Batman, S/D

Also the first Batman/Grendel crossover (the Hunter Rose one) is pretty good.

The forties version of Red Hood where they discover the Joker's origin is fun, and a good companion to "The Killing Joke."

I have good memories of some of Pete Milligan's stories, though I think they were quite Milligan. I'm a bit surprised, with hindsight, that Milligan and Alan Grant came out of nowhere to be regular Bat-writers.

Destroy: Batman/Spawn (although I'm pretty sure I was into it in '94)! I'd like to say Hush, but it was one of the first things I followed after getting back into comics in college and I enjoyed it at the time.

ihttp://batman.manyfacesof.com/art/mig3.jpg

The one Milligan Batstory I remember (& really liked!) was some Riddler 3-parter (drawn by Kieron Dwyer) that involved The Spirit of Gotham & possession & ritual sacrifice & lots of cool spooky stuff!

I have fond nostalgic fuzzies for the Grant / Breyfogle years (THE VENTRILOQUIST) & the Starlin / Aparo run pre-JASON TODD OMG. And the too-brief Barr / Alan Davis run on Detective - fun & nice to look at!

The thing is, everyone went "ooh-ah, Miller's taken Batman back to basics," whereas dudes like Steve Engelhart and Moench had been shepherding the character like that for years without all of Miller's "HEY LOOK AT ME, I'M AN AUTEUR!!!"

Also, guilty pleasure: the three BATMAN/PREDATOR trades! Best experienced when they're free and you read them all at once. I love Batman's increasing resentment at being forced to deal with stupid space aliens rather than fighting real crime (at least that's how I remember it).

Theres a Ras Al Ghul story from the 70s with Michael Golden art (its in the Tales Of The Demon trade) which I love...can't remember who wrote it though..

Some of the Year One follow-ups were great before Jeph Lob muscled in and ruined it for everyone - Andy Helfer and Chris Sprouse did a Two-Face origin story for a Batman annual that was creepy and moving, and Moench/Gulacy's "Prey", which was the third arc in Legends Of The Dark Knight, is great too.

But some of the best Batman stories I read in recent years were in The Animated Series comics, especially when Ty Templeton was writing with Rick Burchett art...anybody else read that at the time? Small, perfectly formed little doses of Batman.

And LoDK #54 hasn't been my white whale for a year!

On a completely different subject: Why everyone says that DKR is fascist???. Could someone explain it to me?. Never understood that particular interpretation.

Pencils by Bernie Mireault, inks by Matt Wagner, colours by Joe Matt.

http://www.hillcity-comics.com/graphic_novels/bat/thrillkiller.jpg

i don't know if "fascist" is the word necessarily but i'm reading dkr for the first time right now (after greatly enjoying year one) and there's a definite right-wing overtone which is more distracting than anything else

Well, in the comic Bruce Wayne end up leading a small army of uniformly-clad ex-gang members who've suddenly (and rather inexplicably) converted to the cult of Batman... But saying Dark Knight Returns is fascist perhaps too extreme, though it definitely has a right-wing tone that hinges on fascism. I've said this before, but I'll say it again... The character of Batman is inherently fascist (as are most superheroes, though Batman especially so): he thinks crime is a disease that can be fought and solved by vigilantism, violently apprehending the criminals and putting them behind bars (or as with Miller, even actually killing them). However, most Batman writers get around the issue by not involving the societal implications of Batman's crusade into the story, the easiest solution being to make him fight against ludicrous supervillains that don't easily stand as proxies for real crime. But in DKR, Miller takes the politics of Batman quite seriously, and it is rather clear where his personal sympathies lie. This is why, even though I can admire the craft put into the story, I can never bring myself to actually like it.

superheroes that are not fascist:

the fantastic four
spider-man
captain america
captain marvel
the x-men
wonder woman
the sub-mariner
the black panther
the green lantern

moral: superheroes are not "inherently fascist."

BATUSI

OFF TOPIC:

The Bat-Trot

Is this meant to register disagreement or agreement or what?

So school me: Where does Kane-as-actual-artist end, and Dick Sprang begin?

as for transistion from Kane to Sprang, you have Jerry Robinson in there as well. I think Kane's surrogates took over pretty darn fast— he didn't do much from 1939 on, due to his father schooling him on biz-stuff—certainly moreso than Siegel and Shuster. and no, i don't think he plotted hardly anything.

in the sense that he died a penniless, bitter alcoholic, yes.

You guys seen Batfatty's LJ?

