Cartoonists and critics log the comics they read, as they read them.
N for Nadelman, John Hankiewicz: This is a new self-published comic from the fervently-admired Hankiewicz, whose superb and mysterious graphic novel “Education” you can still get from Fantagraphics. “N for Nadelman” is not a graphic novel, it’s a 16-page short story, printed roughly at magazine size, but several familiar devices link these works: word balloons always emanate from outside the frame, never connecting to any character’s mouth; a running, caption-based narration gradually decouples itself from what the panels are showing; and characters are depicted as if against flat scenery, which they traverse, as if to invoke theatrical rather than cinematic values. Or:
Here we see the three strands of narrative winding through the comic: (1) a caption-based narrative of a woman from an art gallery visiting the sculptor Elie Nadelman in the final years of his life, as he struggled financially, unwanted sculptures rotting in the attic of his home; (2) a bubble-based dialogue between the woman and “N” from one portion of her visit; and (3) drawn depictions of the woman wandering in and around Nadelman’s house, smashing one of his sculptures by accident and gazing at others. Sometimes the three strands line up juuuuust enough to approximate a typical integrated comic, but then they veer apart, so that the woman seems engaged in a disconnected dialogue with the sculptures themselves while recalling events that have not yet happened. It’s rather operatic, in its play between recitative dialogue and aria-like bearing of the mind, though Hankiewicz, of course, knows that comics flatten these elements into an uneasy, mutable reality. And his are uneasy comics - explicitly, the story is about people looking at art and art looking at people and art looking at art, and men looking at women; all of them shifting, like the traits of this comic, to confirm their own perspective. But the only sure connection is their proximity in space, as staged by Hankiewicz. Comes with a bonus booklet of unused text, paired with sketchbook drawings done on a beach.
No Visitors Season Four, HTMLflowers: The self-published latest from Melbourne-based cartoonist and musician HTMLflowers, a 20-page stapled comic book with tape marks visible around the edges. The “Season” label tempts comparisons to television, and much of the work indeed consists of characters facing each other with statements, invitations and challenges, transmitted via the camera control of tight grids: 12-panel base, with departures therefrom. But this no ensemble dramedy; it is a concrete-hard gaze at the situation of Little, an impoverished hospital inpatient with an incurable disease, introduced in this issue deriding the progressive pieties of a support group for the chronically ill before making off with other patients’ food. Little is ambulatory, and fucks off from the hospital sometimes to snort and sell drugs, and hook up a bit, though the realities of health and lodging assure that such casual encounters end with the sickly partner jacking off in a hospital bed at the end of the night. Many television Seasons have been devoted to nasty protagonists being amoral-yet-compelling, but to Little this is nothing dramatic or exciting; it’s not the titilation by which a disadvantaged person becomes a compelling trope, it’s life.
What the artist does here is something challenging; he remains totally fixed on the perspective of the character, relying on perepherial information as a means of complicating their worldview - we see, for example, a patient in an adjoining room gurgling in critical pain in between panels of Little eating fast food and laughing at Simpsons videos online. What is implied, is implied loudly. Yet this is not an obvious or cloying work, because HTMLflowers does not use these techniques to undercut the character. He presents instead a simultaneity, in which Little’s anti-communal, anti-“progressive” point of view rolls out in uninhibited tandem with ‘sensible’ alternatives that are, frequently, sensible. At one point, Little is told that, while very ill, they are occupying a bed that could go to somebody with a worse prognosis: “If you don’t start doing as we advise… well I give you five more years at best…” But the advising is the problem. That the abled do not allow the disabled the human dignity of self-destruction is the provocation I see in this raw and bloodied work.
Incision, HTMLflowers: This is a 2018 zine, arranging 72 pages of diaristic material, much of it handwritten. HTMLflowers was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis as an infant, and moved to Australia with his mother to escape the U.S. health care system that swallowed their money and made basic survival impossible. There are not a few similarities here to the situations depicted in “No Visitors”, but the scope of the narration is both wider and more admittedly excerpted: the handwritten portions were composed during various hospital stays the artist underwent in a four-month period in 2017, with times lived outside the hospital only presented in the context of inpatient reflections. The tone is tenderer than that of “No Visitors”, with references to friends and family made fleshy and warm, while the newer comic hardens such things into narrative immediacy. Left to wander, “Incision” dwells on the frustration of going back and back into hospital care, with its contradictory diagnoses and the push and pull of administrative regulations struggling against underfunded staff; the animating image is of the artist running, which is both useful exercise and potentially dangerous. Regularly, sketchbook drawings are collaged atop actual medical documents and hospital ephemera, obscuring the literalism of “trying not to die” with the capture of life in art. The thorny rose on the cover is hand-colored. You can buy these and other books here.
