Batman: Off-World

Usually it’s a bad sign when familiar characters go off into space. In terms of horror franchises it didn’t work for Jason, Pinhead, or the Leprechaun, with each of those movies being clear indications that a shark had been jumped. So Batman in space wasn’t an idea I was keen on. “I have no business battling alien empires,” he reflects at one point. I could not agree more.

Given all that, I thought Jason Aaron did a decent job with this this six-part series. The set-up is, admittedly, crazy. Batman gets his butt kicked by some muscle that a Gotham gangster has brought in from way out of town. Specifically, he’s a goon from the Slag Galaxy. How he got to Earth I’m not sure, but I may have missed that part. Anyway, Batman figures that the only way he can beat the goon is to actually go to the Slag Galaxy himself and train against this new competition. So he gets on board an experimental rocket ship and off he goes.

The Slag Galaxy is a brutal place that’s run by the Blakksun Mining Company. The BMC have a mercenary force of War Stormers that go around enslaving the populations of various planets, resulting in mass orphanization. This of course gets Batman’s back up since he has a soft spot for orphans, not to mention injustice generally. So he decides to take on the BMC as part of his training, which proceeds with the assistance of the requisite sexy alien (a Stormchaser named Ione with lots of tattoos), a giant war wolf, and a Punch Bot that likes to get into fights (and lose them).

It’s pretty brutal stuff, as Batman works up the corporate ladder until finally taking on the co-CEOs of the BMC, a pair of baddies called the Blakksun Twins who rule the galaxy with “lawful omnipotence.” Wrath Blakksun is a tall dominatrix warrior woman while her brother Whisper is a nerdy-looking runt who makes people’s heads explode when he says something to them. They’re actually quite a creepy couple and I was only let down by how easily Batman manages to withstand Whisper’s dirty talk. It seems all you have to be is tough enough and you can take it. And we all know Batman is the toughest guy there is. Even if, as always, his code doesn’t allow him to kill any aliens. Which makes his taking out whole armies of mercenaries a bit hard to swallow, but at this point we just have to roll with it.

Then . . . back to Earth and a rematch with the goon he fought at the start. Who this time doesn’t stand a chance. It’s a tidy ending, and things are even set up for Ione to launch as she adopts the Batman mantle back in her galaxy (her sidekick, the Punch Bot. is now Bat-Bot for good measure). I think I can live without those adventures though, at least for a while.

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Batman: Europa

We begin with Batman going toe-to-toe with Killer Croc in some Gotham alley and the Dark Knight is really feeling it, but not in a good way. “Getting’ too old for this, Batman?” KC chides. And even though Batman finally puts the big guy down for the count, he has to admit that “it was harder than usual.” Is he getting old? In need of some testosterone replacement therapy? I mean, over the course of nearly a hundred years of crime-fighting he has taken quite a beating.

Alas, things are worse than that. It seems a secret canonical villain has infected Batman with a virus that will kill him in a week. This sends Batman hopping about Europe trying to find out who’s responsible. He’s first off to Berlin, then to Prague, Paris, and finally Rome (being sure to hit all the must-see tourist monuments like the Brandenburg Gate, Notre Dame, and the Coliseum). The twist is that he finds out early on that the Joker has been infected with the same virus, so they actually have to go on this little road trip together. It’s a team-up of unlikely partners, which turns out to be as much fun as you’d expect.

I didn’t care much for the story. The whole premise seemed like the flimsiest sort of excuse for throwing Batman and the Joker together. The problem I had with it is that I just couldn’t see how it made any sense, even on the level of the way the plots of most criminal masterminds in comic books are needlessly complicated and don’t add up. And then Batman’s trick at the end to take down the bad guy struck me as ridiculous.

But the plot isn’t the point anyway. What we’re really getting here is a gallery of striking artwork from different artists for each of the travel destinations. Now if all you want is art in the standard DC or Marvel comic book style then you may be put off by it. I found the Paris section by Diego Latorre to be particularly dark and sketchy, making a lot of the action hard to figure out. It reminded me a bit of Reptilian in that regard, for better and for worse. But most of the time I was really impressed.

Despite the interesting idea of pairing Batman and the Joker as buddies I really didn’t care for the script. What sells Europa is the art though, which is well worth a look.

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Simpsons Comics Jam-Packed Jamboree

The Simpsons have been with us for so long that a list of minor recurring characters from the show would likely be as long as the tax rolls in some small towns. And yet, even though it’s been years if not decades since I watched the show, I can identify all of them, or nearly all of them, as soon as they’re introduced. Examples showing up several times in this collection include Dr. Nick (catchphrase: “Hi everybody!”), Gil the worn-down salesman, and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. Hell, I even remember the Cletus song.

But I said I recognized nearly all of these guys because I had no recollection of Dr. Colossus. This sent me to the Internet to see if maybe he was introduced sometime after I stopped watching, but actually he’s been around since 1994.

I didn’t even notice Dr. C the first time he shows up in this collection, when he briefly appears with his mother before Judge Marge. But then it’s easy to miss things in these comics as they often have so many gags appearing even within a single cell that you have to squint and read the fine print to catch them. As usual, the stories are pure zaniness, giving you no idea where they’re heading aside from the fact that at the end normalcy (or what passes for normalcy in Springfield) will be re-established, with the Simpson family as indestructible as ever. Which makes you wonder at their evolution from what were, at the time, subversive roots, into something so conservative you could even think of them as an institution. Though after nearly fifty years that may be a natural progression.

