Supergods by Grant Morrison and Why DC Comics Is Increasingly Full Of Bastards

I honestly did not like this very much. It may have something to do with how I see/saw its author, as the person primarily responsible for my return to comics after I had gotten tired of reading everything that said Spider-Man on it somewhere in high school. Morrison's Animal Man was a revelation for me, as I'm sure it was for anyone else who was reading it in the time frame during which it actually came out.

I guess I discovered him during the best period of his career since Animal Man, with the beginning chapters of his still pretty great Batman saga and All Star Superman in full swing. But the Grant Morrison of right now seems to be on a downturn, though even at his worst he's still just about the best in mainstream comics. Joe The Barbarian was an excuse to have a great artist draw a lot of really cool stuff, Return of Bruce Wayne was really uneven, from ridiculously cool Milligan-referencing Puritan witchfinder Batman to super-boring Cowboy Batman and unremarkable 30s Detective Batman.

And now he's about to take over the reigns of Superman, the "for real" one this time. If you aren't up on the whole "New 52" deal, DC's taking their entire line of superhero comics back to #1's to give people a fresh start (gain the built-in sales boost they need in an industry dying slower and more painfully than a Dragon Ball Z A-list hero) and putting new teams on the books and changing up a lot of history. Morrison's going back to the origins of Superman, meaning the 30s Superman who couldn't quite fly and was a socialist working man's champion. In Siegel and Shuster's first issue of Action Comics to feature Superman, he beat up a strike breaking governor! Morrison doing this is kind of a slap in the face to the original creators, who were given an extremely raw deal for creating the most iconic superhero of all time. They were paid $130 total for Superman for the rest of their lives, and as Morrison puts it, in an incredibly glib tone, "had created that character and thought they would create more to sell."

Morrison's new Superman doesn't have the costume, for the sole reason that the rights to Superman as he was created by S&S, which includes the iconic costume design, revert to their families in 2013. Even though he's probably doing this out of his own love for the character, the practical reason for all of this is that DC needs to establish a Superman that is recognizable sans costume and without the same power set as the original creation.

This is my whole issue with all of superhero comics. Ever since Hollywood and Comics realized their mutually beneficial relationship, to the point where both of the Big Two are now subsidiaries of companies that made their stock in movies, superhero comics are the flagship of a brand maintenance machine. Before and while reading this book, I thought about that a lot. What if Grant Morrison was actually allowed to turn Batman into the pansexual psychedelic crazy cool machine he writes about Batman being? I am all for greater freedom instead of continuity or marketability. But by the end of the book, the anarchic, fiercely original Morrison of Arkham Asylum's transvestite Joker and the Invisibles' motley crew of gender-bending lsd-magic badasses I love is gone and replaced with a guy who is totally cool with doing the best job he can without pushing against his editors.

And his editors/bosses have that change too. At Vertigo he was under Karen Berger, who is, as far as I'm concerned, the best. If you look at the stuff under her belt, you'll find pretty much every great comic DC is responsible for. Now in the mainstream DC world, he's got Didio and Levitz, who have their own superpower of completely fucking ignoring things that are major issues for their readers.

It seems like, as they attempt to make comics "smarter" and appeal to smarter people, they don't realize what that entails. The new comics fans are feminists and multiculturalist liberals who have the totally reasonable dream of getting every character of every (non-binary) gender and race a chance to get a great story, and the bosses at DC have responded by plugging their ears for as long as possible and dodging questions as much as possible (see these two interviews: on race and and gender, the latter being even more grossly impressive given that Laura Hudson is a great journalist and female comics fan) until this year's comic con where they finally just delivered a big fuck you directly to the ears of their fans instead of trying to bury it in the press.

This year at a DC panel, a woman and her daughter got up to ask a question. "Why don't you hire more female writers?" The response from Didio was "Who should we hire?" She continued with her concerns about the treatment of female characters in the DCU, and Jim Lee, who seems like a nice enough guy usually, had the fucking gall to ask whether she wanted female characters dead center on covers or slightly off to the side.

At this point, they moved from dodging to outright mocking the idea that they should give a shit about non-white males. In this, the year comics lost Dwayne McDuffie, who I would say is the most important black comics writer ever. The guy who made Jon Stewart the most recognizable Green Lantern, who was not afraid to lash out at Marvel by writing them a pitch called Teenage Ninja Negro Thrashers when they created 3 different characters who were all "black guys on skateboards." The guy who gave us Milestone Comics and Static Shock and Icon and Xombi, a comic that was just recently brought back to totally awesome effect and is being completely ignored by both readers and DC's marketing.