Rodney: The Premonition, “Charlie Trumper” (Eddie Campbell & Phil Elliott): This is a really lovely edition for a comic strip serial - a little bigger than 8” x 11”, all its 36 pages scanned from the original art or filled with notes or letters or script excerpts or preparatory drawings. It was crowdfunded, and you’ll need to check Phil Elliott’s eBay page to see if he has any left. “Check the artist’s eBay page” now joins “please crouch on this record label’s homepage to see if they’ve printed more” and “Facebook message the Japanese publisher, they know English” in the pantheon of Steps to Buy Comics in 2019, as presented by me.
This is from an introduction by the strip’s writer and letterer, Eddie Campbell, who gives us a sense of the milieu in 1984, when “Rodney” ran in the weekly UK music paper “Sounds”. It reminded me quite a lot of sentiments expressed by the artist Chris Ware in his 2017 art book-cum-memoir “Monograph”, despite one ocean’s and the better part of a decade’s distance:
Campbell frames it terms of scholarship, of taste, while Ware alludes to a spirituality of the human authentic, gunked by commerce, but for both the idea of working in an alternative culture is presented as necessary for the artist, because the mainstream culture is completely worthless. I don’t think this separation is so common a thing anymore, in part because I think the ever-consolidating gigacorps of today are very adept at corralling alternative viewpoints under their banners - many ways to earn money in the absence of a monoculture.
The suite of strips that included the “Rodney” serial was Campbell’s first paid work in comics, and close to that for Elliott. As Campbell tells it, “Sounds” was interested in ‘orrible work: something to shock the squares, but not raise so great a shock as to endanger the venue’s profit. The American behemoth MTV teetered similarly atop this foundation, and to great success; there was no such trash allowed my Catholic household’s television as a child. But as an adult, I sense the whimsy — the theatre — behind this small, bloody epic, which Elliott draws in a sprightly and clean-lined style that connects “Rodney” to the continental trend for reviving the aesthetics of the Belgian comics midcentury… I do not know if “Sounds” was aware of how fashionable they’d gotten.
To an American, though, “Rodney” — full title: Rodney: The Premonition II (The Astounding Autobiography of the Man Who Will Blow Up the World in 1985!!!) — recalls the fine tradition of the alternative weekly comic strip, the best examples from which could offer a really sharp rejoinder to the complacency of popular media circa then. Modeled titularly after the film “Damian: Omen II”, “Rodney” finds its title character born with a button that can kill anyone or anything. So he kills his cousin; he kills his classmates; he kills his parents; his lover; his boss; the Parliament; the media; all of the world’s valuable licensed characters; and all of the different types of music listeners on Earth, all of whom are annoying, and must die. All is ho-hum to Rodney, who understands that to live is inevitably to die, and that perhaps if we are aimless in this life, it’s because we’re shaking through the death rattle of a species already fatally wounded - and don’t dare beg recourse to God, for Rodney shall kill Him next! A few people told me on Twitter that they encountered this strip long ago and it really opened their eyes to what comics could do; Campbell says they got no feedback at the time save for one bit of reader mail calling them shit. Elliott prints two letters from “Sounds” right next to each other: the letter accepting them for work, 1984, and a letter booting them from the venue with a sneer in 1986, in the midst of a later serial. That’s life among the living dead.
Pierrot Alterations, CF: And then, suddenly - a new book from Christopher Forgues, one of the madly-loved art comics figures of the 21st century, who had seemed to turn away from even small-press book publishing of late. This 52-page project, however — lavish with sawed-off corners and exposed spine and all-color innards — comes from Anthology Editions, an imprint of the Brooklyn record label Mexican Summer. The first batch sold quickly, but there should be more in a few weeks.
