Whatever Happened To...?

It's not often I get excited about mainstream comics these days, but a pair of releases from DC had me pre-ordering away earlier in the summer. I couldn't even wait for the Titan editions so probably overpaid horribly to import these:

The Gaiman Batman story has come out of some Grant Morrison headline-seeking nonsense about Bruce Wayne being "dead", but fortunately it's not linked to that at all. It's sort of a generic last Batman story apart from the point is clearly Batman will never need one. More accurately, Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader? is about Batman the cultural phenomenon rather than Batman's death.

It's an affecting piece of work, very metaphysical but with a genuine emotional core. It's also got lots of references to Batman's entire history, but all weaved in so that you don't need to get them for it to make sense.

The supporting stories in the graphic novel are in a similar vein, but alas fairly inconsequential. The Riddler Secret Origin is a love letter to Adam West-style adventures. The Batman Black & White strip is a one joke affair (and a rather sorry joke at that). Only Poison Ivy's Secret Origin is up to Gaiman's usual standard, and it's probably no coincidence that this also the only story in the entire volume that's actually about a character rather than an icon.

Of course, everything but the title Batman strip is old, and absolutely everything in the Superman volume is from the 80s. That's not a problem though as Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow contains the entirety of Alan Moore's landmark work on the character. It was during the period when he was reshaping comics into his own image, and as you'd expect the content is still amazingly good.

The title story provides a proper conclusion for Silver Age Superman's adventures, and actually finishes them in a way pretty reminiscient of the conclusion of Watchmen. Even non-Superman lovers like myself have to admit this is one of hell of a strip.

The supporting features are just as good. A Swamp Thing / Superman crossover that really packs a punch, followed by the sublime For The Man Who Has Everything, which sees Supes plunged into a Better Than Life style situation where Krypton wasn't destroyed, so he grew up as Kal-El and married an actress. Dave Gibbons art too. Wonderful.

I'd read all these stories before as part of a previous Moore collection, but that also included his work on lesser strips such as Green Lantern and Vigilante which diluted the impact somewhat. Here at last it's possible to see with absolute certainty that Moore's version of Superman is the greatest ever.

Such a shame really that both Gaiman and Moore are now only really part time comic writers. Gaiman has bigger fish to fry and Moore prefers the obscurity of writing pretty much exclusively (and mostly prose) for Top Shelf, where he has the 100% creative freedom his talent has always demanded.

Comics needs more writers of this quality.

The Caped Crusader

I've recently read three Batman books. This was the first and best:

I'd read it before, as you might expect, but coming back to Year One after a decent interval it's pleasing how well it stands up. The writing is first rate - Miller's trademark ultra-noir but not overcooked as in his latterday work. The art is pretty special too.

Sadly the other two books both sucked big time. Batman: Jekyll and Hyde is a sort of Two-Face version of the Killing Joke, only really badly done. It completely fails to nail either Batman or Two-Face, which kills the whole thing stone dead. Shame as he's potentially one of the great villains - as The Dark Knight film amply demonstrates - but inserting bollocks about him being a multiple-personality disorder loon with an extremely predictable childhood secret is utterly the wrong way to go.

Batman: Ego & Other Tales isn't any better. Darwyn Cooke draws a good comic, but he writes a below average script. The Ego story where Batman and Bruce Wayne meet is not a bad concept, but sadly beyond Cooke's abilities to do anything with it. His Catwoman tale Selina's Big Score, also included for some reason, is an improvement but only marginally. At least it knows it's pulp.

Of the three books I think they all have lessons for Massacre For Boys, perhaps the bad ones more so than the Miller masterpiece. I am currently working on a new Crusader strip. I am trying to avoid either being one-dimensional junk but also aiming too high and missing by miles. Both Batman Jekyll & Hyde and Batman: Ego come across as wanting to be classics. Alan Moore and Frank Miller Batman comes across as wanting to tell a story.