Batman: Noel

Sometimes it takes dyin' to teach a fella how ta live.

(Spoilers -- although the strength of the book isn't really that its full of countless unforeseen plot twists)

Think about what you know about Charles Dickens' timeless classic, A Christmas Carol. Three ghosts, Christmas goose, "God bless us, everyone!", and all that. Now imagine it with more Batman. An insane concept? I sort of thought so. Dickens' story is a pretty simple morality tale: an old, crotchety hardass learns through some wacky hallucinations that he should be more charitable and look out for his fellow man. Batman has never strictly operated within the law, but the general goodness of his character is never really questioned, and if he has any faults, lack of charity isn't one of them. It's not often that a Batman arc goes by without Bruce Wayne showing up some place or another in Gotham to attend the ribbon cutting of some public works project that he's financing. That said, given that this book, Batman: Noel, was being drawn by Lee Bermejo, whose art made the Brian Azarello penned Joker a delightfully haunting experience, I knew I had to pick it up. This is Bermejo's first stab at writing as well as penciling and my only hope was that his Dickensian Batman idea would hold up. It's maybe not perfect, but I can happily say that it mostly does, and when paired with his strikingly gorgeous art, his book is a very fun read.

Batman: Noel is told a bit like a Christmas book. That was Bermejo's original idea, although he strayed from it being strictly that as he continued to develop the concept. Still, the book has sparse dialogue except for a couple of specific scenes, instead making use of running narration, and only a little of it on each panel, so that the art has room to breathe and so the pictures tell as much of the story as the text. The first few pages in fact are mostly wordless, and show us snow-covered old brick buildings with chimney stacks billowing smoke to at least give us a little bit of the feel of Dickensian England, even as the story is set in modern day Gotham. The first character we're introduced to is Bob Cratchit, who exists just as he is in the Dickens story. He's broke and he has a son named Tim with a bum name. The narration tells us that Scrooge is making him work on Christmas, but this doesn't seem to match up with what's going on in pictures because we see him delivering a package with a hand-scrawled note on it from the Joker. But then, suddenly, Batman shows up, rolls a 20 on his intimidate check as he calls Bob low-life scum and places a tracer on him. So what's going on is that Batman is Batman in the actual dialogue, but he's standing in for Scrooge in the narration. Bob's "working for Scrooge on Christmas" by being Batman's lead to finding the Joker.

Bruce returns back to the Batcave, where Alfred expresses his displeasure with using the father of a young boy as bait for the Joker, gently reminding Bruce that Jason Todd once got a face full of Joker-wielded crowbar. Alfred departs to find Bruce some medicine for the cough he seems to be developing, and Bruce, now alone, looks at Jason's old Robin uniform and sees a vision of Jason telling him that he needs to pay or there will be consequences. That's right everybody: Jason Todd is Jacob Marley. So now Batman we know that Batman is also going to be visited by three "ghosts" and so he does, although unlike Robin/Marley, these are actual flesh-and-blood encounters. Batman briefly stops over on the Gotham PD rooftop to meet with Jim Gordon, who here has his usual bristly mustache and square-rimmed glasses, but smokes a pipe that evokes Sherlock Holmes and dons a red scarf to get in the Dickens spirit. Gordon says that Catwoman has information on the Joker.

Batman meets Catwoman on a rooftop at exactly 1 AM, and thus she stands in for the Ghost of Christmas past. She tries to goad Batman by showing him a bag full of cat-burgled jewels, and when he says between hacking coughs that he doesn't have time for this crap, she reminisces about how he used to be different and less serious. The Ghost of Christmas Present is Superman who basically tells Batman to have more faith in people and to get off his high horse a bit as far as calling everybody who slips up a hopeless scumbag. The Ghost of Christmas Future is filled in for by the Joker, who just skips the moralizing and straight-up buries Batman alive. The book ends with Batman emerging from the grave ala Batman: RIP and arriving just in the nick of time before Joker pipe-wrenches Bob and his family to death. The gist of the scene has been done countless times, countless different ways, but it's gorgeous to look at here, like the rest of the book, and Bermejo has some fun writing for the Joker, having him make quips about Clue, the board game, and being disappointed in Bob for trying to defend himself with a baseball bat, which isn't a Clue weapon.

