The Comic Book Club: Rocketeer Adventures and Batman: Gates of Gotham

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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 the first issues of Rocketeer Adventures and Gates of Gotham.

DOUGLAS: Rocketeer Adventures #1 is a strange thing to see–a tribute to a fantastic artist that’s sort of displaced onto being a tribute to his creation. The original Rocketeer series was much less an interesting story, or about an interesting character, than it was a showcase for the late Dave Stevens to do his stuff, and draw the things he loved to draw: the helmet, the costume, the period settings, Bettie Page. And he was incredible–I can’t think of many artists whose influence-to-finished-pages ratio is as high as his. (There are four issues of Rocketeer Adventures planned from IDW, which means twice as many consecutive issues of a Rocketeer series from a single publisher as there have ever been before.)

IDW published two different versions of a complete Rocketeer collection a year and a half or so ago; for this series, they’ve got an all-star lineup of creators doing short Rocketeer stories and pin-ups. Of the three stories in this one, my favorite has to be John Cassaday’s–partly because I never realized how much Cassaday’s line owes to Stevens’ until this made it clear, partly because of its perfect opening scene, an in medias res Betty-in-bondage sequence that’s exactly the kind of thing Stevens drew at every opportunity and also makes a joke about both his perpetual tardiness and how long it’s been since we’ve seen a new Rocketeer story.

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GRAEME: I am so glad that you said that, because the similiarity between Cassaday’s art and Stevens’ was the first thing that jumped out at me from that story, and it made me wonder whether I was imagining things. It’s not as if Cassaday is making any massive changes to his style to more closely ape Stevens’, but it reads in a very, very similar way, for some reason. Maybe Laura Martin’s coloring helps?

Cassaday’s story is an excellent primer for the Rocketeer concept. You get the Betty bondage, the pulpy rescue set-up, but also the deflation of the cliché, with the “take off your helmet”/punch punchline (literally, and no pun intended, etc. etc.). Even if you’d never read any Rocketeer before, that one story tells you everything you need to know, and in so few pages! I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything else written by Cassaday before, but this makes me curious to read more.

DOUGLAS: The Kurt Busiek/Michael Kaluta story is sweet (it’s really a Betty story), and it’s nice to see Kaluta throwing himself into drawing something again; I wasn’t crazy about the Michael Allred piece, though–it reads like a hastily executed Madman outtake, and “hastily executed” is contrary to the spirit of this particular project. In general, though, reading The Rocketeer without Stevens feels a lot like reading The Spirit without Will Eisner: it’s incredibly sophisticated fan-art, and almost all of the contributors here are always worth a look, but there’s not much potential in the character or premise that Stevens didn’t already realize himself.

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EVAN: I find myself in the same place as you, Douglas. As good as this stuff was–and the Busiek/Kaluta thing was really, really good–it mostly left me hankering for the original material. I’d really want future issues to find new angles on the characters Stevens created and not just do stories that feel like what they just like they think he’d do.

GRAEME: I think Kurt Busiek was right when he described the book (on Twitter) as being a Dave Stevens tribute album. The stories here (and I agree that the Busiek/Kaluta one is very sweet, and the Allred one very… thin) are, at best, love letters to Stevens’ work instead of continuations of the character, if that distinction makes sense. Cassaday’s story fares best, giving new readers a reason to like the entire set-up in a way that the others don’t, but as much as I enjoyed the first issue – and I really did – there’s little here to make me want to come back month after month for more. There’s a sense of, Yeah, I really liked Dave Stevens as well, but not enough to listen to all of these cover versions, I guess.

DOUGLAS: Batman: Gates of Gotham looked, on the face of it, like just another Batman miniseries–the second to debut in two weeks: co-plotted but not scripted by Scott Snyder, the regular Detective Comics writer, another piece of Batman product to fill the space left by Batman Confidential. Then the solicitations for August came out, and there were two interesting things in the listing for B:GoG. One was that the final two issues were both appearing in August, meaning that this is another one of those titles that need to wrap up before the (alleged) soft or hard reboot of the DC Universe titles that’s coming in September after Flashpoint. The other was the suggestion that it “sets the stage for a bold new direction in the Bat books!”

