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post #51 of 61
3/9/08 at 6:15am
Quote:
Originally Posted by HunterRose View Post
I loved Planetary's take on all the various Batman incarnations.
Especially when they rolled out the Adam West version! The miniseries Fanboy achieves something similar in its Batman chapter, with nearly every important Batman artist contributing a page or two.
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post #52 of 61
3/9/08 at 7:08am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
Totally agree. Further, what happened to the character after this story's release is in no way Miller's problem. Just because the subsequent Batman writers went derivative and simply followed where Dark Knight lead, it doesn't make Dark Knight a bad story. You can be pissed about its legacy (and rightly so; I hate the whole direction comics in general went around this time), but it doesn't make The Dark Knight Returns any less great as its own standalone work. It was never intended to be the vanguard of a new movement for the character. It was a "What if" story that became hugely influential. It's like saying that Star Wars is awful because of all the shitty sci fi films that came down the pike after its release.
I disagree. Miller fundamentally broke Batman in DKR. I don't mind that he did - Batman's a boring character who has even thwarted Grant Morrison - but there will never again be a Batman story that doesn't have him as, in at least a subtextual way, as a psychopath. You can argue night and day that this is what he 'was' before DKR, but he wasn't. He was dark, he was edgy, but Miller pushed the character to a point from which he could never return. Whether or not that was a point the character was going to reach anyway is sort of besides the point. There are few stories that overshadow one character's complete existence as thoroughly as DKR does Batman, and it isn't because people ripped it off or riffed on it - it's because after DKR there was no other way to view Batman.
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post #53 of 61
3/9/08 at 7:10am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
Dark Knight Strikes Again and Goddamn Batman are on their own. I'm not going there.
Goddamn Batman is not only brilliant, it may be the only way the character gets fixed, by ridiculing him. All Star Batman is a really great comic, and I feel bad that so many reactionary comic fans can't loosen up and enjoy it for what it is.
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post #54 of 61
3/9/08 at 7:16am
I actually haven't read either yet. I wasn't going there just because everybody hates them so much. Like most things that "everybody" hates, I am interested in them, though.

As for DKR, I agree that Miller's conception of Batman is not what he always was. I'm probably alone in this, but I look at Miller's work on the character the same way I look at Burton's movies; they're interesting takes that stand alone, not definitive interpretations.

I do wonder what would have happened if DKR hadn't been as popular as it became. Would we be looking at a very different Batman now? Would superhero comics in general have been significantly less dark and nasty than they became? Or is DKR just a symptom of where comics were already going?
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post #55 of 61
3/9/08 at 7:23am
For some reason the trends of comics get ignored and everybody just looks at the big splashy moments. Batman was headed in that direction since the 70s, but I don't know if it would have been as extreme without DKR. As for superhero comics in general, the fact that the generation writing them in the 80s were people who had grown up with them meant that a trend to more 'adult' themes were inevitable. This is what has made superhero comics into something as embarrassing as plushies, this insane need to 'grow up' a completely juvenile concept in a manner more than just an experiment. It's like if comics all suddenly turned into extensions of Alan Moore's Lost Girls. These are children's entertainments, and making them adult is interesting for a little while but pathetic for twenty years.
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post #56 of 61
3/9/08 at 7:46am
Quote:
Originally Posted by devincf View Post
As for superhero comics in general, the fact that the generation writing them in the 80s were people who had grown up with them meant that a trend to more 'adult' themes were inevitable. This is what has made superhero comics into something as embarrassing as plushies, this insane need to 'grow up' a completely juvenile concept in a manner more than just an experiment. It's like if comics all suddenly turned into extensions of Alan Moore's Lost Girls. These are children's entertainments, and making them adult is interesting for a little while but pathetic for twenty years.
The Independence Day inspired battle with the sentient, dinosaur/demon spewing, floating island in New Frontier wouldn't have been as poignant without the story of John Henry.
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post #57 of 61
3/9/08 at 8:25am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
I actually haven't read either yet. I wasn't going there just because everybody hates them so much. Like most things that "everybody" hates, I am interested in them, though.
Strikes Again is incoherent, gonzo stuff, but it contains a handful of brilliant moments. Captain Marvel has a fantastic scene near the end.

And, on-topic, Miller does a 300-style SuperGreek take on Wonder Woman that works quite well.
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post #58 of 61
3/9/08 at 3:07pm
I like Batman as an in control psychopath. I never found him interesting before he was put in Miller's hands. He was already corrupted, and without a true personality. Was he the TV show Batman? The Superfriends Batman? The Batman from Detective Comics? At least now he has some consistency: He crazy.

When I was reading comics in the 80's I liked the heroes who killed people. I couldn't stand the boy scout super hero archetype that was still carrying through the 70's into the early 80's. Therefore, Wolverine and The Punisher made sense to me, and in the 80's they were relatively 'new' characters. Granted, when I read DKR I was a teenager, and now I'd rather read a dopey hero comic like Invincible, than a 'serious' hero comic featuring Wolverine, Batman or the Punisher. But DKR's revamp of Batman certainly made him a far more interesting character.
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post #59 of 61
3/9/08 at 3:44pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by devincf View Post
For some reason the trends of comics get ignored and everybody just looks at the big splashy moments. Batman was headed in that direction since the 70s, but I don't know if it would have been as extreme without DKR. As for superhero comics in general, the fact that the generation writing them in the 80s were people who had grown up with them meant that a trend to more 'adult' themes were inevitable. This is what has made superhero comics into something as embarrassing as plushies, this insane need to 'grow up' a completely juvenile concept in a manner more than just an experiment. It's like if comics all suddenly turned into extensions of Alan Moore's Lost Girls. These are children's entertainments, and making them adult is interesting for a little while but pathetic for twenty years.
I think the key thing here is what you mean by 'adult'. If you're talking about how some people might mistakenly view it, i.e. tits, gore, and DARK characters, then yes that leads to shitty comics. But I would argue that an increase in complexity benefits comics, even superhero comics, as a whole. It's the reason why I still bother to read the things anyway.
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post #60 of 61
3/9/08 at 4:57pm
The problem, though, is that very few superhero comics went with "maturity" to mean what you're describing. For the most part, the stories didn't become any more complex, subtle or interesting. They just turned gritty, dark, sexual and violent. I'm sorry, but that's not maturity. They just went from appealing primarily to eight-year-olds to appealing primarily to fourteen-year-olds. I wouldn't call that great progress.
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post #61 of 61
3/9/08 at 5:04pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
The problem, though, is that very few superhero comics went with "maturity" to mean what you're describing. For the most part, the stories didn't become any more complex, subtle or interesting. They just turned gritty, dark, sexual and violent. I'm sorry, but that's not maturity. They just went from appealing primarily to eight-year-olds to appealing primarily to fourteen-year-olds. I wouldn't call that great progress.
I totally agree with this, to the point where I resent it when a good story is littered with pointless sex and violence. It's one of the reasons I don't like 'Scalped'. However, I love Preacher and The Authority, which are completely guilty of the gritty, dark, sexual and violent story arcs.

It all depends on the context I guess.
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