SmartRemarks

The final issue of Grant Morrison’s much-hyped “Batman: R.I.P.” storyline hit the shelves last week (after delays. what a surprise)… and the best thing I can say about the story, now that it’s complete, is that it had some lovely painted covers by Alex Ross.

Fair warning: spoilers ahead. A decent summary of the entire story arc (from Batman #676-681)—and its precursors, pretty much the entirety of Morrison’s two-year run—can be found here.

This wasn’t a case (as it seems to be with Final Crisis) of DC promoting the story as something other than what the author intended. Morrison himself pushed this tale as “the definitive story of Batman,” promising to put the character through “a fate worse than death. Things that no one would expect to happen,” and warning readers that in the final issue, “when we find out the identity of the villain, it’s possibly the most shocking Batman reveal in 70 years.” He utterly failed to deliver—not only on his grandiose claims, but even on the basic expectations of a coherent, satisfying narrative.

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Tags: Batman, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, Grant Morrison, super-heroes

Looking in from the outside, it seems like there’s lots of second-guessing and retrenching going on at the number two comics company. With Final Crisis in its home stretch and major goings-on in the Superman and Batman titles, several long-term storylines are up in the air right now, and readers are left wondering whether the DCU will have any coherent creative direction when the dust settles. Omens are not good. As Tom Bondurant puts it in reaction to the solicitations for February’s books,

Cancellations, character shuffling, and general restructuring seem to be the order of business for the first part of 2009.

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Tags: Batman, continuity, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Legion, super-heroes, Superman, Wonder Woman

How could I resist passing this along?

Matt Yglesias: It seems that Barack Obama, like Rachel Maddow and all decent progressives, is a comic book fan. Excellent news for America.

That’s based on the very first item (among many other interesting ones) in the Telegraph piece he links, reporting:

• He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics

We already knew (or suspected) at least the first part of this, of course. Natural choices for someone his age, who probably first noticed comics in the early ’70s. (Perhaps he ought to take a look at Ex Machina, too, an award-winning comic about a professional politician who happens to be a former super-hero.)

At any rate, clearly Barack understands the cardinal life lesson we learn from Peter Parker:  With great power comes great responsibility.

Among other interesting factoids from the Telegraph, we also learn that Obama won a Grammy award, he speaks Spanish, he bench presses 200 pounds, his home-cooking specialty is chili, he uses a Mac (naturally!), and one of his favorite films (I really do love this guy’s taste) is Casablanca.

(I wasn’t previously aware that Maddow read comics, either, but apparently it’s true, which just makes her even cooler than she already obviously was.)

Tags: Mac, Obama, Rachel Maddow, super-heroes

Looking around, Friday was a day of curiously juxtaposed ups and downs, as on the one hand there was the pleasant schadenfreude of seeing the wheels continue to come off not only John McCain’s campaign but those of other desperate Republicans as well, while on the other hand we all mourned the passing of the inimitable Studs Terkel.

But rather than focus on anything too serious, I thought I’d take a short break to look at the less weighty side of political life. On the day that Obama took at least a few hours’ break to take his kids to a Halloween party, I dug up an interview with him from that long-ago time before the conventions, in (of all things) Entertainment Weekly, asking him about his choices in (yep) entertainment.

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Tags: McCain, media, Obama, super-heroes

The final issue of DCU Decisions was released Wednesday, completing a cliffhanger from #3. As I’ve written, the series started with at least some potential for breaking interesting ground, but then methodically failed to live up to that potential. The second half of the series is even more disappointing and forgettable, leaving one wondering what if anything this book was intended to accomplish.

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Tags: continuity, DC Comics, DCU Decisions, Election 2008, Superman, Wonder Woman

Now this is what a really epic-scale super-hero comic book looks like.

(Yeah, I know it came out two weeks ago, but I’m running a little behind. There’s been a lot of politics happening lately. So sue me.)

Notwithstanding the official title and cover dress, this story really bears no meaningful connection to Final Crisis. And that’s just fine. It’s a Legion story through and through, and it’s done in a grand style.

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Tags: continuity, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Geoff Johns, George Perez, Legion, super-heroes, Superman

After a two-month gap (partially planned, but also including an extra three-week delay), DC released issue #4 of Final Crisis this week.

And… I can’t really say that it was worth the wait.

Here’s what happens in this issue:  with Earth infected by the Anti-Life Equation, the heroes try to rally their forces against those who have been possessed. Meanwhile, Darkseid finishes reincarnating in the body of Dan Turpin.

And, umm… that’s it, really.