How you get there from here is the question posed to me by this stack of drawings. The first 25 or so pages are devoted to a quiet two-panel-per-page narrative in which a small crew of clowns erect a tiny city; they work, drink, fight, and occasionally ride each other like erotic horses, though pantaloons-clad sourface Regulus has manifested psychic abilities that the rest of the crew indulge as another frivolous distraction from their dialectical labors. Then, suddenly, a miraculous transformation occurs, in which a series of die-cut gaps in the book itself guide us into a series of crowded, denuded, domestic purple drawings, interspersed with and ultimatly supplanted by incomprehensible faux-photo ID images and official-looking documents and dystopian pencil images drawn atop calendar pages redolent with decomposing architecture and tiny faces in tiny circles.
What does it all mean? Nothing; it’s just a bunch of sketchbook pages dropped in at random to plump up a short comic in a faintly suggestive manner so as to tickle the arrogance of flatulent critics-cum-marketers and fool hapless culture consumers into paying twenty dollars for a tiny book and you should never, never trust naughty artists and/or Brooklyn hipsters again!
-Harlequin
Among the first of the ‘calendar’ pages is a schematic for Alterations on the Pierrot form, in the Pierrot Quality Amphitheater, where characters line up in discreet sections of a walled stage like dates stuck in boxes, peering at each other. “[P]oetry means very little if taken in its practical sense,” CF muses in a brief text coda. The Pierrot of the newer traditions, the longing Pierrot, seeks an impossible sense of art amidst the building of tradition: Regulus, the Leo, levitating and transforming, his flight from the stagebound story of one half of the book revealing a future of increasingly varied activities, collapsing into categorization and suppression. It is the ember of desire, the Idea, “poesis” encumbered, gradually, by practice and consideration and concretization and more, more, more, until the city of this art is a prison. Art as a process of life vs. the life of art as process. The back cover of the book depicts a woman in modern dress smashing a rock through a window, and clowns then scrambling to build a brick wall. What do you do when even dancers seal you in? Vanish?
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 4: The Tempest #3 (of 6), Alan Moore, Kevin O’Neill, Ben Dimagmaliw, Todd Klein: I dunno if not writing comics at the same time as a 1,000,000,000-word novel all of a sudden has had an effect, but this is the most bouyent thing Moore has scripted since the early ‘00s, paring down the massively thorny LoEG concept to a climactic struggle against a sinister modern League comprised entirely of revamps of the same character: the arch-misogynist James Bond, who has literally fired a nuclear bomb into humanity’s collective imagination so as to preserve the statist-corporate status quo of reactionary commercial product as the sole definition of globalized fantasy. Turns out, Alan Moore is not a big fan of superhero movies, and that is the landscape through which a ragtag crew of 1960s UK superheroes are fated to wander, their IRL creators conspicuously cited on the back cover of every issue, lest the hands behind the magic be forgotten. Long b&w sections give O’Neill a better chance to cut loose than usual in these texty things, and this issue also has a photo-comics section(!) and a 3D bit - glasses included. And, the usual Alan Moore caveats apply, like his don’t-tell-me-what-to-do-square aging hippie insistance on ‘reclaiming’ racist caricatures as a cod-messianic white man, which feels like a guy calling women “girls” and insisting it’s a term of endearment. I often get the impression that what counts as eternal imagination and what counts as corporatized chichiniry in the metaphor of this series tends to boil down to things Moore finds sexy or things by people who have screwed him over, as it’s not particularly a nuanced enough work to consider the endless whirl of personalization that accompanies the ordinary consumption of fictions under capitalism and all the systemic inequalities of the world. On the other hand, the chill, friendly, fan-loving nice guy superhero writer of the moment is a dude who’s submitted Batman scripts for review by the C.I.A., so I guess I’m kinda down for bitter leftist shit atm.
