I am a fan of comics, I like the idea of comics, I like super heroes.
I don’t actually read all that many comics. The ongoing monthly cost is more than I care to bother with and I hate the whole multispan multi book story arch aspects (multibook Crossovers, not bultibook within a series). It also feels like there is too much long tail and too much filler to really “get into” anything these days. I really love collections and Graphic Novels. They tend to highlight the best aspects and they tend to be self constrained consolidated stories. The only DC hero I really care for is Batman, and maybe Power Girl (and not for her enormous plots). It’s probably not a coincidence that my favorite Marvel heroes are Iron Man and Mr Fantastic (and the FF by extension). I like the sciencey inventory gadget types. My exposure to Batman is is still mostly limited tot he various movies and TV shows.
I’ve been reading through a bunch of Batman graphic novels recently, and mostly enjoying them. They apparently are not all in continuity with each other but it’s good enough for my level of interest. (I picked up ten books on Comixology during their 75th anniversary sale).
Batman: Hush
I started out with Hush. I wanted something from a more slightly modern era that I had heard (meaning it must be relatively famously decent). Hush fit the bill. It’s also possible that it was just first in the list and this the first one to finish downloading. It turned out to be a decent book to start with, not because it’s super great but because it covered a pretty wide birth of general Batman history and almost all of the major villains make an appearance at some point as well as many of Batman’s allies.
Ok, I’m assuming these random appearances are at least somewhat less common, maybe Joker is in every other issue, Arkham Asylum seems to be a literal revolving door of entry and exit for these bad guys. It’s kind of comical just how bad the security is on a prison that holds all of the cities most dangerous psychopaths. Anyway, Batman follows through a series of encounters trying to track down this new criminal mastermind. His journey even takes him through to Metropolis with a brief appearance by Lois lane and Superman.
I don’t want to get into TOO much details for spoiler reasons.
While I enjoyed the art and the overall story, the book suffers from the over use of the red herring plot device. There are at least 3 people who wear the same outfit for various reasons in an attempt to make you think they are the real villain, not to mention the other “could he be the mastermind?” moments with people not dressed in a coat and bandages. This is made even more annoying by the fact that it’s pretty obvious who Hush REALLY is from very early on including his motivations. This results in a decent ride with a lackluster, and obvious ending.
Despite this complaint, I really did enjoy Hush. Its a great quick primer for someone like me who is less familiar with how the character dynamics work in the comics. It also has a few set ups that I imagine are expanded upon in the future mainline series of books.
The Long Holloween
It’s kind of funny reading through The Long Halloween just after reading through Hush. It’s an older book, but it has a fair number of parallels to Hush. Specifically the whole “who is the mysterious killer” aspect as well as the “All of the rogues gallery will make an appearance” angle. You even have the subplot of Catwoman showing up to help out. I suppose the reality is that these gimmicks are probably just the way Batman books always work.
Unlike Hush, the “secret main villain” (Holiday, as in the Holiday Killer) is slightly less obvious from the get go. It also saves most of it’s big reveals until the end, and it actually has a nice twist at the end that I didn’t see coming yet it totally makes sense and fits. The core plot follows Batman tracking down Holiday, a killer who is systematically murdering high level Mob figures through out Gotham, except each murder falls on a Holiday, starting with Halloween.
There is a secondary point to the story but it’s a bit of a spoiler, so I’m going to throw it in this paragraph. If you want to avoid spoilers you can just skip ahead to the next paragraph or the next book. Anyway, now that there is a bit of space in there, I’ll go on an say, the basis of this book acts as an origin story for Two Face. This is part of why i wasn’t certain of the true identity of Holiday despite my suspicions. Harvey Dent plays a pretty major roll in the story, but I know Harvey Dent is a character who isn’t just Two Face. I had my suspicions that in the end Harvey would become Two Face, but it was entirely possible that Harvey would just spend the entire story helping Jim Gordon search for Holiday. It helped that there were several other possible candidates for Holiday, however unlike Hush, the entire story wasn’t spent setting them up and knocking them down as suspects. Most, if not all of the suspects lasted up to the end of the book.
Also, I may be imagining things, but this book really felt like it had served as the root of the recent film, The Dark Knight (aka the good one). The Dark Knight is certainly a way different plot than The Long Halloween, but it shares a lot of the core ideas and characters. The Joker, the Mob characters, Harvey Dent, i think there was even a money burning scene in both books (I’ve been reading a bunch of these and they are starting to blur). The Dark Knight is one of my favorite movies for sure and this book really kept hitting a lot of the same notes that movie does.
The Killing Joke
The last book for this round of discussion is The Killing Joke. Both of the last books were essentially collections of like 8-10 issues covering an arc. The Killing Joke is considerably shorter and by rough estimate covers 2 or three issues. It’s considerably less “epic” and only involves Batman versus the Joker. The most notable thing about it is the slightly iconic cover, which may be less iconic than I feel it is as most of my experience with the cover involves a remake for Transformers involving Megatron and Reflector.
(Some spoilers ahead) Despite how short it is, several notable things happen in this arc. I am not sure how impacting on the overall world some of these events are given how Comics sometimes handle continuity, but they seemed important based on what I know. One, Barbara Gordon gets show and crippled. This is important because Barbra used to be Batgirl, later she is the wheelchair bound Oracle. Knowing comics, there has probably been a back and forth on this, but for my purposes, this serves as a point when Barbra’s character became permanently changed. None of this happens IN the book aside from the shooting. Batgirl doesn’t show up at all and Oracle doesn’t show up to help Batman track down the Joker.
This book apparently also is the basis for a change in how the Joker is depicted in all future books. The Joker spends most of the book torturing a naked Jim Gordon with BDSM midgets, it’s kind of bizarre more than freaky, but I suppose I can see the change. Instead of being a kind of comical “Joker” he is more of a deranged psycho. Ok, admittedly, I don’t really see the change, but then almost all of my Joker exposure is to the “Psycho Joker” so he just feels more or less like, The Joker.
There is also a subplot revealing the Joker’s origins. It’s really watered down though, which makes it more disappointing than insightful. Part of the Joker’s “thing” is that no one knows his true identity. Even after this origin we still really don’t know his identity other than he had a wife and was somewhat tricked into becoming the Joker. It sort of explains why he is the way he is but it really doesn’t feel like it gives enough motivation for why he is who he is. It also doesn’t help that the Joker is an Unreliable Narrator and the story may in fact be entirely untrue.
The point is, I can see why this is an important story in the Batman Mythos, but it’s also kind of a mediocre leaning crap story at it’s core. It adds to the mythos in several big ways, but it’s done in such a lame way that it’s hard to really care.
