This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up talking about what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk, Evan Narcisse, Mike Williams and Graeme McMillan discuss the first issues of Neal Adams’ Batman: Odyssey and Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s Scarlet.
DOUGLAS: I’ll say this for Batman: Odyssey: it really doesn’t read like a generic Batman comic book, even beyond the early-’70s techniques that Neal Adams is still sticking with (thought balloons!). It’s pretty rare to see a writer-artist who overwrites this heavily, isn’t it? (“Just a cave? Just a cave? You know it’s not… ‘just a cave’!”) The whole scene with the two Man-Bats talking to each other–I kept flashing on the rat creatures from Bone squabbling with one another. And the Generic Oirish Train Conductor on page 2! And the guy who keeps calling Batman “Hombre Murcielago,” which adds five syllables! And “He’s targeting our–EYYOW! guns.” And Batman and Robin squabbling in the Batmobile like they’re in All-Star again! And the wildly off-model Commissioner Gordon! And the totally random page at which it breaks for a “to be continued”! And the bonus pin-up by the artist’s son, whose career it’s very sweet that Neal’s supporting up to and including getting him listed as a “special guest” at Comic-Con but really, now… And you know what? That’s all fine with me. I love it when this kind of eccentricity turns up in a mainstream comic.
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I also think it’s funny that a couple of sequences in here directly mirror scenes in Batman & Robin #1–the flying Batmobile and the gliders, in particular. Which do you suppose came first? I know this book has been in the works for a very long time–long enough that, as I recall, Frank Miller was originally supposed to write the dialogue. Actually, the multiple-Man-Bats business echoes the very first Morrison issue of Batman…
EVAN: Douglas, off-model is the watch-word here. I wanted to hate this book, but the Neal Adams-ness of it all fought my quibbles to a standstill. We get “hairy-chested love god” on the very first page, and he’s all like, “Oh, that scene on the cover? Here’s how it went down.” And then we go headlong into a story which, quite frankly, makes no sense. Adams’ visual sense is the draw here, because the dialogue and the plot don’t get told in anything resembling a cohesive way. There’s a thin line between quirk and self-indulgence and somehow Odyssey #1 comes up on the right side of the border.
The main thing that strikes me here is that Neal Adams is a Batman nerd. Moreover, Neal Adams is a Neal-Adams’-Batman nerd. Throwing Dick Grayson into the Tim Drake Robin outfit that Neal Adams designed, even though it makes no sense. Sure. Using Man-Bat, a character whose heyday coincided with Adams’ Bat-glory days? Yup. Name-checking Ra’s Al Ghul, whose most memorable stories were drawn by Neal Adams. Check. Yet it’s clear that Adams is aiming for something more than a retread of his greatest hits. The glider-capes and the flying Batmobile are/were new ideas of a new, now Bat-saga, daddy-o, and the philosophical rambles between Dick and Bruce hint at some big idea (most likely based around guns) that Adams wants to get at over the course of the series.
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I will say again that I’m glad I’m still able to be gobsmacked by Adams’ art. It’s always sad to see comic pros of earlier eras with their skills in decline, but that isn’t the case here. He may not be as fast as he once was, but Adams’ strength was always his design sense.
MIKE: “My hearing always was a cut above perfect. I heard what seemed to be a very loud voice… like a handful of fries in hot oil.” In a sea of quotable lines from this issue, that has got to be the winner. Douglas mentioned some gems already. Any other candidates?
I’m not familiar with much of Neal Adams’ work. Is it always this fast-moving? I feel like I just read an entire trade. And yes, it did seem to leave off at random spot in the story. I flipped through some of the filler in the back thinking I was missing a page or two.
I also have to add how much I want this iteration of the Batmobile. Not only does it look like a Pontiac Firebird (circa KITT) crossed with an earlier ‘vette but it has gull wing doors and can fly. The Tumbler has been dethroned.
Oh, and one more thing, Douglas. The conductor wasn’t a generic Irishman. It was clearly movie star Dennis Farina:
DOUGLAS: Oh man. Neal Adams would require more of an explanation than we’ve got time for, but I think a single anecdote will say something about his work: The first issue of Valeria the She-Bat, which he wrote, drew and published under his Continuity imprint, is cover-dated May 1993. Valeria #5 is cover-dated November 1993. There were no issues #2-4.
GRAEME: I am officially the grumpy old man of this group, then: Beyond “Oh, it’s a prettier version of All-Star Batman, with less outright bitterness,” I didn’t really get anything from this. There were seconds where I kind of enjoyed it – Batman thinking to himself that it was stupid to have pulled the gun before climbing the ladder, for example – but the rest of it was… I don’t know, something that felt like a reunion tour from a band that still felt relevant even though no one has bought their records in decades. I’m sure there’s an audience for this (hey, you all seemed to get something out of it), but it did nothing for me at all.
DOUGLAS: On to Scarlet #1. I’m still sorting out how I feel about this book: there are things about it that I dislike fairly intensely, but I also found it really promising and compelling, and I kept thinking while I was reading it that if this was some indie debut and I’d never heard of Bendis or Maleev before, I’d be telling everyone I knew that they had to pick it up. In some ways, this is the best work I’ve ever seen Maleev do–integrating the coloring with his linework, making Scarlet’s hair “pop” in every panel where it appears, doing fantastic things with texture everywhere. But there are places where his figures are so clearly photographs run through the Maleevotron 3000 that I’m not even sure what the characters here “look like” as drawings; if Iva, the Scarlet model, ever stops participating in the project, there’s going to have to be some kind of Man with the Getaway Face business where Scarlet undergoes serious plastic surgery, you know? I do think the fourth-wall-breaking aspect, having Scarlet not just narrate the story but tell it to us and (as she suggests at the end) bring us into it, is a fun idea, but I’d probably be more engaged by it if she were a character rather than an actress, if you see what I mean.