Hawking Vol. 1, Takao Saito & Saito Production, translator unknown: Long, long ago, LEED Publishing — the publishing affiliate of Golgo 13 creator Takao Saito’s studio; I believe it’s run by his nephew — produced a small grip of English translations for a tiny portion of their backstock, and they keep putting these same books up on every digital distribution platform that ever deals with manga. Now comiXology has them, so I gambled five bucks on a 400-page collection of mid-‘70s action comics. The lead character looks exactly like Golgo 13, but with slightly messier hair; he’s on death row in France for murdering 21 people on a quest for revenge, which, obviously, demonstrates the “determination and efficiency” that are hallmarks of the Japanese kamikaze spirit, so a shadow group of European defense experts buys him out of jail and makes him a special agent along the Trans-Europe Express. Then, immediately, the series turns into “Golgo 13” with a slightly more personable/obnoxious (and therefore 1,000% less fun) lead character and really perfunctory suspense plots. At one point he plants a bug on some IRA guys and tracks down their smuggled arms… and blows them up! The end! Or: he needs to stop some Germans from blowing up an airplane, so he asks the girlfriend of one of them where they are, and then they get captured, but then he kills the Germans with their own rocket, FIN. After a while, I started to wonder if this wasn’t all some kind of training program for young studio hands - it’s so similar to “Golgo 13”, but so stiff and off, like a recipe missing small, crucial ingredients. Or, did they think having scenes onboard trains in most storylines was a hook? Maybe the answers are in the other two volumes of this series, which aren’t translated, and probably won’t be.
Letter to Survivors, Gébé, translated by Edward Gauvin: Hot damn, this is a French one! I would even go so far to say that of all the French comics New York Review Comics has published, this is the most French comic of them all. Gébé (Georges Blondeaux; 1929-2004) was a longtime editor of and artist for French satirical magazines, and this 1981 album lays out its vignettes in a manner both blunt and elusive. A hazmat-suited mailman arrives at the fallout shelter of The Typical French Family from advertising history and reads them a series of letters recounting tales of the pre-apocalyptic past - and all of those tales are themselves concerned with how people discern the past. It’s not ha-ha humor, it’s humor like ‘a little girl can see the future and takes pains to sabatoge a situation that she knows will create a sentimental family memory that her relatives will use to distract themselves from the pain of their future,’ you know? At first the fallout family groans over didactic potential of the mailman’s mission, but gradually they cotton on to sentimentalization of the past as a failsafe switch for restoring the past’s iniquities in the future. Will a revolutionary society rise from the ashes?! L'humanité ne sera heureuse que quand le jour où le dernier bureaucrate aura été pendu avec les tripes du dernier capitaliste, as they say in the funnies.
How to Read Donald Duck, Ariel Dorfman & Armand Mattelart, translated by David Kunzle: Not a comic, but one of the all-time classics of writing-about-comics, though it’s not especially concerned with the comics form. First published in Chile in 1971, in the triumphal flush of the Allende presidency, the book instead addresses charges on the part of certain press interests that the new, socialist-minded children’s literature of the day was politicizing the arena of youth entertainment dominated by Disney comics - I’ve heard rumors there are similar arguments online in 2019! So, the authors present a puckish title: Para leer al Pato Donald, addressed both to young students and to their opponents, who cannot read the simplest things in terms of ideology. To massively simplify things myself, the authors detail how the sexless, anti-biological uncles-and-nephews setup of the Disney menagerie creates a closed circuit of children/nephews behaving as an adult’s ideal of good behavior, correcting the transgressions of adults/uncles in a world with no sense of history or progress, therefore policing the maintenance of the status quo; moreover, the true ‘children’ as portrayed by the Disney comics are foreign, native, backwards caricatures, grinning simply as the heroes chase rewards they are shown to deserve through the sufferings of adventure - ‘treasure’ that exists as divorced from the circumstances of its production, and is therefore up for grabs by the clever and daring. This is the imperial project that Disney represents… real tinfoil hat crazy stuff, right?! Haha, anyway, two years later a CIA-backed military coup crushed the Popular Unity government, and scores of copies of this book were sunk or burned; Disney itself attempted to block the book’s entry into the U.S. through copyright litigation upon its initial English translation, but this 2018 edition from OR Books — nearly half of which is comprised of various introductions, forewords, and supplementary texts, including a lengthy, annotated list of related books and articles — can easily be obtained however you want. Disney, meanwhile, has not gotten smaller.
Neuro Hard, Masamune Shirow: I impulse-bought this 2015 Japanese collection of the ‘lost’ Shirow serial, an unfinished 1992-94 effort at creating a story bible for others to follow. I’m *looking* at it, not reading it; this is the kind of manga that’s never been scanlated, not for lack of interest, nor unavailability, but because Shirow’s walls of abstruse text are just too much to deal with in the absence of pay. Some nice art though, from roughly the same ultra-lush, pre-everything-on-a-computer period as his best comic, Dominion: Conflict. Also: some newer CG art, in the style a friend once described to me as “the visual equivalent of a urinary tract infection.” I tried to post a sample, but Tumblr told me it was porn.