So what does all that really have to do with Morrison? Easy. He's helping perpetuate the only defense The Big Two has against those problems. He's keeping that vile precedent DC set with buying Superman all the way back in the 30s alive by writing a book where he softens the blow and then cleaning up the mess for DC. Grant Morrison is capital-G rant captial-M orrison, and if he threw his weight at the bosses about anything like this, it'd start raining authors and artists finally given the courage to unionize against an industry that has take over half a century to barely get almost fair with them. And now, sensing that the product they produce is just the blood in the veins of a much larger body of business, needs them more to maintain brands than produce good work, is going to do its best to keep them, they're gonna pull even harder, lest they learn from Superman, lest they stop worshipping Alan Moore's exemplary talent but slagging him off as a crazy old man who can't get along with anyone.

And that's why, with the confluence of Morrison's book and DC's asshole parade, I ain't buying a new DC book for a long time.

Batman 204-205, 206, 207

Tonight we've got an army of blind men, a thieving hippie-American Indian stereotype jazz trio, a bomb in a bouncy ball, a litany of luscious alliteration, barrels of pun, and Batman getting the death penalty! SOUND LIKE FUN!? LET'S GO!


Batman #204

Apology, Spider-Man vs. Batman, Batman 86, 112, 113, and 156 and why I'm skipping up to #204

Hey, I kinda fell off with this huh. It's because those old issues of Batman are tough to read man! But! They taught me a lesson about comics by being so.

If I had started a project to read every issue Amazing Spider-Man, I'd probably never have missed a day, and the reason why is that the Merry Marvel Method of storytelling was a MASSIVE game changer! The difference between Marvel Comics (especially Spider-Man) and everything else at the time was that ol' Stan knew how to develop a supporting cast! Spider-Man almost out of the gate has Aunt May, Flash Thompson, J. Jonah Jameson, Betty Brant, Harry Osborn, and the whole Fantastic Four as associates and they all have their own stories that happen along with Spidey's adventures. Batman on the other hand is almost completely static because he doesn't really have a personal life or a continuous narrative until DC takes notice of how well the Marvel formula works (and a certain giant of comic bookery named Denny O'Neil takes the bat-reigns.)

Now, with all that, I'm going to straight up skip ahead to Batman #204, the first issue where Batman left the nutso sci-fi stories of the 50s and early to mid 60s behind. But before I do that, I'll give you sort of a greatest hits of said stories, and these are mostly ones that Grant Morrison brought back during Batman RIP.

Batman #3 and #4

So yeah, these two issues are both not nearly as cool as the last two. There's about one story in each one that's worth the time it took to read them. In #3, Batman fights a gang run by The Ugliest Man In The World, and his origin story contains one of the best lines of dialogue in comic book history:

"What have you got there Tyler?"
"It's a hypo needle filled with a lot of drugs I mixed together haphazardly! I'll pretend to inject it into Carson!"

In #4, Batman and Robin fight Blackbeard. Also Batman guts a shark with a cutlass. Blackbeard turns out to be a two-bit mug though.

Yep. Pretty unremarkable.

Batman #2, Summer 1940

In this issue: Awesome splash pages, swashbuckling, surgery, Robindependence, and Batman in Africa.

As to the first item:
Look at that! Bob Kane just draws the coolest images. I love Joker's creepy hands. Oh and that's Catwoman on the ledge there.

In the first story, Batman concocts a brilliant plan to abduct The Joker from the hospital where he's recovering from his self-inflicted stab wound and force him to get brain surgery so he can become a productive citizen!However, Joker's boys have, in something that would never ever happen to today's genius-bordering-on-precognitive Batman, a better plan! They hold the surgeons working on Joker's wound at gunpoint to hurry them up, get him out of the hospital, and then use a fake Batman to distract the cops, eventually leading them to a barn where Fake Batman TOSSES A PITCHFORK through a boy in blue.

Ow.

Fake Batman is shortly thereafter blasted in the face with a Tommygun. Meanwhile, Joker's cronies secret him away into the back of a car while Catwoman spies on them, dressed up as an old lady selling gum(?). The real Batman appears and persuades Catwoman to help him stake out the Joker's castle as seen in the splash page there. Also, the Joker gang flies back to that particular castle in their very own hospital plane. At the castle, Catwoman is working both sides, trying to snags the same jewels Joker is planning on grabbing. Joker shows up while Catwoman is finessing them from their owner, and who is there to rescue Catwoman but Robin! Robin beats the stuffing out of Joker for a bit until he gets knocked in the face with a mace and nearly administered a "solution that will reduce you to nothingness within five minutes!" Then Batman and the Joker have a swashbucklin' swordfight until Bats knocks him out cold and Catwoman jumps into the ocean instead of going home in the previously mentioned awesome Batplane.