I've been reading through some late 80s Alan Grant (with John Wagner mostly in name only from what I understand) and Norm Breyfogle Detective this weekend. You have a Gotham DJ playing The New York Dolls and doing coke while a vampire like character has someone killing hobos and a guy gets turned into a chemical waste monster. You have Scarface selling dope to kids that causes them to go crazy and attack cops. You have Ratcatcher keeping judges, jury and jailors in a prison in the sewers and kills people by having his legion of rats attack them. You have a guy creating a Tulpa (years before Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis used one in a storyline) to steal to pay off gangsters and leads to creating a demon that can only be stopped by Etrigan/Jason Blood, who is always a good guest star in a Batman story.

I had read all of them 20 years ago or so and enjoyed them then and they hold up pretty well. Batman’s personal life and all is really in the background and the plots are pretty dense, as most of these stories are 2 or 3 issues.

I also read a Year One annual by Chuck Dixon dealing with The Riddler and an annual by Mark Waid & Brian Augustyn that was about Batman getting trained by a Matlock style southern detective going up against the klan, both were pretty decent reads. The Riddler holds up a bit better and could fit in with current stories just fine, I cannot remember the artist but it was nice and gritty.

I love the Grant/Breyfogle issues, though I haven't re-read them in years.

The dense plotting is doubtless a result of Grant having learned his craft writing stories in four to six page installments for 2000 AD.

Desperately looking for a Batman comic that portrays Bruce Wayne as an overweight cop who dresses as a bat... written with a much more realist direction such that Batman is ridiculed no end. It's sort of a parallel universe interpretation (it's not "batman at 40") and I think might possibly contain sci-fi thematics.

Anyone familiar w/ what I'm talking about?

This maybe? http://whatmarkread.blogspot.com/2011/03/batman-mask-by-bryan-talbot.html

Nah, this is done in a much more comical (literally) style. Thanks, tho!

Are you sure it's not a parody of Batman by MAD Magazine or something like that, instead of an official DC comic book?

Didn't DC do a couple of things called something like 'Realworlds' instead of 'Elseworlds', about Batman and Superman in the real ("our") world? No idea what they were called, but maybe this was it?

RE: James Morrison

This?

Probably not the item desired, but worth a shot.

GOT IT.

I WIN.

Hey! You know what immediately comes up when you google search "bruce wayne fat cop"?

Batman/Robocop slash fiction.

"Bruce finds an unlikely ally in the form of Robocop. As the title suggests, the two end up finding more than answers in their quest for justice."

this setup with fat bruce wayne definitely sounds like a Tales of the Dark Knight arc

i mean, Legends

except kelpolaris specifically said it wasn't Talbot's Masks

Blah, yeah, I can't remember where I found it - save for that it was on some sort of *list*. I've picked through the first couple pages of "fat bruce wayne batman comic book" (etc) but obviously not to a lot of success.

My only memory of it is a picture - it's got Bruce Wayne as a cop dressed in a significantly less stylish Bat-suit, sitting in a car with the door open eating jelly donuts. The car I remember looking somewhat futuristic, or just Deloreon-like. That's really all I'm going off of. I definitely don't think it was just a MAD parody.. the image took too much care.

I'm kinda praying that what I'm looking for isn't just a Deviant Art mockup.

sez N'rama: "Detective Comics #881 represents the culmination of the single greatest run of Detective Comics in decades. Perhaps of all time."

Oh shut the fuck up.
Meanwhile, has anyone read it? Read Snyder's first issue and it was okay, a little hamfisted (like a young Rucka working out his kinks) but wasn't that interested in following up.

Mordecai Richler reviews DKR, 1987 http://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/03/books/paperbacks-batman-at-midlife-or-the-funnies-grow-up.html I love the parallel he sets up between Tijuana Bibles and DKR.

Ha, Mordechai sort of OTM about late Frank Miller, if not Dark Knight.

I dunno... DKR, much more than Miller's other works of that era (Daredevil, Ronin, even Year One), pretty much predicts all of his later craziness. It already has the required elements: liberal-hating and crypto-fascism disguised as "satire", grim & gritty palette, ridiculous musclebound and testoterone-overdosed fight scenes, the first person narration that's half macho noir, half medical journal (the ridiculously detailed descriptions of various bodily harm), etc. It may have felt fresh in 1987 because no one was doing stuff like that then, but in retrospect all that it has going for it is Miller's & Varley's visual innovativeness; everything else is just stale, a precursor of what went wrong with Miller, Batman, and superhero comics in general by the 1990s.

it still had a sense of humour, which vanished almost immediately from his work afterwards

actually, that's probably wrong. you can absolutely tell what his sense of humour is in the latter stuff, it just isn't funny and falls flat. Tuomas is right that his later attitudes are designed as satire in TDK, but I feel in the overblown, operatic context of that piece they do still work as comedy, even if I don't agree with all of them.

I'll admit that I found the Sin City movie frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious in a way that I presumed Rodriguez was intending, but had refused to give Miller credit for on the page. I'd not sit through it on TV though.