Superheroes
I used to read superhero comics all the time when I was a kid. My oldest comics (which are in tatters by now) date back to about 1976: World's Finest (at the time, I didn't realize that "finest" in that context suggested police officers), some giant-size Superman and Batman issues, and then by a couple years later all sorts of other stuff. My brother was into Spider-Man, so I read a bunch of that, but I didn't really collect it. But all through junior high and high school I bought and devoured Teen Titans and X-Men and Legion of Super-Heroes. It wasn't 'til late high school, I think, that I began to regularly read comics that didn't involve superheroes. But these days I pretty much never read superhero comics.
But a couple of things have made me nostalgic this past week. First, there's "Mr. Muerte and the Eyeball Kid" over at Strange Horizons; I can perfectly picture the comic-book scenes from Sean's descriptions, down to the poses. He's really got the tone down, too—the dialogue, the character motivations, the kinds of incidents. And I think it's particularly cool that all this is in service to a literary story.
And last Wednesday I wandered by the comic shop, as I often do. Lee's Comics is where I bought my comics when I was a kid, going by after school on my bike (and not locking my bike); I think Lee opened the store when I was in 7th grade. It's moved twice since then, and now he has two stores, and one of them is a ten-minute walk from my apartment. It's a great store; Lee has always been supportive of independent comics creators, from Elfquest back in the old days to Finder today. Friendly and knowledgeable staff, too.
So anyway, I stopped by and happened to wander past the racks of Marvel and DC titles, the mainstream superhero stuff that I rarely even glance at these days, even though some of the more interesting independent creators (like Brian Michael Bendis) have started writing some reasonably good superhero stuff. And something caught my eye: a perfect-bound 80-page volume with a distorted Batman on the cover and DK2 in big letters across the bottom.
It was, in fact, exactly what it appeared to be: a sequel, fifteen years later, to Frank Miller's groundbreaking Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, better known simply as Dark Knight. I had no idea this sequel was even in the works, and here we had issue 3 of 3. The shop had the first two issues on hand, so I picked up all three of them, and read them here and there over the next few days.
It's not quite as good as the original, simply because it's not as original. The original was one of the things, along with Watchmen, that changed the face of superhero comics and ushered in the Grim 'n' Gritty(TM) era; the new one couldn't possibly be as influential. But it sure is good.
In the original, I was really annoyed by Miller's larger-than-life art style. I'd been a big fan of his run on Daredevil, and couldn't see why he was giving up the clean lines and standard comic-book look for these grotesqueries. It was the start of a style that he's been using ever since, mostly on the Sin City books, which I haven't been paying much attention to. But I've had fifteen years to get used to the look, and it doesn't bother me nearly so much any more.
This new series is one of a smallish genre of end-of-the-superhero-world stories, again pioneered by the original DK. Kingdom Come is probably the best and highest-profile example in recent years. Such stories do several things that I appreciate:
- They bring in a huge array of references and in-jokes, which I, being one of the audience they're aimed at, tend to enjoy quite a bit.
- They're not canonical, so they can mess with continuity a little, for best effect.
- More importantly, they're not canonical, so they can kill off any of the characters, and can leave the world drastically changed.
The Dark Knight Strikes Again (a.k.a. DK2) is no exception in any of those areas. For example, it brings in lots of great old characters, gives you a page or so to guess who they are, then tells you. (The opening sequence is breathtaking, if you're into this sort of thing.) A specific example is Miller's use of the Question, the old Charlton Comics character who wears a skin-colored mask that obscures his face. Now, back in the mid-'80s, DC bought the rights to the Charlton characters: the Question, Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, Booster Gold (I think), et alia. And Alan Moore came to them and said "I really want to do a story with these characters, but it will completely change the characters in big ways." And DC said "Forget it. Go invent some other characters that are kind of like these ones, and then you can do what you want with them." And so the Question became Rorschach; Blue Beetle became Nite Owl; Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan. If Booster Gold was indeed a Charlton character, then he was probably the basis for Ozymandias. (It was particularly mind-bending to learn the origin of those characters after I'd been reading Justice League for a while; JL was going through a fluff-comedy phase, so Blue Beetle and Booster Gold were played completely for laughs, a pair of buddies straight out of a road movie. Imagine Ozymandias and Nite Owl knocking back a couple of brewskis.)
Anyway, I never read enough of the original Question to know how much Rorschach's personality was based on him, but Miller plays it to the hilt; the Question in DK2 essentially is Rorschach, slightly boosted and distorted for partial comic effect. His narration is in typewriter font, and he says things like:
The HUMAN SPIRIT is a shattered pane of GLASS--wrapped in soft VELVET and soaked in sugary POISON. EVIL has SEDUCED mankind. And MANKIND has shown all the CHASTITY of a three-dollar WHORE.It's marvelous. And to make it even better, Miller puts the Question in a situation where he has to work with Green Arrow—who in Miller's world has become an old-guard Marxist. The two of them have a very funny argument right near the end.
There are plenty of other great moments as well. (Superman and Wonder Woman having sex; Jimmy Olsen as a hard-bitten rabble-rousing newsman; a certain stretchable but quite mad former hero; wings and bottled cities and just all sorts of cool stuff.) If you weren't reading superhero comics in the '70s and/or '80s, you may not enjoy this, but if you were, and if you liked the first DK, you'll probably like this one too. (Though I should note that it relies fairly heavily on comic-book science; if you've outgrown comic-book science, you'll be really annoyed with some bits of this.)
Unfortunately, the B story, the big subplot that doesn't resolve 'til the end, is not nearly as good as the main story, and is kinda predictable and mildly politically annoying. But what the hell, the rest of the story is solid enough to make up for it. Besides, in the post-Sept. 11 world, where else are you going to get a story where the good guys are basically terrorists, trying to take down an evil totalitarian government?
Okay, that was way more than I meant to say about that, but I'm not done with this entry yet. Because the other thing that caught my eye over in the superhero section was a bound volume of four issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, the new series being written by J. Michael Straczynski. I'd read a couple issues early on, and thought they were okay but nothing special, and I've kinda soured on JMS because of how terrible most of this season of Jeremiah was. But I opened up this Spider-Man book and leafed through it, and discovered that the first issue in it was a Sept. 11 tribute. Such things tend to annoy me, and I don't think it's possible to really do a good job of explaining how real-world tragedies can happen in the world of comic books; any of a dozen superheroes does more impressive things every month than stopping a hijacking-in-progress. But never underestimate the power of good writing. And JMS is still a fine writer when he wants to be. This Sept. 11 issue brought tears to my eyes, despite my not wanting to like it.
And then there was an issue about Peter Parker, in his real-world identity as a science teacher, dealing with a student whose family's living in an abandoned building; not brilliant, but solid. And then: Aunt May comes to Peter's apartment to confront him with the fact that she knows he's Spider-Man.
Really powerful, really nicely done, very effective. I bought that volume too.