terrific batman essay by (haha notorious ilx-hata) k-punk

and interestingly enuff he made me see clearly what aspect it is of "dark knight returns" that redeems it for me (well, lets me continue to like it, let's say), which is (very specifically) the batman-robin relationship

(wehich is of course the still-small-voice return-of-the-repressed depiction of the old-skool-comix artist-fan relationship: envisioned as something lovely - if a bit very weird and pervy - as op[posed to something to be sneered at)

[or like, NOT]

but the weakest part is that in order to praise the characterisation of Batman in Begins, he ignores the fluidity of the character that used to be implemented over decades, but has been fragmented and hyper-accelerated since The Dark Knight's example - even without resorting to Elseworlds (of which there are approximately 725 Batman series for every Green Lantern or Superman), the Batman in Giffen/DeMatteis' JLA is not the same Batman as in Grant Morrison's JLA [and Morrison himself played with this explicitly on his return last year, with the same personality of the no-powers-but-most-dangerous-man-in-world going to his sci-fi closet, looking at his dalek, and getting in his bat-flying-saucer], is not the same Batman as in Dini & Timm's Mad Love. Not to mention the monthly example of LOTDK, where rotating creative teams and approaches is the raison d'etre. Bryan Talbot was allowed to get away with a story portraying Batman as the internal delusions of a homeless nutcase with a rag over his face!

Clearly, this guy hates the English language.

You sure you didn't start off annoyed and then just get more so?

This is not a straw man. A straw man is a false representation of an argument. The oppostion between superheroes and alcoholic self-destructive superheroes is not one that k-punk invents, it is one that he cites. The misrepresentation of the genre lies with the hacks who have defended Miller on the grounds of 'comics were rubbish until Miller rode in on a white charger to save them from their juvenilia.'

From the piece, it seems that k-p doesn't have a problem with superheroes, only with Moore/ Miller etc. As for the stuff on the fluidity of the Batman character: doesn't k-punk praise BB for its 'syncretism'?

Who even says that? Not anybody who was reading Batman in the 70s or 80s. Maybe people who somehow assume that Batman stayed in the Adam West mould from 1966 to 1986?

That's where the Strawmannery comes in, counterarguing a point that has never/rarely credibly been made. That's, like, covered in Limbaughism 101.

i don't know if this misperception is now as "hegemonic", as k-punk wd say, or if he's reactin to somethin a bit past-it's-sell-by, but that's bcz i don't read ANYTHING these days except ilx

That K-Punk article was incredibly 'dual', part-Clark-Kent-part-Superman, in that huge rhetorical generalisations and glaring historical inaccuracies are followed by moments of great insight (eg the comparison between SIN CITY and the 'dream' noir of the Singing Detective).

In fact, it seems like it's only been in the last 14 months that DC caught up with the overwrought melodrama and grimmmmmmmmmmmmness what DKR wrought.

What book is this in??

hey mark have you?

xpost

i think i encounter the "whiz! bang! comics aren't just for kids anymore!" at least ten times as a complaint of a comics fan for each one time i see it in the wild. but then i'm too young to have been reading rock press stuff in the eighties.

steamrollered-marvel-dark sort of killed off miller-and-moore dark in some ways..? because the the uh general public's awareness, if not of cable or venom or whatever, but an awareness that stuff like that is in comics these days, is how ppl think comics-are-just-for-kids now, not anything else

i read 'batman in the sixties' trade a couple weeks ago. some of it felt like reading barthelme or something.

Miller and Moore's 'maturity' corresponds with comics' depressive and introspective adolescence

M and M traded on a lack of confidence that had begun to cloud the medium and on a disingenuous male adolescent desire to both have comics and to feel superior to them

It's about time that Miller stopped being congratulated for bringing into comics a noir-lite cartoon nihilist bleakness that has long been a cliche in films and books

(they don't actually even seem particularly controversial to me, unless we're interpreting them completely differently) (actually i don't really think mediums have "adolescences", but all he's saying is that M&M weren't the at-last-arrived "maturity" of the medium some people said they were - he's certainly not saying it doesn't exist elsewhere)

And [i]t's about time that Miller stopped being congratulated for bringing into comics a noir-lite cartoon nihilist bleakness is sort of getting one foot on the money, and only by accident: plenty of people have variously mocked, reviled and praised Miller for the overblown caricature of noir that came into full bloom with Sin City (after being developed in Daredevil and Batman: Year One), it's only idiots who have ever taken it on face value. But he also shouldn't be congratulated on it because he wasn't solely responsible - cf. Detectives, Inc and especially Ms. Tree as immediate antecedents in the US direct market arena of the comics medium, not to mention plenty of European style-over-substance efforts.

i kinda assumed from the get-go that KP wz talking about "the genre superheroes as it is perceived" rather than "all of comics", which is why kit and i mainly differ i think: on kit's reading KP is being very silly and narrow, yes

Detectives Inc and Ms Tree were such woeful failures aesthetically

cf. Sin City ha ha!

And, even if he is right, I don't understand why "mythicness" should be a good criterion of the quality of art. He says that Dark Knight and Watchmen are overrated because they haven't produced any mythic characters and while this is probably incorrect (Maybe Punisher, Wolverine and John Constantine?), it's a rather silly requirement. If we applied this same test to Romantic poetry or the the postwar novel, I don't know if we'd come up with any mythic characters there either.

I thought of something like that when I first read Dark Knight (and then Marvels and Kingdom Come) but you said it a lot better. I think in order to understand good superhero comics, you need to read a number of bad comics so you can understand what good "metrical"-character effects look like. It's like "Batman" isn't a character but a tool to use in a certain plots, right? So it's not like the best Batman story is the one that creates the most pathos, high art, etc., but the one that uses the tool in the best way. Or something.

First thing I've read which made me actually want to SEE BB. Everything else has praised it for following Miller, which turns me off.

His implied dark vs mythic opposition is exactly the same one that the comics biz publically thrashed about with in the mid/late 90s. I bet you that k-p would absolutely hate the likes of Kingdom Come that 'addressed' this stuff.

Slightly tangental question. To what extent is Batman's refusal to kill and integral part of the character (and how does it balance with the equinimity he uses near leathal force).

Okay will read piece now.

I think the lack of Watchman or indeed comics to invent new viable mythical characters may well be that we are too close (to grasp this mythic you need varieties of tellings surely, else it is all just the same story). Or that comics do not have the popularity to do that any more. Or indeed that they cannot do that without help from other media. So Hellboy anyone?

If anything, the "thank Jah for Miller!" praise that's come out in light of the the flick could probably be seen as lazy shorthand for praising the actual return to the pulp fiction roots of Batman, which Miller distilled and focused for Year One (definitely) and DKR (maybe).