Batman: Year One

One-Sentence Summary: Um, it's Batman Year One, I don't need this.

Several of the next few posts will be "Classic comics I somehow have not read yet" so withhold judgment all zero of you. This night's edition is Batman: Year One.

Batman: Year One is by Frank Miller (Sin City, 300, Dark Knight Returns) and David Mazzucchelli (Um, this and Asterios Polyp and a couple other things?) and is Miller's go at writing a 4-issue origin story to Batman. Awesome.

To be honest, it's tough for me to know how influential this comic was. The Batman that Miller writes here more or less is the modern Batman w/some inexperience. This comic came out the year I was born, so I have no idea how people thought about Batman before this, or what his origin story was like, tonally, etc. It's fairly difficult to capture that sort of impression after something else has already been etched into you (it's like how it's impossible not to read old X-Men issues as a statement about minorities, even if they weren't intended that way until Claremont). I think it says something that this comic was so influential it could easily have changed how I think about Batman (which is often) without me even knowing.

It holds up fantastically. The recoloring helps (I have no idea when that happened, but I'm glad it did), but Mazzucchelli's art stands on its own merits incredibly well. Miller paints the scene very well showing not just why Batman is, but why he was needed, and draws a parallel between Batman and Commissioner Gordon that works well and hasn't really been expanded upon much (they're seen more in a symbolic relationship nowadays, I would argue, vs. serving the same purpose).

I really like Mazzucchelli's Batman cowl. I dig the old-school stylings, and he really works them well here. It's a sort of false-retro style that wouldn't really bloom, I think, until Cooke (though someone who knows comics better than I could probably tell me why that's wrong).

Can I make a complaint? I don't really get Catwoman's purpose here (except to fulfill the Law of Miller). I sort of see the idea of Batman inspiring others, thus creating his own need (a theme that's used much more openly in other stories), but the story does parallels with Batman and Gordon so well anything additional seems more cluttered than anything else. It feels like an idea that could've been interesting on its own in a sequel, but in here, it just seems unnecessary, especially given the story's otherwise spartan use of subplots.

Also: what's up with that son? Such an odd facet of Gordon to be completely forgotten, especially given its central placement w/in this story, considered a seminal Batman book.

And, really, that leads to an odd contradiction with this book: it will forever be loved, and rightly so, by Batman fans as one of the key trades to own, along with The Killing Joke and Dark Knight Returns, and tonally it more or less set the tone for the Batman we still have. However, most of the elements actually used here -- the relationship between Gordon & Batman, Gordon's son, Gordon's silent acknowledgement of Batman's identity -- seem to have disappeared.

Oh well. Batman's currently awesome, and this Batman was awesome, so, really, who am I to argue?

Preacher: Ancient History

One-sentence summary: This collection of the Preacher specials is solid, if probably unnecessary.

I haven't read Preacher in years, so I've been going through it again recently. It holds up pretty well as a series -- definitely Ennis's magnum opus.

A big part of Preacher, though, is the fascinating long-form narrative. Another equally important part is Steve Dillon, whose art is key to the story's tone. What's interesting, though, is how well these three stories work despite that. They're a reprieve from the main Preacher -- a side-road to travel -- but they're still a good read.

Well, the Saint of Killers 4-parter is a good read. Arseface's origin and a story featuring Jody and T.C. are pretty lackluster. They're a bit of cotton candy; sort of enjoyable, but there's nothing to it.

The Saint of Killers story -- there's some amazing Preacher work. Firmly entrenched in the bizarre theology of the Preacher universe, while a complete embrace-and-rejection-of the old Westerns that Ennis loves so much, it just works. It's a story that's simultaneously awesome and terrifying, over-the-top but creepy. It serves its purpose as a legend w/in the Preacher world, giving us an interesting background on the Saint of Killers that we can choose to believe or not, while giving us an interesting amoral tale. It's the key to the collection, and really what makes the book worthwhile.

That being said, I do wonder about the placement of this trade within the series. As I said, it's been awhile since I read Preacher, so I'm not entirely sure if what comes immediately after this has any relevance to the going-ons of this book, of if it just so happened that some of these issues were published during the issues in trades 3 & 5, so they threw them in here. I don't know. If they end up not having any relevance, I sort of question making them a numbered part of the set, and not just their own separate trade -- but, meh, it was worth it for the Saint of Killers story.

Atomic Robo Volume 1

One-Sentence Summary: Hurray for Atomic Robo!

I'll admit it: I've got a major soft spot for this comic. Not only is it by Brian Clevinger (whose webcomic, 8-Bit Theater, is super-fantastic), but it's everything a superhero comic should be.

This doesn't read like the first few issues of an independent comic. It doesn't look like it, either, or even feel like it. You have a (seemingly) fully-developed world with characters with rich backgrounds, and the action sequences are well-constructed.