Detective Comics #1000, Chris Conroy & Dave Wielgosz, eds.: I bought this on impulse because it was on the new releases shelf and people were talking about Batman online. It’s a 100-page anthology tribute for the Batman character’s 80th year and the one thousandth issue of “Detective Comics”. I don’t think anyone is ever at their best in a tribute anthology, but that makes them kind of interesting to look at, you know? There are eleven stories, which I will now spoil in their entirety.
1. “Batman’s Longest Case”, Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion, FCO Plascencia, Tom Napolitano: The first of two stories in which Batman is doing something that looks grim, but is actually happy and anniversary-ish - both with similar titles, and both from major Batman writers. This is the better one, because I think Capullo is an interesting artist. He’s comparable to Jae Lee, in that he’s someone who had some work in comics under his belt prior to being ushered into the second ‘generation’ of popular Image artists, and has continued to evolve quite vividly over the years. The Capullo of today dials up the use of shadows and silhouette that used to sort of decorate the folds of Spawn’s flowing cape and such - here, they’re used more to focus attention on storytelling fundamentals: geography; gesture; etc. I also generally like the colorist, FCO Plascencia, who’s done some Varleyesque color-as-mood work on earlier comics with this team, though the story here is subdued… very classy, dressed for the gala.
Hints of ‘90s grotesquerie only pop up once Batman has solved a large number of flamboyantly abstruse riddles and discovered that the titular Longest Case is really an initiation test fronted by wrinkly old Slam Bradley, the original Siegel & Shuster-created star of “Detective Comics” back in 1937, who welcomes Batman to a Guild of Detection. This is clever of the writer, Scott Snyder, because Batman as a basic concept is hugely derivative of earlier pulp, detective and strip hero characters - and, if you’re being honest about paying homage to the character’s origins, you might as well play up lineage as your metaphor.
2. “Manufacture for Use”, Kevin Smith, Jim Lee, Scott Williams, Alex Sinclair, Todd Klein: In contrast, this story shoots for the quintessential. Smith, of course, is the filmmaker and longtime geek culture celebrity who’s written comics off and on, so maybe it’s his distance from the continuum of superhero writing that has inspired a short story that could have run as a backup in any Batman comic since the 1970s, give or take few cultural references. Matches Malone (Batman, when he is being an undercover cop) descends into the secretive world of true crime memorabilia to buy the gun that killed Bruce Wayne’s parents, which he then melts down to form the metal bat-symbol plate Batman wears on his chest, verily steeling his heart with the memory of this tragedy to fortify him in his neverending battle against crime! NANANANANANANANA BATMAAAAAN! Jim Lee and his usual crew makes everything look like it’s ‘supposed’ to, provided you see this type of statuesque posing as the best sort of superhero art, which many DC comics readers presumably do, given how a lot of these things look.
3. “The Legend of Knute Brody”, Paul Dini, Dustin Nguyen, Derek Fridolfs, John Kalisz, Steve Wands: Dini has written tons of comics, with not a few of those drawn by Nguyen, but this feels mostly like DC1k (acronym’s resemblance to “DICK” a purely innocuous reference to Nightwing, I assure you) acknowledging the extensive legacy of “Batman: The Animated Series”, on which Dini was a writer and producer. The story takes the form of a biography of an infamously clumsy hired thug for supervillains, whom even the most novice reader will have figured out is a Batman Family asset about halfway down page 4 of 8, leaving a whole lot of laborious and narration-heavy slapstick to wade through. Admittedly, this might work better as an animated cartoon, with voice acting leavening the pace of the gags, but I’m also not sure ‘this would be better in a different art form’ is the impression superhero comics should be giving right now.
4. “The Batman’s Design”, Warren Ellis, Becky Cloonan, Jordie Bellaire, Simon Bowland:
Most of the drawing in DC1k is the kind of stuff you can easily trace to a few popular and fairly narrow traditions of ‘realistic’ superhero art. Becky Cloonan is the only woman to draw an entire comic in here – Joëlle Jones co-pencils a story with Tony Daniel later on, and Amanda Conner does a pinup, mind – and her work is the only place in this book where you catch glimpses of a global popular comics beyond the superhero provinces in the Hewlettian wild eyes of the hapless human opponents of her Batman, lunging through velvet layers of cape and smoke, lipless mouth parted on a shōnen ai jaw. It is really very impressive.
