The new demon of the comic book industry is its dwindling base of readers. The reason for the loss of readers used to be college, nowadays it ‘continuity.’ For the layman, that means a build-up of stories that reference each other throughout its long life.
In an effort to get around this, both DC and Marvel Comics have developed their own lines of comics to draw in new readers. Marvel has its Ultimate line (now in danger of cancellation) and DC has its All Star line. While Marvel sought to update and simplify their characters, DC simply hired all star creators (get it?) and let them go all out on their two biggest properties, Batman and Superman.
The All Star Superman series is a love letter to the Silver Age of the series from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. An imaginative and heartfelt series, All Star Superman has brought in readers that would never dream of reading about the big blue boyscout. A successful combination of a new direction and a stellar team of creators, All Star Superman has been a heralded award-winning monument to the medium.
All Star Batman and Robin has almost universally regarded as the worst comic ever made.
This raises two questions:
1. How could a Batman comic by Frank Miller be so bad?
2. Is this some ironic statement on the fanboy community from Miller as hinted at many times online?
In either case, I’m more interested in judging the book on its own. A supremely late series that has a hard time meeting its monthly release dates, the first issue is full of cheesecake images of Vicky Vale telling the readers in her narration about how cool her date with Bruce Wayne is going to be. Her date at the circus. That’s right, Bruce has invited the sexy Vale to watch him ogle a young boy acrobat at the circus. The first issue also details that Gotham is a crooked town where the cops are sex-crazed lunatics… (the fact that Frank continually establishes such a sexually frustrated world alongside Bruce Wayne stalking Dick Grayson really creeps me out to no end).
I was almost positive that this series was intended for a young audience, but All Star Batman and Robin is without a doubt the most juvenile and base comic I have ever read. The only possibility that would make this series passable is that Frank Miller is being ironic with his depiction of a deranged child-like Batman and a likewise unappealing super hero community.
The inclusion of other characters such as Black Canary, Wonder Woman and the rest of the Justice League of America (who apparently hold court in the basement of an apartment building) is a simple hate mail letter to super heroes in general. They are shown as idiotic bumbling fools a few seconds away from killing each other or humping each other.
If Miller’s intention is to play a prank on his readers, it’s a very poor one and ironically (there’s that word again) one being played on comic readers by other creators such as Garth Ennis (The Boys) and Mark Millar (Kick Ass). A scant number of years earlier Miller released Dark Knight Strikes Again was a proposed antithesis to his grim Dark Knight Returns series that made Miller a glory boy of Rolling Stone. Another terrible comic book, Strikes Again regaled super heroes as fantastic fun characters rather than depicting a grim world driven to the breaking point.
So… is Frank Miller psychotic or clever? Given the early glimpses of his Spirit film, I’ll side with psychotic and leave it at that.
If not for Frank Miller being very vocal about his views on justifiable violence, I might be obliged to view this series as humorous, but instead I really think Frank feels that Batman’s style of punishment (more similar to Marvel Comics’ Punisher than DC’s Batman) is justified. That in itself is worrisome. The proposed ‘Holy Terror, Batman!’ one-off featuring Batman versus Osama Bin Laden looks all the more like the work of a lunatic than an ‘ironic comic book.’
All Star Batman and Robin is a series that tries the patience of readers as words are thrown about the page, often repeating themselves (I never knew you could just repeat the words ‘Love’ and ‘Chunks’ so many times) and fails miserably to tell a story worth reading. I had picked up this collection of the first 9 issues due to a bargain price. After hearing how this was such a must read series, I took the chance.
But now I realize that amount of money is too much for this waste of time.
The latest issue (#10) was ‘leaked’ with profanity on almost every page, bringing a massive amount of attention to the comic. As columnist Steven Grant pointed out, apparently DC Editorial had no problem depicting the rough sex between Batman and Black Canary in the same issue, which begs the question ‘why censor words over actions?’ I cannot say with absolute certainty that this leak was a deliberate ploy to drum up readers to the series, but if so… those readers will be very disappointed. The ‘misprint’ issue is now almost worthless and the main series seemingly written by a frustrated teenager.
Back in my day, there was an almost instantaneous negative response to the Dark Knight Returns with numerous parodies lampooning Frank Miller’s grim Chandler-esque style. Few remember how the comic community was divided over the acceptance of Dark Knight Returns.
Many comic journalists and historians would have you believe that the series challenged the medium and was praised almost universally but this simply untrue. The reason that I bring this up at all is that All Star Batman and Robin reads more like a parody of Frank Miller’s work than anything else… except the parodies (such as Gnatrat) were actually funny.
The defense of this series may be that it is more interesting or more difficult to make a Batman comic book that thumbs its nose to the idea. I counter that by saying that the far more difficult act is to create a sincere Batman comic book that embraces the thing for what it is and still presents a finished product that is enjoyable.
How did ‘regular comic books’ become so difficult to produce? I know that I am setting myself up here, but it seems that the ‘ironic’ or ‘post-modern’ comic book (ooooh, I mean graphic novel) is becoming more prevalent than the traditional comic book. Both can certainly exist and certainly serve their purposes… but let’s not forget that comic books as they are act as the corner stone of why readers ever picked up Batman or Superman in the first place.
Check out my recommended list for a few examples and also the aforementioned Gnatrat.
Recommended:
Batman: The Long Halloween
Batman: Year One Hundred
JLA Vol. 7: Tower of Babel
Batman: Death and the City
Batman: Ego and Other Tails
Tales of the Batman: Tim Sale
Batman: Black & White, Vol. 1
Batman: Tales of the Demon
Batman: Son of the Demon
Ultimate Gnatrat