We get nothing new about the errant Monitor (the only plot thread that even remotely ties this in to previous Crises). We get nothing about Libra and his army of villains. Nothing about goings-on on Oa. We do get more non sequitur dialogue (the sequence between Green Arrow and the Ray, for example). We’re given the puzzling factoid that about a billion people planetwide were taken over by the ALE… which sounds large but is actually only about 15% of Earth’s population, making it odd that they seem to have a zombie-movie-like numerical advantage in all the crowd scenes. And through it all, every page practically screams at me, “none of this is going to matter to the DCU at large. There is no possible way this story can end except by pressing a giant reset button.”

(Except for the return of Barry Allen, of course. Which is itself a terrible idea:  Barry had one of the best deaths in comics history, by far the most memorable moment of his heroic career, and anything flowing from his return can only undermine that moment and seem anticlimactic by comparison.)

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Tags: Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Green Arrow, super-heroes

Last week brought the release of DCU Decisions #2. While I was ambivalent about the first issue, I have to say I’m seriously underwhelmed by the second. Perhaps it’s just that the dramatic real-world political and economic events of recent weeks make this story seem painfully superficial by contrast… but honestly, even judged just as a comic, I think it’s heading rapidly downhill.

Neither the political themes nor the mystery story go anywhere interesting (or really much of anywhere at all), and the writing is tonally uneven and shows a poor grasp of the characters. Even the art is lackluster; Howard Porter’s work here doesn’t compare well to his own past work, much less to Leonardi’s in the previous issue. (I understand Porter is recovering from a thumb injury, though, so we can cut him a little slack.)

The story deserves no such generosity.
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Tags: Batman, DC Comics, DCU Decisions, Election 2008, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, super-heroes

The news broke this week that DC Comics is cancelling Legion of Super-Heroes. (Whoops: putting it on “indefinite hiatus.”)

Says DC’s Executive Editor Dan DiDio, “50 seemed like a really nice number to bring this series to a conclusion.” This oh-so-carefully considered reasoning evidently superseded the fact that writer Jim Shooter was in the middle of an extended storyline projected to conclude four months later in #54. Or the fact that 2008 is the 50th anniversary of the Legion, which was the very first super-team of the Silver Age when it debuted in 1958. Or the fact that Legion (while not an A-list title in recent years) has bumped in sales since Shooter (a fan-favorite on the Legion since his original run in the 1960s) came aboard, and has been selling a steady 25-30,000 copies a month, far more than other titles like Birds of Prey, Blue Beetle, or Jonah Hex. (Nothing against those titles; all are critical favorites, and I’m not suggesting they should be cancelled. OTOH, the critically disregarded Simon Dark only sells about 12,000 copies, yet doesn’t appear to be on the chopping block).
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Tags: Dan DiDio, DC Comics, Geoff Johns, Legion, super-heroes

I just saw The Dark Knight for a second time yesterday, at a discount matinee. I’d seen it before on the night it opened, but I enjoyed the chance for a repeat viewing from a vantage point better than fourth-row lower-left, and with an audience noise level that didn’t drown out the dialogue.

Then today, through sheer happenstance, I read a fresh consideration of the film in the New York Times by the always-thoughtful writer Jonathan Lethem, who had been secluded writing a book this summer and not seen the film until recently. He admits that he “felt disabled by the film, and demoralized”… and refers to other analyses validating his impression of it as a political work,

“…a defense of the present administration’s cursory regard for human rights abroad and civil rights at home, in the cause of reply to attacks from an irrational and inhuman evil.”

I don’t agree with that. There’s no question that The Dark Knight is, well, a dark film. It is in many ways a tragedy:  several sympathetic characters die, the villain is captured but unchastened, and the hero has his character flaws on painful display and ultimately has his public reputation ruined, forced to run from the law. My girlfriend left the screening in a dark mood herself, complaining that although it was well-made and gripping, it was also discouraging and depressing.

Personally, I think it puts these elements to good use. It elevates the material to a level seldom reached by super-hero movies (or, indeed, by very many movies at all these days), using it to explore difficult moral choices. Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker, turning a familiar villain into a genuinely unsettling agent of chaos, would be worth every plaudit it has earned even without the sympathy for his untimely death.

However, dark as it may be, I do not find the film as a whole to be an apology for fascism, or the current admnistration’s movements in that direction.

Some do. Lethem cites conservative writer Andrew Klavan, who not only sees but celebrates this interpretation, writing in (of course) The Wall Street Journal:

“There seems to me no question that the Batman film ‘The Dark Knight,’ currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.