Well. It does seem to be devoted to wrapping up some of the last few years’ worth of plot threads–there’s even a direct reference to something that happened in Batman Inc. #6 last week. Cassandra Cain is on the verge of assuming her much-teased new Black Bat identity; the Penguin’s post-“One Year Later” role is approaching what looks like an end; there are references to Alan Wayne from the Return of Bruce Wayne stuff, and to various other bits of Gotham lore. (I assume that for the geographical references Snyder and co-writer Kyle Higgins are working from this map or something similar–although the final few pages cry out for a map we can see, since that’s the only way one of Damian’s lines could make sense.) And, since Paul Dini seems to have mostly moved off the Bat-titles, the cliffhanger prominently involves Hush.

Oh, man, I am so tired of Hush I can’t even tell you. The only interesting thing about him when he first appeared was that he was drawn by Jim Lee, honestly. Dini tried to rehabilitate him in “Heart of Hush,” but it didn’t take–every time he appears, I have at least five “oh COME ON now” moments, and it takes a lot to get that reaction from someone who’s been reading superhero comic books for thirty years.

So what this miniseries ends up being, it seems, is a plot-hammer–not a gross or awkward one, but not a particularly stylish one either. It’s not really telling a story: it’s moving pieces into position for what I imagine is going to be someone else’s story, especially since the August issue of Detective apparently concludes Snyder’s run. I’ll be curious to find out if anything interesting happens in it, but I might want to just find out from Wikipedia.

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GRAEME: It’s interesting to me that you describe this as “not particularly stylish,” because the style on show is one of the main things that I took away from the book. Not that I particularly like the style, but there’s something very individual about Trevor McCarthy’s art: something very cartoony, in the sense of “it looks like cels from a cartoon,” as opposed to “it’s very exaggerated,” that sets the book apart from the other Batman books on a visual level, at least. I’m not entirely sure it works (the cover is horrible), but at least it’s there.

Storywise… Yeah, there’s a lot of “And here are lots of things from lots of other Batbooks!” going on here – especially Cassandra’s reappearance and ohGodreallywhy Hush appearing at the end. (I’m with you and your Hush dislike, Douglas. He feels very much like the 2000s-version of Bane, a character who becomes weirdly popular for no immediately apparent reason, and then gets killed through oversaturation.) But I still felt as if the story held up as a story more than you did, perhaps. I’m unsure why it’s not a Detective arc, or what beyond the sudden “Hey, everything changes here!” solicit promises mean that it’s due its own series, but I thought it was a potentially interesting idea (what happened at the building of Gotham that connects its most famous inhabitants now?) told in an entertaining, if not overly spectacular, style. I’ll be back for the second issue, at least.

EVAN: I’ve loved Scott Snyder’s run on Detective. He’s working a bit of a Batman 2.0 ideastream, and has given the Dick Grayson Batman new villains, a new HQ and his own status quo that don’t feel like they’re trying too hard. He’s set up a great character by bringing back Jim Gordon’s son as an adult psychopath who may or may not be reformed.

But the attention to structure and characterization that make me like Snyder’s run are in short supply here. It’s clear that he’s only partly involved, and the book isn’t neccessarily bad, per se. But it doesn’t have the hallmarks of what I like about his run. Granted, part of that has been the great art of Francesco Francavilla and Jock. The art here is distinctive but not always tonally appropriate for the goings-on. One or two panels left me scratching my head as to what exactly was going on.

As for the goings-on themselves, they’re just okay. I feel like the whole “Wayne family/Gotham history rotten to its core” thing has been done before with middling results. When so much of the Bat-franchise seems to be looking forward–Dick-as-Batman, Batman Inc., and all that–Gates of Gotham feels like it may be going in the wrong direction. I’m going to stick around to see how it plays out, but this first issue, which relied on well-worn beats, wasn’t what I wanted it to be.

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DOUGLAS: So looking at those August solicitations, do you think any of the DCU books are going to keep their current creative teams in September? I’m betting Gail Simone’s still on Birds of Prey and Secret Six (although she’s taking the July and August issues off the former), and beyond that a lot of the solicitations have a distinct tang of “okay, we’re done here” about them.

GRAEME: I think Simone will stay on her books, Levitz on the Legion books, and Morrison will stay on Batman Inc. (Oh, and Johns will probably be writing a relaunched Green Lantern, of course.) Other than that, I think most everything is up for grabs. I think the September books are clearly being primed for a post-Flashpoint linewide relaunch, and wouldn’t be too surprised to see a “One Year Later”-style creative shuffle on most of them. It wouldn’t really upset me to see things shuffle around, either, to be honest, beyond the prospect of losing James Robinson off JLA. I’m surprised by how much I’ve grown to like him on the title.

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