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Underground > Comic Books >

Frank Miller, Jim Lee: The Goddamn Batman

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15:09 / 20.07.05

no one's saying the final page is all that brilliant, but it taps into a 'kewlness' factor that's not nearly as cheap as that of the rest of the book, that's all. It's decent moment for the lousy modern Frank-Miller-who-writes-Batman-and-is-on-autopilot. And a decent moment, even a bit cliche, compared to the rest of the book just seems better by comparison.

15:11 / 20.07.05

I mean 'kewl' as we all understand it to mean, but there are moments that are actually kind of cool & fun at the top of the 'kewl' spectrum, 95% of which is lousy.

By which I mean the moment was kind of cool even though it was cliche. Didn't mean to get into an essay on what 'kewl' means.

And if all the 'solider/war' talks annoys you, get ready, cause Miller has said that's what this all be about - training Robin with lots of tough guy talk. Of course, there's well-written Frank Miller tough guy talk and poorly written Frank Miller tough guy talk.

19:33 / 20.07.05

My god, it was badly writen wasn't it. And the art wasn't at all good. At best it was distinctly 'whatever', but it wasn't at it's best at all, ever, at any point.

22:23 / 20.07.05

I flipped through this for about thirty seconds at the shop. My God, it looked ghastly. The only good bit was the last page...

23:29 / 20.07.05

heh.. flipped through it & got board before I ever got to the last page. Is it worth flipping all the way through next time I'm in a shop?

02:04 / 21.07.05

Also: That final page. Why do people keep saying it's good. It's not. Lee can't do shadows for shit, and if I hear the old 'good soldier/war' stuff much more I'm going to explode. Played out.

not only that: would Batman drag Dick into his nightlife [sorry] that quickly?

I can't recall how the previous versions of Robin's origin were held...

but in ALL-STAR FRANK MILLER AND JIM LEE THE BOY WONDER #1 a rather DKR-looking-Batman lifting you up like a cat and and telling you've been drafted was the worst ending to a day in which your parents get killed in front of a crowd.

06:17 / 21.07.05

I thought these All Star books were more or less all ages? Am I misremembering? Or have opaque VS underwear and bumcracks become acceptable for eleven year olds?

Regrettable Juvenilia

07:28 / 21.07.05

When I was 11 I accepted little else.

Haus of Mystery

07:58 / 21.07.05

Re:Final page - Dick suddenly becomes four years old. And on the previous page, did Batman drive through the cop car? Some mighty bad artwork kids....

Keith, like a scientist

18:09 / 22.07.05

i knew i hated Miller for a reason. What a waste.

and "Galt's Gulch"... laugh out fucking loud.

14:39 / 07.09.05

I hear Miller is gonna do a cover for issue 2. Should be interesting...

12:47 / 19.09.05

Wow, number 2 was even worse than number 1. As I read it in the store, I kept thinking "Woww...this is just 12 kinds of BAD." Batman slaps Robin around in the Batmobile, screaming "you're gonna love this, kiddo!" as he tries over and over to put a scare into young Dick Grayson, then repeats in a poorly-written first person narration "This kid JUST WON'T SCARE!" Ugh.

Other hilarious lines: "You got a problem with the idea of FIGHTING CRIME, kid?"

13:00 / 19.09.05

I didn't know I could laugh and be scared at the same time:

13:19 / 19.09.05

Truly.

Miller has seemingly really lost it here.

But I guess the new Sin City books will still be good, since they make better use of this hyper-macho crazy talk.

13:20 / 19.09.05

I guess DC figured it would be too "PC" to edit Miller's use of "retarded" here...? Batman is talking like a drunk barroom brawler.

13:44 / 19.09.05

1. I liked Christian Bale's portrayal of young Bruce Wayne as an arrogant, filthily rich twit. It made sense that his arrogance was an act. It put people off and prevented them from diving in too deep, because they were disgusted with what they were confronted with. The arrogance served as a defense mechanism, as well as a smokescreen.

2. Is Miller's Batman acting? History shows that Robins tend to pry open Batmen.

13:46 / 19.09.05

Still.

retarded or something?

Horrible.

14:07 / 19.09.05

If you read Bats' dialogue in #2 with the voice of a drunk, infuriated Nick Nolte in your head, it almost works.

Almost. (and not that that's at all right for the character of Batman, of course)

14:14 / 19.09.05

now i'm a big fan of the last twenty odd pages of dark knight 2, y'know where he's broken his vow for good and it's totally cracked his brain open so he's reduced to a barely-coherent kiddly-fiddlin nutcase with no sense of responsibility towards the twelve - year olds he's a repeat adopter-of? y'know that bit? it works there, but now miller's just going to apply that to the bat evermore?

i'm going to have to get it, that 'are you dense?' panel up there's about the funniest thing i've ever seen.

