity, although admittedly Wonder Woman’s popularity has been low of late. Part of it comes from longevity. Everyone has memories of them. Most of it, though, comes from their iconic nature.

Superman is the one last hope of a dying race. He is sent to an unknown place where that hope is brilliantly realized, even if the sense of loss remains. He represents every parent’s wish for their child, and the responsibility that every child feels when it makes its way in the world.

Batman is the personification of solitary, relentless obsession.

The well known phrase used to describe Wonder Woman is ‘beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena’ but it sites entirely the wrong goddesses. Artemis is much more appropriate. The perpetual virgin and goddess of the hunt, Artemis was also the protector of newborn animals. This is what Wonder Woman evokes; purity, strength, ferocity, and the defense of the weak.

These three, and their situations, are archetypes that everyone recognizes and responds to.

Except that Superman is not Krypton’s last hope. Kryptonians hedged their bets by sending his cousin. And his other cousin. Also a dog. And a monkey. And a horse, in case the dog, monkey, and two cousins need a ride somewhere. There may also be a cat. But everyone loves cats, right?

Batman, the solitary night stalker, could be running a daycare center. Yes, the daycare center would get shut down by the state fairly soon, but until it did it would be full. No other hero has collected such a large number of sidekicks.

Wonder Woman has had crushes on various men for decades, and right now she’s aggressively pursuing Tom Tressor, I guess because his name sounds so much like Steve Trevor.

I can’t help but feel wistful for the icons, the perfect, immovable ideals that the originals represented. The Last Son Of Krypton has an emotional and aesthetic wallop that can’t be matched by three cousins and a petting zoo. The Dark Knight, the lone crusader who pits himself against every criminal in a vast, chaotic city is an extraordinarily spare and beautiful picture. That picture has gotten pretty crowded. And Wonder Woman? The virgin huntress? She’s wooing a man with a nectarine pit.

But if you take Supergirl and Powergirl out of the Superman mythos, you lose not only two fantastic characters, but the sweetness and the emphasis on family that is so great about the Superman books. The Batkids bring warmth and enthusiasm to the Batman mythos. And Wonder Woman is such a difficult character to relate to. Romantic love and all the failings and vulnerabilities that it brings out in a person gives readers a toe-hold, a way of understanding an immortal, invulnerable, an infinitely wise character.

There is something thrilling about iconic characters, and plenty of wonderful stories have been told using that aspect of the Big Three. However, a lot of good comes from knocking those characters off the pedestal. Not only does it introduce new and different characters, but it adds richness and texture to characters who would have been only splash pages. There’s something to be said for being a human instead of a god.

Funnybook Babylon – Archives – Tough Love Tuesday Breaking News: Insufficient Censorship

The reason behind All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder’s recall revealed! The censor bars didn’t print properly a whole bunch of times! Cusswords are visible! Look out! Don’t click through if you don’t want to see Batgirl being super-sassy:

(this makes the comic late, which sucks)

In writing, the phrase ‘killing your darlings’ refers to the painful process by which authors weed out their favorite lines, best scenes, and most precious concepts because they distract from the story. In comics fandom, I think of it as describing the way that fandom crushes its own favorite characters under the weight of their own popularity – a process I can’t help but take part in.

Oracle is one of the best characters in comics. Her role on the various teams she’s on is irreplaceable. Her history is as varied and interesting as any character’s could be. She has a defined personality but isn’t a tired, one-note character. Her strengths and weaknesses make every fight she is in even enough that the reader cannot predict the outcome. Of the hundreds of people in the DCU running around in capes and solving the problems of the world by punching people, Barbara Gordon, confined to her wheelchair while being the Lone Ranger of cyberspace stands apart as a unique character.

I, as a reader, would give all that up in a second if she could be Batgirl again. I wouldn’t do it because I lack female crime fighters to identify with. After Fempocalypse – the cancellation of Manhunter, Batgirl, and the elimination of Spoiler, Onyx, Leslie Thompkins, and Gotham Central – DC is gyning up their superhero roster again and I can find strong females without resorting to the Teeny Blue Miniskirt. (Although, to be fair, Kelley Puckett has done an excellent job on Supergirl and I’ve been reading that again, too.)

I wouldn’t even do it because the Batman: The Animated Series episodes that starred Batgirl brought joy to my pre-adolescent life, although admittedly that would be a secondary reason.

I’d regress Barbara Gordon from a team leader to a Batman knock-off with problem hair for one reason: I think it would make her happier.

Yes. You read that right. I want a fictional character to be able to take a walk in a fictional park, then maybe go out dancing with her fictional boyfriend. Just to end the day right, I want her to get her fictional feet massaged. She’s earned it, hasn’t she?