Bermejo's art, in collaboration with an Italian colorist named Barbara Ciardo, is easily the best part of the story. It looked more painted than penciled, the way Alex Ross's work is, which works with the idea of modern Gotham as a pseudo-Victorian setting. It has much less of a rough and gruesome feel than his work on Azarello's ultra-dark Joker story, and it uses a lot of bright reds and casts a lot of warm light on people's faces as if from a fireplace to fit in with the Chirstmas theme. At the same time though, there is a darker gothic motif to it that any self-respecting Batman story has, especially in the Batcave and on the rooftops. Bermejo's faces are gorgeous, with tons of expression in them. He draws Batman as perpetually furious and border-lined crazed, while the scenes with Bob and Tim are intimate and genuinely heartwarming. Overall, the book's Chistmasy yet not always rosy look ends up reminding me of a Norman Rockwell painting, if he had one step less myopic a view on life.

I don't know if the book is a masterpiece. The Batman is Scrooge analogy is never really sold perfectly. Batman never comes across as a man who desperately needs to save his soul, mostly just a guy who's acting like a bit of a dick. Batman here is kind of like a less vulgar version of Miller's "goddamn Batman" persona: angry, abrasive, and obsessive to a fault, but still a man clearly on the side of good and not evil. Seeing people from the Bat-verse as stand-ins in a Christmas Carol retelling is still a lot of fun, and when they're being drawn by Lee Bermejo it's hard to look away. This is a very different book from Joker, but it'll fit nicely on my bookshelf alongside it, nevertheless. Noel is very much worth picking up.

The New 52: Action Comics (Part 1)

Batman has always been my go-to superhero. I've dabbled in Superman stories here and there, but generally Action Comics and Superman aren't on my regular pull list regardless of who's writing them the way Batman and Detective are (although I think that's gonna change for the first time in like 5 years). Superman stories often seem stuck in the mud, with his altruism and near-invulnerability making it hard for him to be put into new and interesting situations. I didn't read it, but it seems as if that was the case with J. Michael Stracynski's "Grounded" storyline, where Superman decided to spend year walking across the entire United States to... I dunno, more closely identify with regular people or something, because that's apparently something that would make sense to Superman instead of using his amazing powers to fly around saving a bunch of said regular people from getting killed or maimed.

The last Superman book I really read and enjoyed the hell out of was Grant Morrision's 12 issue out-of-continuity toy box, All-Star Superman, that's regarded by many as one of the best Superman books ever. Morrison showed his love for some of Superman's old, wacky, silver age exploits, throwing in everything from Superman having to escape the Bizarro planet with a scrap-metal rocket to Jimmy Olsen briefly getting transformed into Doomsday. Along with all of that, though, the book also had a lot of heart, was clearly one of the best takes on the character put onto paper, and it was a good reminder of why the character still exists after 80 years or so. So, suffice to say, the announcement of Grant Morrison writing a rebooted Action Comics alongside artist Rags Morales--whose art in Identity Crisis was better than Brad Meltzer's story-- was enough to pique my interest, especially after preview images started coming out showing a jeans-clad Supes getting pelting with police bullets. Huh?! Clearly this is was going to be a reboot involving more than just sticking a #1 on the cover.

Indeed, the events of this Action Comics arc take place five years previous to "present day" in the current DCU, and Superman's first appearance is pretty jarring as he shows up at a business meeting on the top floor of a highrise, deplores the "rats with money" in attendance, and dangles a dude off of a ledge. It feels more like Batman than Superman. I'm told that this is actually accurate to early characterizations of Supes. I honestly don't know enough about his history to confirm as much. Some cops show up, but have no idea what to do, as Superman takes Mr. Glenmorgan, the businessman who's the subject of his ire, and jumps down to the ground, leaving him alive and unhurt but scaring the crap of him enough for him to confess to skirting labor labs and giving bribes. Superman tells Glenmorgan, "treat people right or expect a visit from me." He's the goddamn Superman.