14:20 / 19.09.05

Maybe I'm reading it wrong but it seemed a fairly standard reichian/BDSM crack-the-chara-armor-to-get-rid-of-trauma deal. Batman putting on his scary mask and smacking the kid around so the kid'll feel something rather than put up all these defenses... and seriously, if Dick had come up to a guy in a blue skinsuit, little red trunks and booties, cape and spitcurl and alienesque wink of all-knowingness... and threw out a 'who are you?' I would half expect whoever else was standing there to say something like 'He's Superman, dumbass.'
Supes is too polite to do it. Batman isn't. And he isn't willingly or easily sociable, either. The cluelessness, the bullying, the horror figure and dilettante, are all facades that are also partly true. 'Sounds like my last date' and 'I'm the goddamn Batman' and everything in between. He's utterly sane, reasonable, rational and completely convinced of his own supersolipsized status.

17:36 / 19.09.05

>> Maybe I'm reading it wrong but it seemed a fairly standard reichian/BDSM crack-the-chara-armor-to-get-rid-of-trauma deal. Batman putting on his scary mask and smacking the kid around so the kid'll feel something rather than put up all these defenses...

I would buy that plot idea/concept if it weren't so laughably poorly written/executed here...

Haus of Mystery

18:04 / 19.09.05

Just unbelievably shite. It's as camp as all hell too - topless Alfred holds a swooning Vicki in the rain. TOPLESS. ALFRED.

The 'retarded' line is good, but I'm sorry it'll never top

GO BACK TO YOUR NEWSPAPER SEXPOT!!!

for all time greatness.

Phex: Dorset Doom

19:22 / 19.09.05

Just read this today and god I'm hoping Miller's going to pull the rug out and reveal that all the drunk retardo-talk has just been to toughen young Robin up. If not, then Miller has lost it. It's gone, poof!, no more.

19:25 / 19.09.05

It's not obvious that it's supposed to toughen him up? Batman's talking to him the way a drill sergeant is expected to. I still think he's a screw loose though.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

19:58 / 19.09.05

Well, generally I wait at least until after the funeral before I start convert bereaved young boys into brutal crime-fighting machines. You know. So they can at least try to process their grief like an ordinary human being.

Haus of Mystery

20:15 / 19.09.05

Yeah we'll you're not the GODDAMN BATMAN, RETARD!

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

20:50 / 19.09.05

Well, yeah, he's got bigger boobies than I do.

Of course, I haven't been drafted into the war yet.

Haus of Mystery

20:54 / 19.09.05

Good soldier.

23:13 / 19.09.05

Hey, whatever, guys. I thought this ish was the dog's baws.

Was planning on posting the above bubble ('05's finest dialogue thus far) from the Bat by way of proof. Got beat. Anyway, hey, you don't have to just take my word for it.

These guys know what they're on about too. I think it's all about what I'm going to call the 'fun factor'; see, this is a Batman (solo, cause I ain't gonna try and deny JLA and Classified) book, and it is a shitload of fun. When's the last time you could say that? DKSA prolly.

#1 was poor, no doubt, barring the sexpot line, but this is just awesome. This fucking rocks.

Look at Jim Lee; the art here is furious. Couple Miller panels, but never crossing the line from his own patented dynamism into homage (Lee can do an excellent Miller, btw, check out his Batman B&W, written by - iirc - Ellis and you'll see) and he has the beat right. Jarred at first, but now in platinum synch.

Furthermore, Robin makes sense. Robin makes Batman make sense. The 12 panellers are ludicrous, but they are also in parts, pretty moving. Not a bad trick if you can manage.

Reader, I fucking loved it, as may be evident. Batman didn't used to make me give much of a shit, and I'm presently buying three of his books, and assembling a top notch hypertimeline thusly: Year One HC (must I explain?) - Man Who Laughs (Brubaker/Mahnke - not totally endorsing this, but it's decent) - LOTDK 'Snow' (Johnson/Williams/Fisher) - this - Lapham 'tec. I'm not even embarrassed by this apparent monomania. Chuck in Ellis orthogonally shifting examination in Batman/Planetary, the singing in JLU and Baleman (obvs.) and I begin to understand why he always, always wins these best character awards.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

23:42 / 19.09.05

I don't know. I don't tend to by Batbooks either, but the "Snow" storyline is gorgeous, funny, and sad - but this? I look at this in the store and have weird '90s flashbacks and have to put it back down.

00:13 / 20.09.05

It seems that this book is falling under the same lens that DKSA fell under, with one camp touting its unhinged ironic genius and the other flabbergasted at the wanton departure from logic, sense, and characterization.

Is Miller serious? Does he think this is the same Batman from DKR and Year One? He's said he does in interviews, but the first two issues have him killing a dozen police officers in one night without a second's thought, when Year One had him risking his own life to save two police officers from a burning wreck who would have just as soon let him die.