If I have any complaints, it's in the nitty-gritty. I think that background characters lack faces is a bit of a distraction, even if it's more of an artistic choice than a shortcut. Because this is a volume that's really about introducing Robo himself, the side characters sort of get passed by. You have some wacky dialog from them (including a great, on-the-side discussion of imaginary physics), but Robo really dominates.

The good part of this is Robo is a great protagonist. The comparisons of this comic to Hellboy are rife and apt, but I will say it: Robo is a better character than Hellboy. Stories aside, Hellboy is a much more reactive character, while Robo is front-and-center of his world. Robo has no dominant characteristic -- sure, he jokes and fights, but he's an intelligent character, and, in my favorite scene of the volume, you feel the weight of being an 80-year old ageless robot.

The art works so well for this series too. Much like Invincible, or the 90s Deadpool when McGuiness drew it, this relatively bright, relatively cartoon-y style is very liberating on the story. Not only does it allow for fairly ridiculous things seeming ordinary (Robo himself would be a bit more dehumanized with a more realistic style), but it also brightens the story a bit and really highlight the humor-element.

As far as the trade goes, it's a pretty standard job: 15-ish dollars, 6 issues, the b-material from the issues is included along with a few pages of concept art. Glossy paper, though, so that's nice.

Atomic Robo is one of the up-and-coming comics, and Clevinger is a rising star himself. I won't pretend to guess the future on it: it could go the route of Hellboy, and become huge; it could go the way of The Goon and begin to explode, then collapse for creator-based reasons (yes, I know it's still limping along); or it could be like so many Dark Horse projects of the 90s, and be popular and critically acclaimed, only to be forgotten borderline-instantly (Concrete or Monkey Man & O'Brien anyone?). It has the potential to do any of these. I know which route I'll be rooting for.

Complete Crumb Volume 2: Some More Early Years of Bitter Struggle

One-sentence summary: Despite some peaks, this really is an edition only for the hardcore fans or completionists.

In case you don't know, the Complete Crumb Comics is a 17-Volume series of all of Crumb's work that could legally be gathered by Fantagraphics into these 120-or-so page volumes, up till a certain point in his career where copyrights start to bump into each other. As a collection, it'll take awhile to assemble if you don't want to pay outrageous mark-ups on them (they drift in and out of printing, with prices that fluctuate accordingly, though realistically they rarely go for more than 25 in an eBay auction).

Now, when I say they collect all of his work, I do mean all -- the first volume has high school doodles and attempts at comics with his brother, and this volume is still him in a very early phase of development. I'm not saying the comics aren't interesting -- Crumb's unique take on powerful women is here less embroiled in a trope and instead much fresher, as in his longer Mabel story -- just that, as a rule, it's pretty meh stuff.

Fritz the cat, while appearing briefly in the first volume, really starts to come into his own here; the final sequence in the book is an incredibly disturbing story of him going back home after an off-panel fall-out with his current teenage pet/girlfriend, a story which ends suddenly and I'm not sure I want to see the conclusion of, truthfully.

You're mostly getting comics that are somewhere between doodles and fully developed amateur work, and the last 50 pages are mostly sketches (gorgeous sketches and covers, sure, but still just sketches). Among the nicer bonuses of the Complete Crumb sets, though, are the 6-7 (large) page introductions done by people relevant to Crumb's life at the time of the material. I'm not a huge Crumb buff, so I'm not sure how readily available the material they present is, but I always enjoy the intros.

Crumb's an impressive enough cartoonist that even this early material, almost 50 years after it was first written, is interesting on its own right; however, for what you get in this trade, it's not that interesting. I'm definitely looking forward to the next volume, in which we see the bulk of the Fritz stories.

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus

One sentence summary: Some hits and some misses, but for the price well worth it to read these darlings of the old underground.

I am not an expert in the underground comix of the '60s-70s. A large reason for this is how generally unsuitable for modern-style reprinting is the original material, if quality copies are even available. That's part of what makes this (and the Complete Crumb collection, for that matter) such a treasure: these are gen-u-ine cultural artifacts.

That being said, it's not like reading this is similar to, say, reading Piers the Plowman or some other Medieval writing suitable only for historical perusal. These are vibrant characters in hilarious situations, most of which manage to deal with drugs.

What struck me when reading these, particularly the first couple of hundred pages, is that the joke of a page would be straight from a newspaper funny: a mistaken identity, a hilarious inversion, etc. These managed (and still do!) to have an edge by making these situations darker and about material never printable in a newspaper funny. An example is when one of the trio, off-panel, shoves a cop out of a third story window thinking it's Fat Freddy in costume, leaving the brothers in the last panel dots on a mountain, hiding out in the wilderness until the heat dies down. The punchline is so old it's vaudevillian, but it manages to twang a new chord by adding the darker element.

