A Tale of Two Gritties // VOID-STAR.NET

Okay, so I’ve been flitting in and out of Wollongong over the last month or so and that means I’ve been reading comic books on Vexxis¹ because that’s what I do when I’m travelling. If you remember last time I ripped through a bunch of trades and arcs, and though I’ve been far less prolific this time ’round, I figured I should tell you all about the two I did read, because it fills up a day of NaBloPoMo and all that.

So…

Batman: Year One

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In a nutshell…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…²

The verdict…
“What’s this?” I hear you all cry in Jack Skellington-like amazement. “Dee read… a Frank Miller book?” And yes, dear readers, it’s true; I read a Frank Miller book. Cover to cover and everything. Maybe it was some kind of vain, Bruce Wayne-esque attempt to Know My Enemy, maybe I was just curious and maybe some foolish part of me thought, “It was written a pretty long time ago. Maybe he wasn’t as crazy back in those days.”

Apparently, Frank Miller has always been batshit fucking insane. It’s not that Year One is bad so much as that it’s a horrible train-wreck of senseless plot and hideous characterisation. This being a Miller book, it is saturated with teenage misogyny so we’ll just get that out of the way first. There are probably four female characters of note here. Two are prostitutes, one is a home wrecker and the fourth is merely a passive victim of circumstance. None of these people are ‘characters’ in any sense of the word which is especially damning considering one of them is Catwoman. Yeah. It’s not the fact that Miller has her as a prostitute. I mean, it had me spitting at the screen and all that but… okay, so Catwoman’s a prostitute. So is every woman in the Millerverse; either explicitly or implicitly, so she’s not really any worse off than anyone else. The thing that drove me really crazy was the simple fact that Miller has her as a completely passive entity. She’s pre-mask here but there’s no journey of personal discovery or any of that; she simply sees Batman on the TV and decides that might be a cool career change. I mean, seriously; it hurts to see someone who’s sort-of-maybe-kinda supposed to represent female empowerment and ‘Sistahs Doin’ It For Themselves’ reduced to that. Miller effectively strips her of any independent identity. Plus, did I mention she’s a prostitute?

The other female characters don’t get off much better, but as I mentioned this is more-or-less expected so I’m just going to drop it for now. Because there’s another group in this book that get royally shafted in the characterisation stakes, too. The men. And here’s the deal, you see, because while Miller’s mindless misogyny is well-known, what is hardly ever mentioned is the fact that he’s a rampant misandrist, too. Miller’s men are no less one-dimensional and dangerously stereotyped than his women are; almost to the point where you can probably take any Miller characters from any of his books, swap them around, and still end up with the same story to the point where I felt like shaking my laptop and screaming, “You’re Bruce Wayne not Bruce Willis for godssakes!” The main victims in Year One are (of course) the titular character but more dispiriting than that was the treatment giving to Jim Gordon. Now, I really like Gordon and the poor guy really doesn’t deserve getting turned into the sadistic sleaze ball Miller portrays him as. There’s really a sort of ‘uncovered meat’ vibe going on here in that you kind of… you knowGordon is going to end up banging the ‘sexy’ partner lady simply because that’s how she’s set up. She has literally no other function in the story other than to ‘tempt’ Gordon away from his wife. And you know he’s going to do it, because (again) this is a Miller book and no man in the Millerverse can resist a short skirt, apparently. And this is what I mean by Miller’s secret misandry, because his men have no room for depth of character, either; if all the women are whores then all the men are over-sexed sadists. And, let’s face it, that’s not doing anyone any favours.

But Gordon is just the tip of the iceberg because, of course, no-one in this books gets a worse deal than Batman. I mean, seriously. If I were Miller I’d be worried that one day I’m going to be walking down the street and suddenly a great big black gauntleted-fist is going to appear out of some kind of inter-dimensional portal and smack me in the face in time to a growled, “I’ll show you the goddamn Batman!” And don’t get me wrong; I do like my Dark Knight, well, dark but there’s a difference between “broken, obsessive introvert” and “sociopathic sadist” and I really don’t think Miller knows what it is. It’s not that Miller’s Batman has trouble connecting with people so much that he simply doesn’t. At all. There’s a quite painful scene — it’s actually arguably the most famous scene in the book — that involves Bruce sitting in a chair bleeding all over the floor and thinking about Alfred. Now, like all sane people I’m a card-carrying member of the Alfred Pennyworth fanclub and I’m fairly certain that the founding member of said club is probably written down on the charter as “Mr. B. Wayne”. Because — let’s face it — the man is pretty much Bruce’s father. And the relationship is kinda complex, sure, but that’s what makes it interesting. Except Miller doesn’t do ‘interesting’, Miller does DARKER and EDGIER and in the world of DARKER and EDGIER Alfred turns into a plot device as opposed to, yanno, a character. Bruce even says as much during his brooding narration, and there’s something about that whole scene which is just… disturbing.