Supes flies off and we learn that Lex Luthor is with a bunch of military big shots monitoring Superman's actions. Lex has devised a trap where a building scheduled for demolition but not yet abandoned will be straight-up wrecking balled down with people still inside. Supes helps those inside escape and so here we get a much more traditional image of Superman: He still saves people first and foremost. An armored tank shows up and tries to capture Supes by firing an electrified net at him to no avail, Supes takes the wrecking ball to the tank, the residents that Superman just saved get pissed and do the whole "if you're gonna get to hit you gotta get through us" bit, and Superman flies off and grabs his Clark Kent clothes off a clothesline before entering his apartment. This is roughly halfway through #1, by the way. It moves fast.

In this "five years earlier" period, Morrison and Morales depict Kent as young and shaggy-haired, looking more like Peter Parker than the usual design of the character. Superman calls Jimmy Olsen, who is apparently at this point already Superman's super pal even though Jimmy and Lois are working for the Daily Planet while Superman is working for the rival Daily Star. Jimmy and Lois are tailing "Guns" Grunding, an "enforcer" who worked for Glenmorgan. The train's brakes are sabotaged and it careens down the tracks at full speed, while Grunding pulls a pair of pistols on Jimmy and Lois. Amidst a bunch of commotion, Jimmy manages to subdue Grunding, while Superman gets between the train and the wall it's about to ram into. Everyone on the train is safe as Superman blunts the impact, but he ends up being knocked out, impaled up against the wall. Luthor, monitoring things once again tells General Lane, Lois's father, "I give you Superman." What Morrison does with Luthor is pretty great. He really gets his time in the spotlight in the second issue, but here he has a nice beat when he mentions to Lane that it was his daughter who christened the name Superman, but "the creature" didn't go out of his way to refuse it. Later at the end of #1 he has a great rant to Lane about how is a non-native species that's going to threaten humans the way cave toads upended the ecosystem in Australia. It's always fun when Luthor is filled with this sort of jealously-tinged disdain for Superman. Luthor, while just a wee bit of a bastard, is an undeniable genius and his achievements reflect the absolute pinnacle of human potential. Suddenly, an alien creature shows up and turns Luthor's word on its head. A lot of Luthor's beef with Superman is just that he sees him and the impossible feats he's capable and sees a cheater, like a 'roided up baseball player. I've always loved that idea.

More on Action Comics to come.

The New 52: Detective Comics

After coming off the high of Animal Man, let's get this one out of the way. Before the relaunch, Tony Daniel had kind of an erratic run as writer/artist on Batman where he covered a lot of different ground He returned The Riddler to being a villain--which is fine because his reformed period didn't seem to lead to much--and gave him a girl who's allegedly his daughter to run around with called Enigma. As to what her point is, she doesn't seem to have much of on yet. He did an arc with I-Ching, an old Wonder Woman character, centered around a Maguffin called the Beholder Mask that was okay. Essentially, the stories were mostly forgettable, but not acutely terrible. Now, Daniel is serving as again both writer and artist here on Detective Comics, and this is, in fact, terrible.

