BATMAN FOREVER? NOT FOR ME, KEMOSABE

We live and learn. I learned lately that it is now impossible to catch up to the Batman saga. It has passed me by. I neglected for years to buy any of the Batman titles. I like Batman (or used to), but I had only so many thousands of dollars to spend every month on funnybooks, and since my typing duties here at the Rancid Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer demanded that I read at least a few of the newest titles that heave into view with relentless regularity, I elected to spend my allowance on inaugural issues and a few Old Favorites. Batbooks didn’t qualify. But all the atmospheric disturbance recently about Bruce Wayne retiring — or dying or being buried alive or being transported to another planetary system — soon overwhelmed my best intentions, and I bought a few Batbooks — namely, Batman Nos. 681, 683, and 686, Detective No. 851, and the Battle for the Cowl one-shot, plus No. 1 — hoping to find out what Bruce was up to and what it all meant anyhow. Alas, a vain hope.

All of these books have at least one thing in common: they are almost entirely unintelligible to a person who has not been buying and reading these titles since the Dawn of Time or soon thereafter. In Batman No. 681, for instance, I don’t know who any of the characters are. Master Lo? Pierrot? Dark Ranger, Al-Khidr, Cardinal Maggi, Black Glove? The names keep coming, raining on the page like splinters in a typhoon. Jabari, Diallo, Jacob Nkele, John Mayhew, Squire, Musketeer, Mangrove Pierce? Jolly Swagman? Or is that last one just a joke? It’s impossible to tell; there are so many fanciful names without personalities or identities. Batman No. 683 is no better; ditto Detective No. 851. No discernible plots or stories or very many familiar characters.

The continuity confusion is compounded by another tendency too often indulged by comic book writers these days: they aspire to be script writers for movies, I suspect, and so they write as if they are writing for the cinema, not comic books. Action movies these days are distinguished by non-stop action and very little plot. Everything is visual excitement. Action leaps from one battle to an explosion to another battle. Observing all this, we have only an impression of what’s going on — the impression that all is in motion, all is exploding. Action action action. Whatever plot or story lies buried in the wreckage emerges only piecemeal and occasionally, a fragment here, another fragment there. The so-called narrative moves back and forth in time, here and there in space. Fragments, impressions predominate — all adding to an overwhelming sense of excitement. In a movie theater where everything happens in a couple hours, all the fragments begin to add up eventually and make a kind of splattered sense; but when the same narrative technique is used in a static medium like the serialized comic book, none of the pieces come together in a single issue, so we stagger on, bewildered and angry, in complete ignorance of the significance of what we see exploding on every other page. Without a sense of closure, the action becomes meaningless. And frustrating to view, impossible to comprehend.

Here, employing the same cinematic impressionistic technique for criticism, is Battle for the Cowl No. 1: Robin and Squire foil robbery attempt by means not altogether clear ... gang of pigs? vs the Network? ... someone is crusading around as “Batman”; who? ... Damian—who? Wannabe Robin? Batman? He crashes Batcar (or Oracle does?) ... then Nightwing rescues him ... then faux Batman rescues Nightwing ... too many scene changes and characters.

And then there’s the actual writing, the verbiage itself, which, in the wake of Bruce Wayne/Batman’s disappearance, has become bloated and pretentious. In No. 1 of Battle for the Cowl, we read that “the citizens of Gotham are looking for a savior — someone to take back the streets. They’re looking for Batman — or a batman.” Because Batman “was much more than just a crime fighter. He was Gotham’s protector. Her guardian angel.” Savior? Guardian angel? Not even in a comic book can we stomach such misbegotten religiosity.

Often the drawings are as inferior as the stories are baffling. Too much laboriously applied shadow, copious wrinkles in clothing distort anatomy, shadows on faces disfigure and destroy recognizability, anatomy is sometimes off. Catwoman Kyle’s head in No. 686 is repeatedly drawn in a position that is an anatomical impossibility. Andy Kubert’s pencils, featured on three pages at the back of the book, are beautiful, but Scott Williams’ inks turn subtle shading into stark black splotches that add too much visual emphasis where less would be more. Perhaps Kubert’s pencils, beautiful as they stand, simply can’t be inked without destroying their visual appeal. And the coloring time after time destroys visual clarity by being too dark.

In the Batman titles, DC Comics is doubtless hoping to amp the popularity of the Batman movies into newsstand sales, but, if industry reports are to be believed, it isn’t working. Happy movie-goers ought to snap up copies of the comic book featuring their movie idol, but apparently they’re not doing it. Still, DC plunges ahead with its marketing schemes. The plan is that a hyped-up movie fan will buy a Batman comic book, then, when he/she discovers that the story is continued in another Batbook, he/she will happily buy that title, too, and so on, ad infinitum. Even if this scheme worked — if more titles were being purchased, willy nilly — it’s a short-sighted strategy because it creates a continuity that is impenetrable: no new reader can make sense of what happens in a single title, so why would he/she buy the next title in the continuity? Initially, the plan may yield greater sales from title to title (although, as I say, it doesn’t appear to be working that way), but it stunts the growth of a comic-book reading public. The continuity-clutched titles appeal only to die-hard fans, who, presumably, would buy any thing with “Bat” in the title. New readers — youngsters looking for places to spend their three bucks — are likely to be quickly turned off by such tactics. Where does that leave the funnybook factories? Twenty years from now when all the die-hard fans — who were nurtured on the characters before continuity was the be-all and end-all of comic book writing — have died off, comic book publishers will have no one to buy the books. Like newspapers, they’ll die off themselves.

Comments

[mickey]

I couldn't agree more... bravo.

[ACK]

I look at the sales for all these volumes and then I marvel at your use of the word 'we' - 'we can't stomach', etc.

Apparently 'we' - the vast majority - can.

[RC Harvey]

"We" is an antique journalistic custom: the so-called "editorial we" means "I." "We" in the sentence at issue therefore has nothing to do with the misguided millions who are buying Batbooks.