Yeah, it beats me how this is going to work, but I don’t feel like waiting too long for this blog nonsense to be cleared up, so here are tiny, bite-sized chunks of my much longer post, which kept getting longer because real life was kicking my ass, until it was going to be too long anyway, so maybe this is a better solution. Let’s go!
Batman: Off-World (April) by Jason Aaron (writer), Doug Mahnke (penciler/inker), Jaime Mendoza (inker), David Baron (colorist), Troy Peteri (letterer), and Chris Conroy (collection editor). $19.99, 144 pgs, DC.
As I read this collection, I kept thinking, “How can something so well-written be so terrible?” Contradictory? Maybe, but I’ll ‘splain: Aaron took a look at Grant Morrison’s “Bat-God” depiction and thought, “You know what? He’s not enough of a Bat-God!” and by gum, he did something about it! His Batman is basically Jesus With Fists, which might sound awesome but gets a bit annoying when you realize that this Batman is unkillable even by the ridiculous standards of superhero comics. But, ok – he’s Super-Bat-God. Despite this, Aaron does a really good job with both his internal narration – for the most part – and the way he figures things out. It’s a compelling narrative, in other words, and Aaron does a nice job with the other characters too, from Ione the Tamaranian (who probably draws mustaches on the posters of Starfire she has on her walls) to the robot whom he helps find his soul, even to the evil baddies whom Bat-God has to take down. Aaron does a really good job making the galaxy in which Bat-God has his adventures interesting and dangerous and weird. But … it’s in service to one of the stupidest plots I’ve ever seen in not only a Bat-book, but in a superhero book in general. I mean, seriously. We begin with Bat-God’s spaceship getting captured by a much larger ship captained by a super-tough Akkarian, whom he can’t defeat so he gets thrown in jail with the other losers. We know that he paid 532 million dollars for this one-way trip, because he tells us himself. He meets Ione and a bunch of others, helps foment a rebellion, and then goes after the big bads because he’s, you know, Bat-God. Nothing wrong with that. So why is this so terrible?
Well, it turns out that the only reason he went to space was to figure out how to defeat an Akkarian. You see, this takes place early in Bat-God’s career, after he’d been on the streets about a year. He had successfully scared the crap out of Gotham criminals, until … one of the mobsters, an Irishman (of course, those lousy Irish would think of this!) hired an Akkarian as his tough guy. Bat-God can’t fight him because he knows nothing about him, so he spends half a billion dollars and goes 26 million light years away (very quickly, mind you – Aaron ignores the time it would take to do this) to learn how to fight alien beings, specifically but not limited to Akkarians. Let me repeat that: an Earthbound Irish mob boss hires a super-duper-tough alien from a galaxy 26 million light years away. That sound you hear is your brain exploding from the stupidity of it all. Yet this is the sole motivator of the plot. Bat-God spends at least a year out in space banging Tamranians (because of course he does), teaching a robot how to be a real boy, taming a space wolf, and proving that he’s the baddest motherfucker in the fucking universe just so he can defeat an alien back on Earth. There are many, many cool moments in this book, there are many, many nifty fights, Mahnke’s art is stupendous as usual, and it just zips along at a breakneck pace … and then you remember why Bat-God did all this and your head explodes once again. Jeebus, Jason Aaron, what the actual fuck? I know this is supposed to be during a time when Bat-God was just getting started, but there had to be a better way to figure this out. Maybe call your brightly-garbed opposite number in Pretty New York and ask him? I mean, there’s a Tamaranian and a Thanagarian in this book, so it’s not like weird alien superbeings aren’t hanging around on Earth except for when clichéd Irish mobsters (we see him close up in exactly one panel, and his shirt is unbuttoned halfway down his chest and he’s wearing a gold chain) hire them. It’s just so, so stupid that it messes up the entire book, which is a shame.
Or, I don’t know, maybe you think it’s pretty cool. What the hell do I know?
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel (which doesn’t have a caption because my workaround doesn’t allow it):
Billi 99 (January) by Sarah Byam (writer), Tim Sale (artist/letterer), José Villarrubia (colorist), Patty Jeres (editor), and Kurtis Findlay (editor). $45.00, 192 pgs, Clover Press.
This is an early Sale work, from 1991, originally published by Dark Horse but now in a fancy hardcover from Clover Press. It’s a really nice package, with new colors by Villarrubia (it seems like the original was in black and white, maybe? as no colorist is listed on the Grand Comics Database, which is usually good at these sorts of things) and some nice extras. As with a lot of early Sale art, it’s a bit “rougher” than it would later become when he teamed up with Jeph Loeb and became more confident in his line work – he uses more screentone effects than he would in later works, and he hatches his faces a bit more than he later would (which, I’ve noticed, is something that younger artists do because they think “busier = better,” which is not always the case). This came out around the time his Challengers of the Unknown did, and you can see the similarities in the art. In this book, he gets to create an entire world (the book is set in the far future of 1999), and he does it very well, building a broken-down city from the ground up, showing us the street-level ugliness mixed with the nobility of people just trying to survive but also giving us the heights of power, as the rich build gleaming towers on top of ruins that Sale manages to twist just enough so that they become almost brutalist monuments to humanity’s capacity for evil. He crams the world with details, both beautiful and gruesome, so that even an early double-page spread of Billi standing on scaffolding looking down at the city feels claustrophobic. His characters are terrific, as well – they look like real people, some ground down by life and some fat on the spoils of plunder, and he varies the look of them, too, so that we can discern how each of them survives in this wretched place. Sale’s storytelling is so good – he lays out pages wonderfully and with an eye toward the emotional payoff of each panel – that if you took out all the words in this book, you could follow the story fairly well. Byam’s story, however, is pretty good, and it’s sad and interesting how prescient it is. She knew that the Reagan years were not as great as everyone thought, but in 1991, there was still the belief that the billionaires wouldn’t actually end up running the country. Byam saw it differently, and while her story, as it must be, feels a bit hopelessly naïve as to what might actually turn the tide, the fact that this story is ultimately about the laboring classes understanding their rights and standing up for them is charming and hopeful (if a bit depressing because the laboring classes have basically sold out to the billionaires so they can buy bigger televisions). Billi, the hero of the story, is a classic limousine liberal in the Bruce Wayne mold, except that she ran away from her fortune when her father died, leaving it to her, and she ends up actually doing something productive with her money. Her vigilantism is a means to an end, not just a revenge tour. Byam does a good job creating these characters so that they have some nuance – Billi isn’t the paragon of virtue by any means, and the other characters occupy wide spaces on the moral spectrum, as most people do. It’s a far more radical book than you might expect, especially for 1991, when most Americans still had some hope for the future. Byam knows that only vigilance in the face of greed can slow it down, and it’s kind of a shame that the book feels both more relevant and more anachronistic than ever.
This is a keen comic. It’s nice and dense, and it’s gorgeous, naturally. Who wouldn’t like a big thick slice of Tim Sale art?!?!?
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel (which had a caption because I added it before the blog went ker-plooey):
Well, that was fun. When will the next one come? Will the next one come at all? We shall see! Have a nice day, everyone!