Pretty standard Batman story, but the New Yoik-dialect speaking gangsters having a great plan that Batman wasn't even a little prepared for was pretty refreshing compared these days where Batman literally killed the physical manifestation of evil in Final Crisis.

The second story uses the ol' Jekyl and Hyde trope for an antagonist. Mild mannered Adam Lamb is just a museum guard who likes to read a book called The Crime Master, but sometimes he becomes the evil Mister (wait for it) WOLF! As silly as that sounds, this story is actually pretty intense. Mr. Wolf takes a light night stroll in a park and just straight up bludgeons an innocent old man to death.
Check out the split background coloring in that first panel, and the dialogue! Wolf doesn't even care if you suspect anything, he just wants to kill you!

Our heroes finally run across Wolf when he puts together a gang for a bank job. The Dynamic Duo fails to thwart it and nearly gets run over in the process, but they manage to tail the gang to a pier, and obviously, they fight. This fight is pretty damn great though. Batman gets shot in the shoulder (again, in sharp contrast to today's Batman who has a bulletproof suit and is probably way too fast to ever get shot under normal circumstances) and Robin FLIPS THE FUCK OUT.
Look at that! He's throwing one guy while kicking another dude in the gut which causes that guy to elbow another guy in the face! After Robin soundly whoops the most of the gang, Batman crawls out of the water and tosses a smoke bomb so the duo can escape. AND THEN DICK GRAYSON, AGE 12 PERFORMS SURGERY ON BRUCE WAYNE TO REMOVE THE BULLET FROM HIS SHOULDER.

I think this is a good time for me to talk about the impression of Robin that I get from these books. In these first two issues, Robin seems to be a tiny version of Batman, just as good a fighter, just as insanely talented (I mean surgery come on), and Batman seems to recognize that. He gets to stake-out Joker by himself, he can fight on his own, he seems to get more independence. This is a stark contrast to how Robins tended to be treated by Bruce since Death In The Family, but I guess that version of Batman comes from the Year One post-Crisis thing. I sort of like this well-adjusted Bruce Wayne who smokes a pipe and isn't constantly afraid of having someone else killed.

And on that note, the way this issue ends is Batman fights Wolf and punches him down a flight of stairs where he breaks his neck. Oops.

In story #3, B&R have to take down a crime lord named Clubfoot, who has a meathook for a hand and a...club foot. Almost the entire story is a fight scene. Also, this issue contradicts the idea that Batman doesn't have superpowers because he punches a guy in the face and says "You didn't shave!" Batman's skin is so sensitive he can feel facial hair through his gloves. Anyway, Batman catches Clubfoot because he can't run up stairs faster than Bats. Surprise!

Story #4 is pure old-comic awesome. The hook is that a professor has found a living prehistoric man in Africa and is bringing him back to Metropolis on a train to teach him to be a productive member of society. Batman jumps onto the train because he is apparently aware of the presence of a tribe of hostile African pygmies who are going to try to kill the professor and take the prehistoric man back. You're probably wondering: Why is there a TRAIN FROM AFRICA to AMERICA and why did the pygmies wait until they were in America to attack? The answer is who cares, old comics are awesome. After Batman dispatches the pygmies and makes fun of their height, the professor introduces the prehistoric man. He's a nine foot tall, living 2000 year old man who is worshipped as a god by the pygmies. And then two circus proprietors kill the professor and steal our prehistoric pal. Does this sound like it's going to turn into King Kong again to you? Well surprisingly it doesn't. Batman and Robin head to the circus to bust him out, but he flips out and kills one of the circus guys, and is finally pacified when Robin beans him in the head with a slingshot. He even namechecks David and Goliath as he does it.

And that's Batman #2. Already I'm starting to get into this! The Batman and Robin dynamic is so much different from how it is today, and all these crazy plots are actually really interesting when Batman tends to be such a serious and complex book these days. Tomorrow is Batman #3!