I also find the politics of Bendis’s story kind of irritating on an aesthetic level, and I say this as somebody whose personal politics are pretty far left (and who was friends-of-friends with a guy who was posthumously turned into a “druglord” in the press). Scarlet, per the story, is entirely good and justified in her actions; the Evil System is all bad. (Although, of course, we’re getting everything from her POV.) In the text piece reprinted in the back, Bendis talks about “people’s inability to hear other views, to agree to disagree. Certainly the media’s quest to not allow that to happen, to feed on that aspect, certainly convinced me that this book was absolutely worth doing.” “The media”? Bendis is “the media.” (And so are we.)
One thing I’d really hope to see at some point in the future of the series is more of a sense of the ideological plurality Bendis suggests: something that presents a conception of the world entirely different from Scarlet’s–and presents it as totally legitimate, too. (Comics examples that come to mind: the Invisibles story “Best Man Fall,” the Judge Dredd “America” sequence, the third volume of Halo Jones…) We’re only one issue into it so far, but if Bendis can convince us that maybe Norman Osborn actually is kind of sympathetic, he might have some interesting twists on the ethics of violence brewing. Yes, I want a comic book version of William Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down, is that so wrong?
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EVAN: So, this is all about Bendis having a daughter, right? (He does have a little girl, right?) And I don’t mean that in a flip way. I mean that in the parent-needing-to-fix-the-world kind of way. Because the singularity of Scarlet’s passion seems to come from that kind of elemental feeling. Sure, Bendis folded it into a loss-of-loved-one superhero origin, but it seems to me to have the fingerprints of new parenthood all over it.
Douglas, I was having the same thoughts as you with regard to the idealogical equal time issue. If this is going to rise above Bendis’ superhero work (not that it necessarily has to), then he’s going to have to ramp the complexity and points-of-view up. Because, not to keep comparing it to superhero work, Scarlet’s got the singlemindness of a supervillain, sympathetic trauma aside.
I had a problem with the fourth-wall breakage. It wasn’t so much the romance Bendis is clearly having with this technique. I’ve always read Bendis as someone who doesn’t moderate his own voice when he’s writing dialogue. That made his early work and makes his “smaller” work speak to me. But, when the ensembles get bigger and huge swaths of a shared universe start sounding Bendis-y, the unique-ness washes away. And the fourth-wall thing here seems even more unfiltered than in his other work. If I read Steve Rogers sounding all Bendis-y, there’s still a part of my brain that can call on previous creators’ work on the character. There’s no filter like that here.
The other structual tricks that Bendis uses– the “moments” montage, the in medias res–really didn’t bother me that much. They felt like shortcuts, though, but I kinda understand why he used them.
Good god, people, Maleev’s art has never looked better. His control of line weight just feels so precise: things in the panel foregrounds pop and the backgrounds look dreamy yet realistic. The character of Scarlet herself emotes beautifully and, no matter what’s coming out of her mouth, you’re predisposed to sympathizing with her.
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Overall, it’s a promising start. I wanna know where this young lady learned how to use a sniper rifle, though.
GRAEME: Like you both, I liked Maleev’s art pretty much – I think he really can’t do movement well at all, but that’s perhaps to be expected – but had problems with the story. It’s interesting that you mentioned “Best Man Fall” from The Invisibles, Douglas, because my first thought on finishing the issue was, “So this is for people who haven’t read The Invisibles, but wouldn’t be opposed to it, I guess.” It just felt… I don’t know… juvenile, if that’s the right word? Like, so convinced by its own righteous indignation about the way the world is and SOMEONE SHOULD FIX IT, but without either the humor or the perspective that Morrison brought to this kind of story more than a decade ago. It was… okay, I guess? I ended up feeling very disappointed in it, if only because I wanted to believe that Bendis could come up with more – I’ll probably pick up the next couple of issues to see if there’s something more to it, something deeper, but this first issue is the comic version of that bit in “Killing In The Name Of” that goes “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” over and over again to the point of petulance.
DOUGLAS: A friend of mine once told me that he thought he’d be interested in The Invisibles, but put it down after he saw the protagonist beating up his schoolteacher in the first issue; he figured that was a signal it wouldn’t be for him. Of course, by the end of the series Dane McGowan has become a schoolteacher himself. I wonder if Scarlet will be a cop by the time this series ends?
MIKE: I think I agree with everyone about the story of Scarlet being a bit too one-sided. This seems especially timely after the G20 Summit that just went down and all the arrests that went along with it. It’s just that I’ve read this story before, many times. There are two versions of this that spring to mind right away. The first is that Civic Virtue story from the first volume of Batman: Black and White. That character had the same mantra: everyone is broken. The second was the film Se7en. The similarities between Civic, John Doe, and our redhead, to me, are fairly obvious: they are all goddamn lunatics. What really made the connection to me was when she assaulted the bike thief. I thought for sure she was going to cut off his hands.
I also like Maleev’s art. Calling it the Maleevotron 3000 is great. I noticed it specifically on the pages with the bridge during the “firsts” and again in the bookstore where her boyfriend is shot. Incredibly detailed photos that are washed over in watercolors. I find it distracting. Still, I find the visual style very appealing, especially on this kind of book. When he would do it with Daredevil it looked great, until some of the more colorful Marvel characters started showing up. Then it was jarring but here, in the non-super world of Scarlet, I think it works very well.
GRAEME: Am I the only person who, as much as I like Maleev’s art, is reminded of John Van Fleet? He was doing this more than a decade ago, without the same acclaim. Guess he should’ve worked on Daredevil or something.
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