…like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society… and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

‘The Dark Knight,’ then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. …

Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They’re wrong, of course, even on their own terms.

I disagree with Klavan, emphatically. He’s trying to take a work that actually embodies moral complexity, and twist it into a piece of simplistic propaganda. There is no doubt in my mind that director Christopher Nolan and his fellow screenwriters Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer did not intend the movie as an apologia for George W. Bush.

And yet… and yet…

There’s no denying that those elements are there to be found in the material. And not only in this film, but in Batman as a concept, and indeed in super-hero stories in general.

The Batman is, undeniably, a masked vigilante. He works outside the law, routinely committing acts that would be violations of suspects’ civil liberties if perpetrated by any recognized authority. Even as he hides his own identity, he has little or no regard for anyone else’s privacy:  the cell-phone surveillance device in The Dark Knight, while certainly an allegory for Bush administration wiretapping in some respects, is hardly unprecedented in the comics, where the Batman routinely eavesdrops on all sorts of people, including his fellow heroes.

Much the same is true of most other super-heroes—even the noblest of the lot, Superman. While in his earliest days the character defended the “little people” against corrupt authorities and social oppression, he quickly evolved into a defender and protector of the social status quo, as did most of those who followed in his footsteps. And, at their most basic, they routinely solve problems by violence, taking advantage of the fact that they have more power than average citizens. The fascist subtext, the worship of power, the use of ends to justify means, is always there to be found, inextricably intertwined with the material. It was certainly there in this summer’s other big super-hero smash, Iron Man, in which a man whose life and fortune have made him a creature of the military-industrial complex uses the tools of that complex to take up arms against its corrupt and violent (and inevitable) side-effects.

So why do I, with my decidedly progressive, civil-libertarian politics, enjoy and defend these kinds of stories in general and The Dark Knight in particular? How is it that so many of the other comics fans (and writers) I know share political values not dissimilar to my own? There seems to be a paradox here.

Let us set aside the defense that we’re dealing with fantasy worlds where “good” and “evil” are far more clear-cut and unequivocal than in reality. It’s a distinction that Andrew Klavan (and George W. Bush) seem not to grasp, but it’s not enough; there’s more going on here.

I think a big part of it has to do with the parallel theme of hope, of optimism, of confidence in the ability of individual citizens (costumes and powers notwithstanding) to engage their world in a constructive, meaningful way.

That aspect is certainly present in The Dark Knight. One key plot element that unravels the Joker’s master plan is that he even as he stayed a step ahead of his direct enemies (the Batman, Jim Gordon, Harvey Dent), he underestimated the general citizens of Gotham. In the previous film, Batman Begins, Batman’s nemeses were convinced that Gotham City was too corrupted, and had to be brought down through fear and violence, while the Batman insisted that its people were still worthy of a chance at redemption. In this film they get that chance even more directly:  the Joker’s plot hinges on the assumption that they will be controlled (again) by fear, driven to act in “preemptive” violence against strangers, but they confound him when they refuse to do so and instead accept a greater risk to their lives by taking a stand on moral principles. The completely cynical (just like the completely naive) cannot imagine that anyone else would think or act differently than they themselves do, and therein lies his downfall. In this sense, if one seeks political allegory, it is clearly the Joker, not the Batman, standing in the shoes of the Bush administration.

Another distinction is the matter of accountability. When Bruce Wayne puts on the mask and costume, he understands that he is acting outside the law. As the film makes painfully clear throughout, but especially in its conclusion, he accepts that this prevents him from enjoying a normal life. He accepts the stigma and isolation that come from that decision. When he falls back on the cell-phone-surveillance plot device, the film makes it perfectly clear that this really is too much power to vest in any one man, that using it even once under dire circumstances is enough to alienate the trust of his allies, and that under no circumstances should it be used on a regular basis.

Perhaps most importantly, unlike Bush, he is not willing to sacrifice lives to achieve his goals… even to the point of being prepared to give up his mask and the status and power that come with it in order to protect innocents. In the film as in the comics, he refuses to arrogate to himself the power over life and death:  even the Joker, in the end, he captures but will not kill.

These distinctions, I think, are critical to why I continue to enjoy super-hero stories in good conscience, and in particular why I enjoyed The Dark Knight, which wove such distinctions inextricably into its themes. I do not like the Punisher; I do not like Dirty Harry; they and their ilk are closer analogs for George W. Bush, whom I also do not like. Were the Batman more like any of them, I would not like him. Thankfully, his view of morality is more… nuanced.

Tags: Batman, Dark Knight, fascism, Iron Man, morality, super-heroes, Superman