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Batman: Under the Red Hood

Batman has always had a Robin problem. He’s never been that popular a character, doesn’t fit well with the Dark Knight’s grim persona, and the relationship between Bruce Wayne and his young ward probably seemed creepy at the time and ever since has become the stuff of comedy sketches. Even Robin’s costume looks campy and ridiculous, with elven slippers and shiny green speedo briefs under a shirt that might be a minidress. Fans even voted to have the Joker kill him off in the 1988 storyline “A Death in the Family.”

That particular iteration of Robin was Jason Todd, who was the second lad to step into the role after the departure of Dick Grayson (who went on to become Nightwing). In this story, however, Jason is back as a new crime-fighting crusader who goes by the name of Red Hood. Even though it’s more of a helmet than a hood. But whatever.

How Jason was resurrected is a tale too complicated for me to relate or, if I’m being honest, understand. Suffice to say that Jason as Red Hood is now taking out Gotham’s crime syndicates, which are being run by Black Mask. This should mean he’s one of the good guys, but his methods are quite brutal, which doesn’t sit well with Batman. It seems that when Jason came back from the dead he brought with him a taste for vengeance and rough justice, whether because of how he died or due to some infection from taking a dip in R’as al Ghul’s Lazarus Pool isn’t clear. So there’s a lot of blood in these comics, and bodies are soon piling up all over the place.

I thought it was a strong story, with good character development and conflict between the two leads. Jason/Red Hood has a grudge to settle with Batman, not for letting the Joker kill him but for not killing the Joker in revenge. And he has a case.

Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me. But why . . . why on God’s earth – ??! Is he still alive!!?? . . . Ignoring what he’s done in the past. Blindly, stupidly, disregarding the entire graveyards he’s filled. The thousands who have suffered . . . the friends he’s crippled . . . I thought . . . I thought killing me – that I’d be the last person you’d ever let him hurt. If it had been you that he beat to a bloody mass. If it had been you that he left in agony. If he had taken you from this world . . . I would have done nothing but search the planet for this pathetic pile of evil, death-worshipping garbage . . . and sent him off to hell.

I think this is a question that a lot of Batman readers have probably asked over the years. But we just have to accept that the man has a code and that’s all there is to it.

The conflict between Bruce and Jason is the main one being explored throughout the series, and it culminates with lots of bone-crunching fisticuffs and blood splatter. There’s also some dark comedy, especially coming from Black Mask and his exasperation with his incompetent underlings. And I got a chuckle out of things like how the Batman symbol is printed on the soles of the Dark Knight’s combat boots.

Most of all, however, I think they finally made something out of Robin. I count myself as a die-hard Robin hater, and I’m not a fan of Nightwing either. Red Hood as the back-from-the-dead vigilante, however, is a character with some edge. There were a lot of improbabilities along the way and parts that I felt didn’t add up, but this was a solid comic all around.

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Batman: One Bad Day: Clayface

This is one of eight single-issue comics in the Batman: One Bad Day series, each by different writers and artists and each focusing on the tortured psyche of a famous Batman villain. Now in the case of One Bad Day: Clayface what we get isn’t an origin story so much as a reboot, since there have been a whole lot of Clayfaces over the years, which is what you might expect from such a Protean figure. What’s happened in this one is that Clayface, an actor named Basil Karlo, has left Gotham and is now working as a waiter in Hollywood, where he’s trying to break into the movie business. Things don’t go well, however, and soon “Clay” (his adopted name) is demonstrating that even if he’s not quite willing to die for his art he’s absolutely on board with killing for it. Which means literally working his way up the Hollywood food chain from fellow struggling actors to agents to directors to producers. They all get the mud bath treatment when they don’t share Clay’s creative vision.

I loved pretty much all of this. The story by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing (the Hivemind) is solidly constructed, even though initially a bit disorienting as we get introduced to all of Clay’s co-workers. Things keep escalating as Clayface works his way through the usual gang of movie-business jerks. And the punchline ending is both grim and funny. I don’t know if I’m a big fan of the art of Xermánico normally, but he really does a great job with Clayface here, giving pathos to his sad, pupil-less eyes. And finally I’ll call out the lettering by Tom Napolitano. Usually I rail against the speech of characters being presented in stylized ways where it’s distracting and not required. But here I thought it very effective. I liked how when Clay reverts to his Clayface form the speech bubbles become swirling, puddly forms and the lettering liquefies. I also thought the business of providing emphasis through the use of what looks like yellow highlighter was a gamble that paid off. It works with the way they present the text for the scene settings in screenplay format throughout (“Int./Ext. Sunset Chateau. Day.”)

Batman does show up at the end to put an end to Clayface’s theater of blood, or mud, which is done in a perfunctory way with a Ghostbusters-style trap and a quick moral lesson about truth and lies in the dream factory. But Clayface not only gets the last word, he’s also a far more complicated and compelling character. Sure he’s deluded about Hollywood, but he has the conviction of the true psycho, while also being sympathetic. I mean, who hasn’t wanted to throw mud at movie stars at some point? It’s just that Clayface is mud with teeth.

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