Jim Lee's sure playing it straight for the most part, though the hunky topless Alfred splash and the Vicki Vale cheesecake might say otherwise...

To be honest, I think Miller had too much fun writing Sin City, and got locked into that mode of square-jaw'd ironic machismo and misogyny from then up to the present.

That the Sin City film was so interesting tells me that Miller's not 'lost it' - he has very particular, very interesting vision - but I don't know that he has any interest in letting others in on the joke.

I thought DKSA was abysmal - arse beyond all reckoning, even if I bought the idea that it was a parody of a post-dark-age Batman gone unhinged in a dayglo fascist world that wasn't ready for his brand of REAL anarcho-fascism. I think All-Star is abysmal as well, but time will tell if I get the joke.

01:15 / 20.09.05

Re: looks like a 90's book.

Aye, it does. But I'm pretty sure everyone in this thread, or at least everybody under 30, in this thread bought one or two books by Image artists so on that assumption:

a) it's okay, you don't have to be ashamed.
b) there must have been something appealing about flash 90's artists.
c) what's wrong with Lee? Can someone please articulate this to me. Especially regarding this ish, in which I can find little fault in storytelling: clarity, excitement, ability to evoke - other than that 'it looks like it was drawn by Jim Lee.'

I mean I'm not trying to push for a reappraisal of Liefeld's X-Force or anything, which is a fucking terrible comicbook, and I knew it was when I was 12, but really if you're in a small NE Scotland town and there's no other comics there in the newsagent, you'll develop a habit.

Also: there's no irony in my (fondly-declared, above) love for this comic. It is very funny, quite absurd and lurid, and yet still affecting. Which is what I'd want from a 21st Century superhero comic.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

01:24 / 20.09.05

c) what's wrong with Lee? Can someone please articulate this to me. Especially regarding this ish, in which I can find little fault in storytelling: clarity, excitement, ability to evoke - other than that 'it looks like it was drawn by Jim Lee.'

I can tell you why I don't like Jim Lee...and the first thing to do is look at his drawing of Batman on the cover of issue #1: There is no way on this planet that the head can possibly be connected to the body the way it is drawn. He constantly has figure drawings like this, and the effect doesn't even work for the picture. I don't mind if an artist plays fast and loose with anatomy, but it has to be to a purpose, and Lee's work rarely does that. It seems polished and sloppy.

I also REALLY dislike how how uses quick pen lines instead of shadowing, making all of his characters look like cats have been clawing at their faces.

He also tends to use a lot of stock poses, poor page design, and makes his pages look appealing as posters, but sacrifices story flow to do it. He doesn't vary panels in a way that serves the story, but instead seems to do it in such a way as to make the page subserviant to a dominant image that doesn't add anything to the story.

But that's just me.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

04:28 / 20.09.05

Rose: I also REALLY dislike how how uses quick pen lines instead of shadowing, making all of his characters look like cats have been clawing at their faces.

That sums it up for me, right there. I tend to favour very smooth art (keep in mind two of my favourites right now are probably Sook or Peter Snjebjerg), and I find his lines really harsh, constipated and over-detailed (fake detailing, maybe).

I can't really recall if I actually owned an Image back in the Nineties. I tended to favour stuff like Davis's Excalibur, and I remember really focusing on Waid's Flash (even though the latter doesn't hold up as well as I would like when I read bits of it again) - I think I may have owned something, but whatever it was I don't think I read it more than once before it got shuffled into some particularly Siberian region of the comic book collection where I could safely ignore it - probably with random, flea market Avengers from when I was ten. I know at the time the Image art was generally - well - too scratchy for me to groove with it. I don't think it got any more specific than that.

04:30 / 20.09.05

Jim Lee seems to often lack a storytelling ability and has an overwhelming desire to glam up and sexify everything on his pages... but, I think he's aware of these tics and deficiencies and more than most Hawt-fanboyfave-IMAGEFATHER artists, works at getting better. Sometimes the writer assists, as with the Stormwatch issue where Ellis basically wrote a sequence of pinups. I liked his part of 'Hush' better than the writing.
I think we're all supposed to loathe the Image founders, though, just because. And never admit to liking anything they do even though I love Savage 'inappropriate orange spikey-dino jailbait blowing the unconscious' Dragon and much of the Wildstorm U even after it's DC sell, and still think that Jae Lee could outdraw half the professional comics artists holding a pen at the moment without actually getting around to doing something new or letting up on the heavy-handed inky darkness of mood-osity.
Of course, in my youth I churned out enough Jim Lee imitation pieces to be entirely unbiased.
Jesus Christ and Quincy Jones could get together and hype a book by an Image artist sometime, though, and there'd be folks in the crowd who'd turn their noses up without ever giving it a fair shake.
And the 'Jim Lee doesn't draw realistic' thing never washes. Do Picasso's three ladies have necks that connect rationall to their heads? Does Gary Trudeau?

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