Absolute Batman: Hush

One-sentence summary: Having not read Hush before and having heard mostly negative things, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself taken in with the story and thought the art served it very well.

Hush is a relatively simple story, and including Loeb's traditional story formula (lots of villains + surprise/12 months) makes it seem even simpler. That being said, simple doesn't equate bad, and despite it's detractors, I would say that Hush isn't bad. It's simple like meatloaf is simple -- easy, nothing glamorous, but danged good all the same.

That being said, it's not really a story you should think about too much. There're pieces that don't quite fit. One thing that became clear with some of the interviews with Loeb and Lee about it is that they genuinely considered the Riddler to be the main villain. I think the failure in the story is that you walk away from it thinking of Eliot as the central villain. Riddler was just a denouement.

I have some scruples with Lee's style (which I'll briefly address later) but I will say a detail-oriented artist like him is the perfect choice for this style of interactive mystery story.

Brief explanation of what I mean by that: there are your basic mystery stories, where you really just follow along the detective as they solve the crime, with a big explanation at the end where details are synthesized and observations are elucidated, but as a reader you aren't especially expected to have it figured out. Interactive mystery stories, on the other hand, are ones in which the reader is given enough clues during the narrative that they can figure it out (or at least parts of it) before the climax. There may be better definitions/terms for this out there, but this seems adequate to me.

Comics seem a uniquely strong way to deliver the interactive mystery story. They're a good medium between prose and film. In writing, in order to make the mystery solvable, the clues must be at least made to the reader, and if they are at all subtle, then their very inclusion will destroy some subtlety (as in, a detective walks into the room and notices a rug is furled like someone recently ran across it. In prose, you have to point this out, so either the reader immediately recognizes it as a clue, or you have to mislead them by deluging the text with observations, which just makes it a lousy read). In film, while you can have all the details you want, you still have a bit of a presentation problem in that certain details, for the viewer to be able to see them reasonably, must either be zoomed in on, have a particular focus brought to them, or have a shot linger on them, all of which can be a bit clumsy. You can, of course, have them simply present and do nothing to highlight them, but it would seem to me this makes the initial viewing of the film rather distracting for the viewer who actually wants to solve it before being told the solution.

Comics, on the other hand, can present essentially as many details as they want, as panels can be however large they want, all the way up to a double-page spread. They need no emphasis be brought to specific things, as the reader can spend as much time as they want studying every panel and it essentially doesn't harm the reading process (well, truly extreme amounts of study would, but looking over that opera house double-spread for a minute or so is no labor).

And, in fact, Loeb and Lee really do take advantage of this, Lee being such a detail-oriented guy as is that small clues don't especially stand out from the things in the background anyway. I can see why this was such a popular series at the time, and despite the knocks it's received, it's a fun read.

That being said -- the combination of Loeb and Lee is also some sort of magic formula to having the most perfectly awful depictions of women in comics. Loeb doesn't have any interesting writing with his women, and pretty much all of their roles in the story are of them as sexual or subservient (I think it's very telling that they desperately wanted a final panel shot of Poison Ivy and Catwoman kissing, which would be essentially out of character and most certainly unnecessary, but would be "hot" for the fanboys).

Look, I don't expect much when it comes to female characters in superhero comics (a sad truth, but a truth regardless). How much more powerful would the story have been if, at the end, it was Catwoman who left Batman and not the other way around? It would have made just as much sense, if not more (she seems the type to cut and run when things get that emotionally convoluted). Why did Huntress have to be the weak link in the Bat-family chain? Why did Poison Ivy have to rely on Superman to fight for her?

I know individually these questions are relatively silly -- the problem is when there's such a pattern of them, along with things like *ugh* Lee's design on Huntress (let alone his well-known love of the well-endowed). It's just one of those things that irks me a little bit more every time it crops up as I read a comic.

I do hate to end on a negative note. There certainly are problems with Hush, but I don't think they're enough to detract from the fact it is a fun read. It's in the style that Loeb writes well for; perfect for the sideline comic book fan, who might know the characters but doesn't really read the comics. It's a genre that Lee's work really works for (and the Absolute edition improves upon pretty much every aspect of the art). And ultimately it's a story that's fun.

It's popcorn comics, the junk food of sequential art, but sometimes that just hits the spot.