Even with the ever expanding supporting cast, Batman is by his nature an insular character, and Batman books are often heavy with internal narration. It can certainly be done well. Frank Miller, obviously, pretty much made a name for himself and created much of the modern idea of Batman using the device, ("Two ribs broken... must not pass out... use the pain!") and even though some find it overrated, I've always loved Jeph Loeb's heavily narration-boxed Long Halloween as well. That brings me to the narration at the beginning of Detective #1 Here's a sample: "His modus operandi changes with the wind... and it's been windy in Gotham City." Really? That's what Batman's thinking? Since when does Batman think like David Carruso sounds at the start of a CSI: Miami episode? The comic gets more bizarre from there. Batman tells us through narration that he's been pursuing the Joker for five years, (according to DC, five years is the amount of time Batman's been active in the new reboot, which doesn't seem like enough time for everything that's still in continuity to have happ--you know what, it's comics I'm just going to go with it) and yet later it's as if Batman is entirely unfamiliar with him. For some reason, Daniel feels the need to have the Joker be naked as he's killing a dude, which leads us later to Batman thinking to himself "What was the Joker doing naked? Does he always remove his clothes first?" Wait, what? In the five years he's been pursuing the Joker, has he never been up close to him? How would he not have determined this at some point in the past five years already? And would a serial killer having a sexualized component to what they do really be that confusing to Batman? Can Batman get a torrent of Red Dragon on his Bat-computer?

The story seems set up to be a reintroduction of the iconic and unending conflict between the Batman and the Joker. Good vs. evil, rationality vs. insanity, order vs. chaos and all that. And yet, this is quickly upstaged by all the gratuitous gore in the book, and the Joker himself, the guy who's supposed to be the villain-of villains in Batman lore, is upstaged by a new character based on cheap grotesquery. On page 4, we see a guy wearing human skin over his own face, and before we have any idea who it is, we see the Joker biting out his own throat. It happens in five panels. There's no tension or genuine horror in it, it's just gross for grossness sake. By the end of #1, Batman has caught the Joker and thrown him back into Arkham, as he always does, although Daniel is not done yet. Our as yet unnamed new villain breaks into the Joker's cell. The Joker tells him "get on with it", the mystery man says "This will hurt--a lot." and in a last page reveal, we see the skin of the Joker's face nailed up on the wall, with the rest of the Joker off-panel saying, "That was fangasmic!" Ugh.

Issue #2 is more of the same. Bruce Wayne bones a just-introduced reporter named Charlotte after the unbelievable sexual tension set up by these lines:

"My eyes are up here."
"I can see that, and they're shooting daggers!"
"Then kiss me before you bleed to death."

Shakespeare is reborn in Tony Daniel! If anything of substance is to come as this relationship it'll be in a latter issue. Bruce swaps back into the cape and cowl and sets out to find our new villain, who's revealed to be The Dollmaker, and he ends up looking a lot like Ragdoll from Secret Six, wish makes me opine even more for a better comic than this. Turns out that he has a whole slew of henchman that all have creepy skin masks on their faces, and there's a creepy girl in a nurse outfit speaking as if she's his daughter talking about cutting out Batman's eyes. The last page reveal here is Batman clutching what looks like Jim Gordon, only all patched up with a bunch of different grafts of skin on his face and not looking in any way alive. This reveal at least has something of an "I honestly have no idea how this ends well" element to it, although knowing how dumb this comic has been to this point, I think it's entirely likely that this isn't actually Gordan, and The Dollmaker just made up an already dead guy to look like him.

Between this, and Batman: The Dark Knight #1, which is also written and penciled by one person (David Finch), and which is similarly uninspiring, I'm thinking DC should stay away from letting one person have free reign on Batman books for awhile (although, theoretically, somebody is supposed to be editing these, right?) Daniel's work here through two issues is truly pretty distasteful. I'm a grown man with no kids, and so I don't really care about how violent a comic book is, so long as there's a point to it. Scott Snyder's recent Detective Comics run before the reboot featuring centering around The Joker and James Gordon is notable in comparison to this both because it manages to tell a story with the Joker and another antagonist concurrently without the Joker seeming to be completely upstaged, and for its use of violence that actually has a purpose. There's a last panel reveal in one of Snyder's issues that's really about as graphic as the face nailed to the wall, but it's violence that's used quickly and effectively in a genuinely terrifying way. The violence here is splattered everywhere up close and personal to the point where it becomes meaningless. Batman comics should have a healthy amount of darkness to them, but they should never, ever be torture porn. This was an all-around awful reading experience and it's getting dropped from my pulls. Luckily, Scott Snyder is writing Batman, and if his first issue is any indication, he hasn't lost anything since his Detective run.