Well, disturbing and a bit silly. Because seriously the man’s just been stabbed and he’s decided that a practical course of action is to sit in an expensive armchair and bleed all over his expensive floor. Bruce Wayne knows not the meaning of the words ‘blood loss’ because he is DARKER and EDGIER. And there are a lot of scenes like this in the book — including one which I swear is Bruce cutting down trees in his garden using roundhouse kicks — mindless machismo seemingly thrown in just to show us how DARK and EDGY these characters are.

At the end of the day, my dislike for Miller and everything he holds dear has not in any way been assuaged by this book, which for all intents and purposes reads like it was written by a passive-aggressive 14 year-old geek while hanging from the inside of his locker door by his underpants. The fact that Year One was — at one point in time — going to be adapted for the relaunch of the Batman film franchise is suddenly making Begins look a hell of a lot more classy…

Batman: Dark Victory

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In a nutshell…
Organised crime in Gotham City is in chaos after the actions of the so-called ‘Holiday Killer’ the previous year. Just when everyone thinks things are wrapped up… bam! Some more killings! Not to mention Two-Face is running rogue, the new DA is a pain in Gordon’s ass and to top it all off the circus is in town. It’s almost like there’s no room for womanising! Well… maybe a bit.

The verdict…
See, here’s the deal. Miller spends all this time running around trying to make his characters DARKER and EDGIER and the net result of all that effort is, at best, giggle-inducing and, at worse, a crime against humanity. Then an actual competent author takes over the reins and not only does everything right but does it in a way that seems so natural that the ham-fistedness of the source shines like gilded shit. Dark Victory is by the same creative team who bought us The Long Halloween which in itself is a successor to Year One. And this is its main problem, really, because it does everything Year One was obvious trying to do and manages to do it in a way that doesn’t make the reader lose all faith in the sanctity of human life (and also has 85% less prostitutes). Sure, Gotham is still dark and depressing and Bruce has the approximate personality of a giant iceberg looming a hundred metres of the port side, but nevertheless we aren’t alienated from him or from anyone else, really. Gordon notably does not sleep with the sexy new DA; instead works on patching up what’s left of his marriage post-Miller. Alfred is actually a person rather than a medkit. Catwoman has given up prostitution and gone firmly into highly-competent burglary, and even the book’s bad guys — the various crime families of Gotham — just seem more… lost than anything else. Oh, and pretty much every incidental character introduced by Miller in Year One gets killed off; hooray!

Now, my first impressions of The Long Halloween were that it was reasonably enjoyable but not a great story. Well, Dark Victory I think makes that leap. There’s a lot to like here. Okay, the plot is still a little pointlessly convoluted, and Batman is still about as useless as a handbag of rainbows until Dick all-but solves everything in the latter half of the story (the kid’s about twelve, incidentally; no he does not have to eat rats), but even still there’s something wholly enjoyable about reading this book that makes those little problems… not so bad. To be honest, I think it’s Loeb’s skill in handling characters that pulls it through. Dick and Alfred here are especially great and yes okay I cried a little bit during the hairbrush scene. Shockingly, Catwoman gets herself involved in the plot for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with Batman, and though they spend a bit of time dancing around each other — both in and out of costume — after one too many missed dates (Bruce swears he was dosed with fear gas… again), she eventually dumps him in order to pursue her own life for a while. The new DA manages to be sexy without being too skanky and unsympathetic (maybe a little bit skanky), and I was kinda rooting for that guy trying to re-establish his (now dead) father’s company outside of the influence of the rest of his Mafiosi family.

If you’re out in the market for some grim, gritty noir Batman then you can do a hell of a lot worse than Dark Victory (q.v. previous review). Competently written with highly complimentary dark, heavy art. One of the few superhero comics I have considered actually going out and buying, and from me that’s really saying something.

Oh, also; the back covers of these issues — all of which feature Gordon in the same scene in his office — are classic.

1. My laptop. ^
2. In case you actually haven’t; Bruce Wayne comes back from Magical Ninja Training School and mopes around a bit in Gotham trying to figure out the best way to Fight Crime. Not-Yet-Commissioner Gordon also gets a transfer into the city and spends his time cheating on his pregnant wife. A bat smashes through a window. That’s about it, really. ^