| |
|
Thanks LDones for doing #3 as I don't own that run in trade paperback and it would have taken me ages.
1. Is there any way other than expensive hardcovers to read golden age Batman and Superman?
The "Greatest...Ever Told" books do have Golden Age stories in them. For instance, the first Batman volume runs with adventures from 1939, 1939, 1940, 1944, 1946, 1948, 1950, 1952, 1954... if I remember right, 1956 is considered the start of the Silver Age. But that's quite a big chunk of old-skool stories.
The Mark Cotta Vaz book Tales of the Dark Knight, a 50-year anniversary celebration, is quite light but does have decent reprints of old stories and gives you a good basic run thru Batman history.
2. Why do you list Arkham Asylum and Killing Joke as nonessentials? When I was browsing around, I assumed Killing Joke would be pretty major, being an Alan Moore contribution.
Well, this is just my taste and I know a lot of people would disagree with the former at least.
I think Arkham Asylum is Morrison's most over-hyped, overworked and overrated work. I think it's really laboured, with that self-conscious "look at me being dark and literary" feel about it that typifies the worst post-Watchmen superhero titles. The Joker makes sexual remarks about the Boy Wonder, Batman has complexes about his mother and the Mad Hatter drools about little girls (hey, comics aren't just for kids!). There are glossy front and end-papers sandwiching the story with clever-clever coffee-table material: an artsy architectual view of the building, a spooky collage of a rogues gallery, the Latin for bat, endless quotations from Lewis Carroll (hey, Alan Moore had lots of quotations, that's what makes it a graphic novel) Under all the cod references to psychoanalytic theory, and stripped of the tiresome flashbacks, the story is ploddingly linear and boring -- just a tour of the Asylum alongside Batman, with a new villain in a new cell introduced every few pages. Oh look, the lunatics have overtaken the asylum. Are they mad, or is it Batman. Ho-hum. Who will win, I wonder. Oh look it's Batman.
The art by McKean is equally showy, and equally hinders what should have been the basic aim of telling an engaging, exciting or interesting comic book story. Yeah it's really radical to have the Joker's script in some spidery hand-scrawl, but you can't frigging read it. Batman becomes a foggy wraith drifting from one panel to the next. Most of the images look like exactly what they are, portraits McKean worked up from photographs. If you're really lucky he sticks some lace or nails over the top and takes another photograph of it. Yeah it's pretty when it's a Sandman cover, but it doesn't make for dynamic visual storytelling.
Actually I think I've made this book sound more interesting than it really is. My advice: buy it for completion's sake, but pay no more than £10 maximum.
Killing Joke, as I understand it, was written before Watchmen, held over and published afterwards, in the wake of Moore mania when people genuinely were asking if he was God. I believe Moore himself said it was destined for a Batman annual, where it would have been a low-prestige but pleasantly surprising story. Instead it was released as the new graphic novel from Alan "Watchmen" Moore, the man who invented post-literary sequential art, pow wham comics aren't for kids anymore, etc etc.
Yes, Killing Joke redefined the graphic novel -- in that it was about the thickness of the average leaflet. It's not even a graphic novella. Storywise it's almost painfully reliant on the visual transition that Moore later refined in Watchmen, where he ends a scene on one image and starts it with a very similar, echoing image. It's also heavy on Moore's other big device from that period, where a caption from one scene overlays and dramtically/ironically "comments on" the image we're seeing. There's also some zoom in/pull out sequences -- start on a rippling puddle, camera moves back over 9 frames -- again very familiar from Watchmen. It's like this was Moore trying out and testing some storytelling ideas, which unfortunately were nothing new by the time this book reached the shops.
Bolland's artwork is pretty but stilted, each frame frozen. When he has to draw action like Batman leaping thru the air, the figures look like shop dummies suspended on wire -- so he falls back on that last resort, adding "whizz lines" around them because they just don't have any fluidity or movement to them.
The story is once again sadly typical of the "dark revisionist" superhero trend of the mid to late 80s -- that "grim'n'gritty" approach that Morrison explicitly tried to counter with his JLA. Comics like this contributed to a way of thinking that said superhero titles couldn't be "adult" unless they crippled and/or killed and ideally raped a sidekick, thus giving the protagonist motivation to get really bad-ass and do some killing of his own. Case in point: Mike Grell's The Longbow Hunters.
I don't know if this was the first "modern age" comic to give the Joker an official origin -- I seem to remember the specifics of it, with him wearing a red mask for a bungled burglary, were actually taken from a much earlier comic -- but the attempt to humanise Batman's arch-villain is interesting enough.
In continuity terms this comic is also "important" because its treatment of Barbara Gordon was never reversed and continues to effect both her and the Bat-mythos.
Again, what the hey, buy it because it's a key document of this particular trend in comic books. But I wouldn't spend too much on this one either. |
|
|
