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?