The idea of treating characters as real human beings is plainly ridiculous, but it’s also only an extension of what comics fans do all the time. When we can’t believe that these characters have a life of their own, if only for twenty-two pages, then all we’re doing is staring at ink splotches on wood pulp. And while obsessing over a pet character can be silly, I don’t want to meet the comics fan with a soul so dead that they let go of all character identification and only read comic books ‘for the story.’ However, there does need to be a story, and indulging love for a pet character most often turns that character and every story they’re in as flat as the page they’re printed on.

Striking a balance between wanting a good story and wanting to cater to a favorite character is difficult. The character that makes me topple over is Barbara Gordon, obviously, but I’m willing to bet that every comics fan has one or two characters they’d like to get hold of. Someone out there wants to cast believability to the wind and make Ted Kord and Booster Gold in charge of the Justice League, or allow Superman to rebuild Krypton, or save Bruce Wayne’s parents.

Of course, thinking about 800 issues of Batman in which Babs Gordon goes for a walk with Martha Wayne on New Krypton and talks about how smoothly things have been going since New League took over earth is enough to make me glad there are strict copyright laws.

Can you believe Infinite Crisis only ended a little over two years ago? It feels so much longer. At the time, it was an exciting time to read DC. A lot was going down, 52 was on the horizon, One Year Later was starting up, among other things. The miniseries did come off as a letdown, but considering how hyped it was, how could it be anything but? By the time the seventh issue landed, with its rushed art to meet the deadline, I couldn’t be happier to be done with this whole storyline.

Sometime after, author Greg Cox wrote a novelization of Infinite Crisis. Such an odd concept, isn’t it? A novelization of a comic book? It’s like the literary version of hearing a country singer covering a rock group’s hit song. I guess I shouldn’t talk, since years back, before I was even into comics in the first place, I read the novelization of Knightfall. Plus there’s the whole movie novelization thing I do for the sake of getting site hits.

I didn’t read Cox’s take on Infinite Crisis, but through chance, I discovered an interesting piece relating to it. A company called Graphic Audio had done a book on CD version of his take. That’s right, an audio book based on a book based on a graphic novel. What an insane concept. Too curious, I ordered the two sets and spent a couple weeks listening through them. Yes, weeks. The entire story is told with twelve discs over the course of thirteen hours. Thirteen hours to tell the story of seven issues.

Well, that’s not fair. It’s more than just the seven issues. Cox chose to cherry-pick tie-in issues to help pad out the story to differing success. This includes the end of Crisis of Conscience where Superboy Prime attacks Martian Manhunter, the Spectre vs. Shazam fight from the end of Day of Vengeance, the part of Gotham Central where Crispus Allen got killed, an issue of Aquaman and parts of the Rann/Thanagar War Special.

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Thomas and Martha Wayne have always been the saints of the DCU. Thomas worked long hours healing the sick. Martha founded the Wayne foundation. Thomas used the Wayne fortune to keep Gotham from economic collapse. Martha stalked and attempted to trap pedophiles. They were pillars of society and always ready to serve the public good.

As parents, however, there was room for improvement.

The first story I read that included Thomas and Martha Wayne as anything other than portraits hanging over the mantle was Hush. Thomas Wayne takes Bruce and Bruce’s friend Tommy with him on a business trip and gets angry when they wander slightly away from him to see a couple of superheroes fighting. As punishment he locks them both in his hotel room for the weekend.
The next time I saw this parenting team they sent Bruce to his room without supper and grounded him for a week because he read a comic book. That’s right; a comic book. I suppose they might have been justified, if the comic was one of the more overtly racist Chick Tracts, but it’s most likely that the Waynes fell down on the job again.

What finally cemented my opinion of the Waynes was a single issue of Batman which I suppose was meant to be cute. Alfred is serving as butler to the Waynes when seven-year-old Bruce comes home covered in bruises. His mother and father immediately send him to his room without supper, where he pitifully stares out the window until Alfred comes up, comforts him, and shows him a creative way to deal with bullies.

Substitute the word ‘Headmaster’ for ‘Father’ and ‘Governess’ for ‘Mother’ and you have something out of Dickensian fiction. They didn’t even offer him a band-aid.

When DC comics shows alternate universes in which the Waynes survive, Bruce is generally either a shallow socialite or a good, but bland, businessman. I’m thinking that at best he’d be in rehab and more likely he’d be a modern day Lizzie Borden.

Some readers think that it’s significant that Bruce’s parents were shot when he was eight years old because he was exactly the right age to understand what happened without being able to deal with it. I think it’s significant that Bruce’s parents were shot when he was eight years old because a few years later he would have shoved them into the path of the bullets.