Introduction/Batman #1

Hello and welcome to the very first post of Batman Summer, my summer project to read every single issue of DC's main Batman title. Obviously doing this makes me miss out on the very early beginnings of Batman from Detective comics, but I think over 700 issues to read as of August 2010 is enough work for me to do in one summer. Over the course of all of this I'll be connecting old Batman to new Batman, though I can't say my knowledge so far is anywhere near encyclopedic at the moment (though surely it will be by the end of this). One of the exceptions to the all Batman rule I'll be making is any time there's one of those huge multi-title crossovers like No Man's Land or Bruce Wayne: Murderer, in which case I'll read the entire storyline. I'll probably end up rereading all the Crisis titles as well.
And so we begin with the auspicious Batman #1 of Spring 1940. First off, the differences in the format are noticeable because for the first 5 issues, Batman was a quarterly magazine, so this contains 4 different stories for a total of 52 pages of comics for the wonderful cover price of a single dime! The first page is pretty damn cool.I don't know if it's the way Batman Chronicles printed these things, but the coloring here is amazing. Really beautiful, bold stuff. Maybe I'm just geeking out on colors because of this awesome Colleen Coover interview where she makes a really cool observation about purple and green and primary colors which will figure into this posting again later. This scan might be too small, but if you look at the way Martha Wayne's face is drawn in the first panel, you can really see that Bob Kane probably inspired Tim Sale (The Long Halloween) in a big way. And how cool is that top image of Batman? Oh yeah, and obviously everyone knows what's going on here by now. I think I'll start keeping a running tally of how many times this same scene is played out throughout this run.
Anyway, the story. This is the very first appearance of The Joker and boy is he scary.
Yipes. Anyway, the plot of the first story is that The Joker is stealing gems and killing people after he announces that he's gonna do it on the radio. After the first two, he finally meets Batman and eventually kicks him off a bridge into a river. For his third scheme, he comes up with this horrifying disguise:Honestly this issue is visually scarier than all the other things I've ever read with the Joker in them. After Joker bags another body and another gem, Robin tails him to an abandoned house in a forest. This would suggest that Batman hasn't yet developed his intense brooding neuroses about letting a Robin do anything potentially dangerous alone. That particular hang-up would have been useful in this case because Robin is quickly beaten over the head with Joker's police billyclub AND THEN BATMAN TAKES OUT THIS AWESOME INFRARED FLASHLIGHT
TECHNOLOGY! Anyway they fight and the Joker ends up in jail, but the end makes it pretty clear that he's definitely going to get out of jail. And that's the end of the first half of one of the three stories in here. This one was later remade into the also awesome Ed Brubaker story The Man Who Laughs, which sort of reconfigured the story around to what the Joker is now, adding in the intense nihilism and insanity he's known for now, where in this original version the Joker's gimmick seems to be mostly playing cards (Lots of card lines like "The Joker is still trump card!" and "Joker's back in the deck!"), which is interesting given that he's already using his patented smile gas, which would seem to go along with his comedic bent as visible in things like JM DeMatteis' Going Sane.

The second story involves one of the OG Batman villians, Professor Hugo Strange. This story was also later remade into Matt Wagner's Batman and the Monster Men, which is also great. Strange busts out of jail with his gigantic monster men pals. After that, the Monster Men go straight Godzilla on Gotham City, smashing a whole squad of cops with a light post, tossing cars left and right, and pulling their El-train off its tracks, so obviously Batman jumps into action to shut that down. And how does he do that? In the mind-blowing WWII-era Batplane, with a pilot seat-mounted machine gun and styling that looks like a realistic bat head with a mermaid tail.
Bats gets to Strange's hideout where he pretty much gets rocked by the Monster Men, and then gets injected with MONSTER SERUM in a bit that would later be half-used in the video game Arkham Asylum to set up its brutally underwhelming final boss fight. Batman convinces the Monsters to beat each other up while he uses an emergency chemistry set to cook up an antidote to the serum and gets back in the Batplane. AND THEN IT TURNS INTO KING KONG. One of the Monster Men climbs to the top of the tallest building in Gotham and Batman strafes him in the Batplane until finally he's knocked out by gas pellets fired from the plane. It's a pretty funny ending that comes out nowhere, and it inhabits a bizarre space between serious thriller Batman and the yet-to-come completely nuts 60s Batman.

The third story takes place on a boat and isn't really noticeable save for that it introduces Catwoman and there's this awesome panel:


Story four is chapter 2 of the original Joker section, and it just gets better. Joker starts off his newly escaped life by whacking a cop in the most ingenious way possible. He puts a poison dart inside a phone and screams his name FORCING THE DART OUT WITH THE POWERFUL VIBRATIONS FROM HIS LOUD VOICE. I love old comics. Also, I hope you did read that Colleen Coover interview, because this page is a beautiful use of complementary purples and yellows.
How great is that? Also, that guy is so terrified he says "jokers" twice simultaneously. Anyway, the Dynamic Duo and the cops come up with the idea of creating a fake jewel for Jokes to heist, and when he shows up, Robin gives chase across the rooftops of Gotham. Joker is just about to shoot Robin when Batman distracts him, they fight, and Batman eventually kicks Joker into a wall which causes the man in green to stab himself in the chest. The final panel makes it clear that this won't be the last we ever see of The Joker.

All in all, this is a pretty auspicious start for Batman's solo book. The introduction of what eventually became probably the most popular and recognizable villian of all time, a ridiculous King Kong homage, and "QUIET OR PAPA SPANK!" This is going to be a real adventure for me as well.