The writer, Warren Ellis, does a pathos-of-the-hard-man story, in which Batman explains his combat strategies via narration while carrying them out, occasionally making reference to the medical bills his prey will incur and their timely motivations as terroristic white men who feel ignored by the world, and at the end Batman asks the last guy U WANT TO LIVE IN MY NIGHTMARE, LITTLE BOY and the guy is like n- no dr. batman sir, and gives up because Batman’s is too dangerous and scary a life model. It is made clear from the text that Batman has programmed himself into a system of reactionary violence that he inevitably reinforces, but this message is so heavily sugared with cool action and tough talk that the reader can easily disregard such commentary, if so inclined, which has been a trait of Ellis’ genre comics writing since at least as far back as “The Authority” in the late 1990s. It fits Batman as naturally as the goddamned cowl.
5. “Return to Crime Alley”, Dennis O’Neil, Steve Epting, Elizabeth Breitweiser, ‘Andworld Design’: I was surprised that there weren’t other writers from across the Atlantic in DC1k, given the extensive contributions of Alan Grant and Grant Morrison to the character. I was maybe not as surprised to see Dennis O’Neil as the lone credited writer to pre-date the blood and thunder revolution of Frank Miller et al. in the mid-1980s, as that commercial shadow is far too long to escape. Of course, O’Neil was one of the architects of superhero comics as a socially relevant proposition and Batman as a once-again ‘serious’ character in the 1970s, and it may be a reflection of his standing as a patriarch that this story contains no sugar whatsoever: on the anniversary of his parents’ death, Batman is confronted by a childhood caregiver who has figured out his dumb secret identity, and castigates him for doing stupid shit like dressing up as an animal and punching the underclass when he could actually do something as a wealthy man to improve the world. Then Batman starts beating the shit out of young masked teens who have stolen a gun, after which Batman, who is also a masked thug, is told that he is, at best, a figure of pity. The end!
What emerges from this story, to my eye, is that Batman is a terrible fucking idea if examined with any sort of serious realism - and Steve Epting draws the story as close to photorealism as anything in this book gets. I also think it is not insignificant that O’Neil, the writer here most unplugged from superhero comics as a commercial vocation, is the one to make these observations; to believe in superhero comics is to understand that there is play at the heart of these paper dolls, and to make your living from these things is to contemplate new avenues for play. Maybe Batman is dark, obsessive! Should he… kill? Sure, Bill Finger made him kill. The Shadow killed lots of dudes. So did Dick Tracy. Ramp up the verisimilitude too much, though, and you’ve got a guy wearing a hood going out by the cover of night to scare the shit out of superstitious cowards who’ve been taking from the good people of society, which, in terms of motivational narratives, is the same origin as the Ku Klux Klan. To play nonetheless, is the craftsman’s burden.
6. “Heretic”, Christopher Priest, Neal Adams, Dave Stewart, Willie Schubert: Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, is veteran Batman artist and frequent Dennis O’Neil collaborator Neal Adams. And while Adams is not credited as the writer on this story, it bears all the hallmarks of his 21st century work at DC: whiplash pacing; uneasy expository dialogue; and eager callbacks to Adams’ earlier work. This is the Batman comic as a continuity-driven adventure, and I found it largely incomprehensible as a story, not unlike Adams’ recent “Deadman” miniseries. I still like his husky Batman, though.
7. “I Know”, Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev, Josh Reed: Hey, did you know Brian Michael Bendis, writer of approximately ten and one half zillion Marvel comics, is writing comics at DC these days? Here he teams with longtime collaborator Maleev for a story that brings to mind the old line from Grant Morrison’s & Dave McKean’s “Arkham Asylum” about Batman being the real person and the guy under the mask being the mask. The Penguin, of all villains, figures out Batman’s secret identity, but elects not to pursue Bruce Wayne in his private life, because destroying Bruce Wayne would create a pure Batman far too dark and twiztid for anyone to handle. Or, maybe that is all just an image the perfectly sane Batman has deliberately encouraged as part of his umpteenth contingency plan. I would argue that this is a gentle spoof of people taking Batman too seriously, which clicks with what I’ve read of Bendis’ idea of the character in those 100-page comics they sell at Walmart: a globetrotting detective-adventurer, appropriate for all ages. Bear in mind, I’ve read maybe 0.2% of all Brian Bendis comics.
