This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk, Evan Narcisse and Graeme McMillan talk about Batman: The Return, Batman Inc. and The Extremist.
EVAN: After the weird emotional high of Batman and Robin #16, Batman: The Return felt like filler to me. (Doesn’t help that I’ve never been a fan of David Finch’s scratchy-scratchy line, either.) It pretty much exists only to spell out the new status quo, which doesn’t seem entirely necessary. Those plot beats are just probably best served in Batgirl and the other individual titles, where you have space to see Oracle, Batgirl, Dick and Damian react to the changes.
Likewise, the teases with the new Leviathan villains felt a bit too compressed for me to really enjoy, but I did like Terrorist Anti-Batman and the twisted reversal origin of his brainwashed un-Robin. Still, Grant Morrison can keep throwing these doppelgangers–like the Red Hood and Scarlet–at me and I’ll keep eating them up. Every time he does it, it just demonstrates how flexible the DNA of the Batman myth is. And speaking of that flexibility, my favorite part of the issue was actually the opening sequence with the “I Shall Become A Bat” bat. Taking that little bit that all fans know and building a new meaning that works in with the new shift is such a great little grace note.
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DOUGLAS: I do kind of like the way Morrison keeps circling around a few key moments in Bruce’s life–we saw Bruce and the bell before in that “Last Rites” story in Batman #682/683. (Although didn’t the bat actually crash through the window in some earlier versions of this sequence?) For a great big new-direction-launching story, though, this really doesn’t add very much to what we already know about the Bat-family’s new direction–it seems like the sort of character beat/splash-page/fight-scene formula that Morrison normally writes rings around. (And the unnecessary lead-in to Catwoman’s appearance in Batman Inc. sort of feels like this was written after that one.)
Also, as pretty as David Finch’s two-page spread of the Batcave is, I don’t have the sense that he’s thought much about how it works as a place. Can Bat-artists please come up with some landmarks in the cave besides the dinosaur (which was destroyed in Detective a couple of years back!), the playing card and that damn penny? Are they going to be duplicated for all the new international Batcaves?
GRAEME: I thought this issue seemed particularly filler-ish, as well. Finch’s artwork doesn’t really help matters, although I’m not sure he could’ve saved the issue even if he’d been the greatest artist in the world, either: There’s just not that much here to really hold my interest, and the whole thing felt particularly unnecessary, especially considering the fact that we’re probably going to get another (and, probably, better) introduction to whatever Leviathan is when they appear in Batman, Incoporated later. Plus, perhaps this is a hangover from the whole “Black Glove/Simon Hurt” thing that just finished, what, last week, but Leviathan as a concept right now just left me feeling kind of cold. It was like, “Wait, there’s another all-powerful evil group that we’ve never heard about before? Seriously? Already?”
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EVAN: Yeah, I get that Batman, Inc’s going to need a opposite number to go up against, but that well is way dry for all the reasons you’ve said, Graeme.
DOUGLAS: Absolutely. And as cute as the “behind the scenes” stuff is, it’s really filler of its own kind to jack up a 30-page story to a five-dollar price point. (And, perhaps, to indicate that Finch kind of whiffed on Morrison’s script in a few places.)
EVAN: Now, Batman Inc. #1: this is the stuff. What makes Sexy Times Batman and Catwoman heading toward an inevitable face-off with an obscure manga Bat-villain in Japan enjoyable is the transparent glee Morrison and Paquette have in putting the thing together. The operatic pacing of the opening pages, the Akihabara-style establishing shot filled with otaku in-jokes, and Bruce and Selina on a super-date all jump up and down and tell you that the creators are having fun. Not only are they enjoying themselves, but so is Batman. This goes back to the well-adjusted Bat-vibe I think Morrison’s trying to set up in this next stage of his Bat-saga.
And obvious sexual innuendos aside, I’m pretty sure Selina singing while cracking the safe is a Hudson Hawk reference.
DOUGLAS: I don’t yet love Batman Inc. the way I adored Batman & Robin from the get-go–although that front cover really is everything I’d want it to be. (There’s nothing in here so far that hits the kinds of buttons Dick and Damian’s relationship did.) But what I do really like is the way Morrison and Paquette have given this series its own look and feel, too; it doesn’t read like any other superhero comic out this month. It’s gaudy and grotesque and funny and packed with hints at an even bigger, crazier world outside its panels. Favorite single moment: the “OMG it’s BEHIND YOU’ trope of Catwoman reaching for the jewel, not noticing the giant robot mouse behind her… and then cut to the next page and Bruce and Selina-as-“Elva” hanging out in their underwear and offhandedly referring to having dispatched the giant robot mouse. (I also love the idea of Selina rolling her eyes at stereotypical Japanese tentacle fetishes, given her own clothing preferences.)
This issue is much more surface-y than the best Morrison Batman stuff of the past few years, but it does feel like a carefully crafted surface: fun and fast, all about action and flash and sex, a rock skipped across the surface of the DCU.
GRAEME: Yeah, this felt like the new beginning that I’d been looking for with Batman: The Return – an actual beginning, and things actually moving forward, as opposed to The Return‘s more awkward “No, we are moving forward, honest, we’re just not SHOWING you anything new right now because, uh, just because, okay?!?”