That said, shockingly, not all 40-year old hippie comics have aged well. In particular, the mega-arc that takes up over 1/6th of the book, "Innocents Abroad," manages to be over-serious and silly at the same time, and not really in a good way. Despite having the best art of the entire set, and being the best-preserved (some of the black-and-white scans are fairly blotchy, though certainly readable), it reads the most out-of-date -- clearly a product of the cynical '80s.

I love having read this book. When one reads a great novel, or something almost entirely uncorrelated with the times (such as the typical superhero comic), there's a timelessness about it, a disconnection from its own history. For good and for bad, the Freak Brothers are a product of their times, and more importantly a snapshot of those times. Shelton has no way to turn off his writing from being a reflection of his concerns at that moment; the Freak Brothers are the hippocampus of the comix brain, spitting out whatever's most current, and in many ways this is as fascinating to me as any number of pot-jokes.

All said, if you can still find it at the retail price, it's a steal. It's recently gone out of print, which is a shame, though I have no idea if there's enough of a demand to keep prices high (I'm looking at you, X-Statix trades).

Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade

Note: In an attempt to balance my desire to write about comics with the time demands of, well, life, instead of my somewhat-crazy attempt to review every comic book that this blog started as, I'm just going to try to write reviews of whatever I happen to have just read. This should be a reasonable 1-2 posts a week. Let's see if I can manage!

One-sentence summary: An ignored comic, but one of the single best superhero stories to come out of 2008 -- no, really!

I think kids' comics get a bad rap on a consumer-level. Critically, they're fairly appreciated (Tobin and Parker's work on the Marvel Adventure line comes to mind), but even this is hit or miss. I think this comic is a great example of that.

Let's be honest: there aren't a ton of well-written superhero comics about girls out there. Unfortunately, part of the reason for this is that they simply don't sell well (Slott's She-Hulk, Palmiotti's Power Girl, etc) even when they are good. I think it's a bit of a self-sustaining cycle: few comic buyers buy girl-centric titles because they generally aren't well-written, thus lowering the demand for girl-centric titles, thus lowering the chances for a company to strongly support a title, and so on. This isn't a new phenomenon, nor is it one that really shows signs of going away any time soon.

I lead off on this tangent because one of the most important aspects to this book is that it somehow manages the miracle of never once falling into a girl-comic cliche, all the while being, through-and-through, a girl-comic.

Maybe it's due to my absence from writing, but I can't really get describe how much I adore this book. The characters are solid, and when the emotional moments are there, you feel them. How many times does this happen in a kids' comic? Even Lex Luthor gets a heart-wrenching line at the end. One of the primary "enemies" of book -- Belinda Zee, her "evil" double -- really is just misunderstood, but you're never hit over the head with that, you're never forced to love the character, but at the end you sympathize with the position into which she's been created\. The emotional moments are sprinkled throughout the book, but at no point do they seem out of place or undeserved or overwhelming.

Now, lest you think it's a maudlin work, let me talk about the comedy. This is what first got my attention with the book; like a lot of kid comics published today, comedy plays a larger role than in mainstream superhero books. The main source of humor throughout the series is Linda Lee (Supergirl)'s image thought bubbles, usually showing her daydreams of an idealized super-heroic self, with the absurdity a misplaced 14-year old might have (one of my favorites was her fantasy of being moon Supergirl stopping moon robbers from robbing the moon bank. On the moon). The series also plays with the inherent absurdity of superhero books, embracing it fully, without any meta-acknowledgment, eventually giving a totally acceptable explanation for all the surreality that had occurred before (just in case there were readers wondering how, for instance, a piece of kryptonite shown through a projector could create an evil double).

But, in case you do like a dash of meta in your comics, the depiction of the 2-d world in the climax as crudely drawn crayon drawings with childish dialog ("Karate chop!!") might appease you. Or if you're a huge DC-canon nerd, you can enjoy the reference in the final issue as a giant hand reaches out through the multiverse. Maybe you simply yearn for the old funny editor note asterisk call-backs -- they're there too.

My point is: this book really does have it all. I'm not easily impressed -- at any given moment, the Big Two are putting out maybe a half-dozen books I really dig -- but this is great stuff. I can't recommend it enough, and it's only $13 retail ($11 on Amazon -- just sayin'). Give it a try. It's a nice, self-contained story, that's friendly to all ages, particularly a good comic for girls, but with more than enough substance to satiate any level of fan.

P.S. Looking up the writer, I see that he?she? has gone on to write some other critically appraised children's comics -- Batman: The Brave & The Bold, and The Incredibles.