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It's hard to pin down what's so wonderful about those archive editions. The art is often amateurish or even downright ugly; the anatomy is all fucked up, the storytelling is murky, the layouts are crowded—they're working mainly in 8- or 9-panel layouts, and there are horse-choking amounts of dialog and expository captioning that some how still don't manage to explain anything satisfactorily. The stories don't make a goddam lick of sense.
And yet, and yet...
It's the energy, more than anything. These are punk rock comics, outlaw art, 12-pagers bashed out in a weekend by wild-eyed young men out of their minds on booze and speed. There were no rules, no "continuity"—they were making everything up as they went along, throwing in everything they could think of: gadgets, dames, gunplay, vampires, dirigibles, sinister Celestials, Dick Tracy-style grotesques. The characterizations and mood are wildly inconsistent—there was no meticulous planning going into these things; these guys were literally making Batman up as we watched.
I can't read these comics in one sitting, no. They're such a mess I can barely get through the stories at all. They're great for browsing, though, for the sheer profusion of what-the-FUCK moments coming off the page.
Seriously: for Matt Wagner to take one of these tossed-off, meant-to-be-ephemeral stories and expand it into a lovingly-crafted six-issue miniseries perfectly squared with seven decades of ingrown continuity seems to me a textbook example of MISSING THE FUCKING POINT.
As to the Batman/Superman question: I'd go for Batman, simply because the character's pulp roots and setting lend themselves to more outright weirdness. Also, Superman was a two-man operation, whilst Batman (despite being credited to Bob Kane alone) was a collective effort from the outset, with Jerry Robinson and Bill Finger and, later, Gardner Fox all throwing ideas into the mix. It was a mishmosh, a stew, but there were some damn tasty chunks. |
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