8. “The Last Crime in Gotham”, Geoff Johns, Kelley Jones, Michelle Madsen, Rob Leigh: Whoa, now we’re talking! Kelley Jones! Just look at this:
Such totally weird stuff, coming from the artist who drew all those classic ‘90s covers with the huge bat-ears and wildly distorted musculature, the cape this absurd, unreal shroud. It looks like he’s working from photo reference with some of this comic, but also just tearing out these drawings of huge jawlines and shit, this total what-the-fuck-is-going-on haze, which perfectly matches Geoff Johns’ furiously ridiculous story about an elderly Batman and his wife, Catwoman, and their daughter, and Damian, and a dog, who all investigate a mass murder that turns out to be the Joker’s son committing suicide, and then Batman unplugs the Bat-Signal because crime is over in Gotham forever, and then we find out it’s all the birthday wish of Batman, who is blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, in costume, in the Batcave. Is “Doomsday Clock” like this? Should I pirate it??
9. “The Precedent”, James Tynion IV, Alvaro Martinez-Bueno, Raul Fernandez, Brad Anderson, Sal Cipriano: Inevitably, we come to the story that argues that Batman is actually a great guy, and his pressing of children into action as vigilantes under the cover of night is an amazingly positive thing. This is what I mean by “play” - it doesn’t literally make sense, we all know that, but if you buy into the superhero idea, you can buy into this universe of metaphor where the Batman Family is a vivification of finding your company of people, and belonging, and being loved. Lots of talk in here about snatching young people out of the darkness and forging them in light, and helping them find a better path - it sounds like Batman is signing these kids up for the Marine Corps, which is one of several organizations that recognizes the power of these arch-romantic impulses.
10. “Batman’s Greatest Case.”, Tom King, Tony S. Daniel, Joëlle Jones, Tomeu Morey, Clayton Cowles: This is just unbearable. Oh god, what absolute treacle. It’s the second story in this book about Batman being serious and mysterious, but it turns out something nice is going on - he really just wants a photo of the whole Batman Family, because he lost his family when his parents got shot, but then he cracked his greatest case by finding a new family, which is the Batman Family!
All of this is communicated via clipped dialogue in which various Batman Family superheroes trade faux-awkward quips and cutesy ‘moments’ that are supposed to embody the endearing traits of the characters, but read as the blunt machinations of art that is absolutely desperate to be liked. This is art that is weeping on my shoulder and insisting I am its friend, and I want to get away from it, immediately. Tom King is the most acclaimed superhero writer of this generation, and I can only presume his better work is elsewhere.
11. “Medieval”, Peter J. Tomasi, Doug Mahnke, Jaime Mendoza, David Baron, Rob Leigh:
Finally, we have the obligatory story-that-leads-into-next-issue’s-serial, thereby demonstrating that Batman endures. It’s done as a series of 12 splash pages, depicting Batman in battle with his greatest foes, and it benefits immeasurably from the presence of artist Doug Mahnke (some inks by Jaime Mendoza), whose been a favorite of mine since those early, blood-splattered issues of “The Mask” at Dark Horse decades ago. Broadly speaking, Mahnke is working in a similarly muscular vein as many contributors to DC1k, but his sense of composition, of spectacle – that boot-in-the-face energy the British call thrill-power – adds an important extra crackle, and an element of humor; his Batman looks like a hulking maniac dressed in garbage bags, beating the shit out of monster after leering monster. What we are seeing is the fevered imagining of a new villain, the Arkham Knight (a variant of a character introduced in a video game), whom writer Peter J. Tomasi characterizes via the old trick of having the villain narrate to us a bunch of familiar criticisms of the hero, which the hero will presumably react to and overcome, or acknowledge in an interesting way, or something, in future installments. This probably would have worked better if other stories in this book hadn’t already made a lot of the same points in a manner that is not an advertisement for the rebuttal of those points… or if I were even capable of reading a story like this without imagining a final dialogue bubble coming in from off-panel going “SIR, THIS IS A BURGER KING DRIVE-THRU.” But something’s gotta go in issue #1001.