It helped that the tone was, if anything, more whimsical than Morrison had been giving us in the first Batman and Robin issues – Come on, those questions at the end of the issue? Those are straight out of the end of the ’66 TV show, or perhaps Morrison’s Seaguy – and a reminder that this series really is Morrison channeling his best Bob Haney Brave and Bold issues (See also super sexy Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle time).
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Also, I love love love Yanick Paquette’s art here: It’s like Kevin Nowlan in a lot of places, but there’s something more… cartoony, maybe? Less static, anyway, about it, and he really helps set the tone in this issue – There’s action and danger and all, but it all looks wonderfully glamorous. I can’t imagine any of Morrison’s previous Bat-artists managing to pull balance off as well, to be honest.
Only thing I didn’t like about the issue? It’s completely anal, but Catwoman’s costume being opened to expose the cleavage. Sorry, people, I know it ruins my sexy cred, but Darwyn Cooke’s original design was so, so much more subtle in its hotness. Selina doesn’t need to offer the cleavage to seduce Bats; he loves her for her dirty, dirty mind.
EVAN: Glamorous came to mind for me, too; the costume liberties felt off. Those goggles should be on the face and that zipper pulled up. I mean, she’s already in skin-tight leather and then in sports bra, thong and knee-high boots. It kinda teeters on the edge of camp, like she wandered in from the set of Burlesque.
DOUGLAS: Agreed. Even when Cooke drew her with her zipper a little bit down, it was more about hinting than exposing, and nowhere near this top-heavy.
EVAN: On to Vertigo Resurrected: The Extremist. Special to the new DC Powers-That-Be: Here’s the legacy and should-be future of Vertigo, in this beautifully transgressive piece of work. I remember seeing house ads for The Extremist when it came out, and I was in a big Ted McKeever love-in at that time. But I never picked it up. Something about it was just too pervy for 21-year-old Evan.
And pervy it is. It’s the story of a leather-clad enforcer who polices a secret society of sexual deviants and kills anyone who steps out of line. It’s not exactly a welcoming concept. But the thing that struck me was how solidly constructed The Extremist is. Reveals, exposition, betrayals, reversals and too many swerves for me to recount, which is all laid on top of some truly outlier sexual behavior (which is mostly implied). Yet the story never falls apart.
It’s funny that two of our picks this week bubble over with sex and violence. The Extremist takes the psychosexual subtext of superhero spandex and vigilante action and moves it to the front. It’s just this side of pretentious, but all that tawdry writhing makes you forget all that. Patrick/Pierre feels like a clichéd omnisexual fop at first, but the stakes just keep going up, and you’re left to wonder if it’s really a pose at all.
I had to check the original pub date on this book to make sure when it came out, because it felt so of the moment for 2010. Milligan was really ahead of his time, with the portrayal of the Extremist identity as a viral meme. Speaking of memes, I will admit to falling prey to “Get Outta There, Brother”-itis with the Tony part of the book. It’s only then that The Extremist felt like a horror comic, and true to form, the black man doesn’t make it out alive. I did like that Tony was the only one to resist the Extremist seduction, not that it mattered much.
GRAEME: It’s funny that you talk about Morrison’s Batman and this both bubbling over with sex and violence. They do, but Morrison’s does so from such a place of fun and camp, whereas this reminds me of another Morrison book, contemporary with the mid-’90s release of The Extremist: Morrison’s Invisibles, and particularly the Marquis de Sade episodes. It’s not just the S&M imagery of both books, but the feeling of characters leaving “society” and becoming something else, either by joining the Invisible army or this book’s Order.
Weirdly enough, I think the choice of McKeever as artist is what makes this book work; his work is ugly enough to fit the subject matter, but also to not get lost in the sex clubs or fetishwear that Milligan is writing about, if that makes sense. If someone like a JG Jones or whoever was drawing this, it’d read differently somehow, be less of a character piece, and it’d be a much lesser story for that. McKeever is really the star of this book, for me.
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Writingwise, this was classic Milligan, and feels like the underside of something like his Enigma (which is out of print, appallingly – If you haven’t read it, it’s one of the best superhero books of the ’90s); both books toy with sexuality and superheroics in similar ways, but to different ends. The Extremist may not have super powers or even do good, as such, but it feels like a superhero story to me, for some reason, filled with secret identities from costumes that get passed from person to person and become weirdly inspirational because of what they stand for (Tony got sucked in, even if he eventually saw through it. Jack saw through it all, as well, eventually – I wonder if Milligan was making some point about Judy, or some point about women’s sexual fantasies and identities in general, in that she was the one who didn’t abandon the identity, but surrendered to it). But where Enigma was joyous and joyful, this is Milligan as cynic about the human condition, mixing superheroes and sex with noir logic, all double-crosses and the worst in people. It’s funny; I feel like I may be too jaded, because there was something weirdly not shocking about all the sex and S&M on show here… it felt like the window dressing for the exploration of identity and morality that Milligan really wanted to write about, and it’s those themes – and the fact that it felt as if Milligan had a story to tell more than just a desire to shock and/or titillate – that make this worth reading.