The New 52: Animal Man

**SOME SPOILERS**

I haven't been reading comics as long as some, but I've been reading them for a while now, and to this point I've managed to not really encounter much of anything Animal Man related. I'm aware of some of his history, notably the Grant Morrison Vertigo run in which he gains awareness of the fact that he's a fictional character, and has a conversation with Morrison himself. I'm also aware that Jim Lemere writes a current Vertigo series, Sweet Tooth, which has garnered some acclaim, but haven't actually read any of it save preview pages in the back of other Vertigo books. And I hadn't heard of artist Travel Foreman at all. But I'd heard nothing but good things about the book both from comic site and from friends, and so I felt I had to check it out, and I'm glad I did. I'm completely sold on the concept. It's going on my pull list.

Page 1 of issue #1 gives you the starting point for the series in the form of a fictitious magazine article, ala those in Watchmen. Buddy Baker used to be a superhero and now he's a family man who's trying to break into acting. Buddy still has a itch for crime-fighting through, and so when an insane man is holding hostages at the hospital, Buddy flies--'cause he can do that--to the scene to punch the dude out. Afterward though, Buddy starts bleeding profusely from his eyes, a symptom which the doctors on hard are unable to discern a medical explanation for, and so here's our hook for the book.

The early pages with Buddy and his family are decent, but it's the back half of #1 that really will really convince you that this is the start of something great. Foreman's art, while not uninteresting at the outset, really gets turned up to a new level of detail when Buddy gets pulled into a cryptic dream sequence. The use of color and the creative paneling (on one page, different images are separated by the sprawling roots of a tree) remind me a lot of what makes Batwoman so enjoyable and so different compared to most superhero books. The entirely dream sequence is genuinely creepy and leaves you genuinely confused as to where the book is going, but in the best possible way. The last page of #1, back in the real world, ends with the reveal, that Maxine, Buddy's daughter has apparently managed to raise several skeletal animals from the dead. Again, super-creepy and super-effective in making you want to figure out what's going on.

Issue #2 manages to keep all of #1's momentum going, as Buddy's mysterious hemorrhaging gives way to artery-like tattoos suddenly appearing on his skin which Maxine weirdly is able to identify as a map to "the red place." This leads into another surrealist sequence where Buddy and Maxine travel (in the real world? in a dream? we don't know) to something between a giant tree and a giant network of arteries, like those that manifesting themselves on Buddy that seems to represent something like the heart of all animal life. Foreman's art is again wonderfully imaginative here, culminating in a two page spread where Maxine tells Buddy to "let it take us into the red," and Buddy's face begins to morph into some shape that I can't even begin to describe. The Hunters Three, the villains of this arc, though their origins and motives are not yet clear, are three different and equally grotesque creations.

The best thing about Animal Man is that I don't have much of an idea where this opening arc is going to take me next, but that it makes me want to find out. Lemire and Foreman have taken a C-list superhero character and decided to reintroduce him by having him discover the nature of all living things in the DCU. It's a sort of broadening a character's mythos like what Geoff Johns did starting with Green Lantern: Rebirth, but this is much more interesting, original, and seemingly must more profound. I've bought into this hook, line, and sinker, and highly recommend it.

New Blog

Howdy. This is a brand spankin' new blog. I used to write another blog, which I called A Briefcase Full of Blues. What I wrote about was pretty all over the place, and that might be the case here as well. I'm going to start off writing about comics, specifically some of the comics I'm currently reading that are part of DC's "New 52" relaunch. Beyond that though, it might branch off into other areas. I watch a ton of movies, a ton of sports, and certain niches of TV. On occasion I manage to read an actual black-text-on-white-paper book as well. I'd say any or all of the above would be fair game. I'm going to try and keep this updated more regularly than Briefcase was, which ended up being very sporadic after a while. Anyway, not much for introductions, hopefully my actual posts will explain what sort of blog this'll be.