Wherein I Talk About Batman

Batman wears two hats. The first is the hat the rabid fans put on him, where he is a god pretending to be a human. His powers come in the form of resourcefulness and omniscience, rather than thunderbolts, but he's still a god. That's the version we saw in Grant Morrison's run on Justice League, and it's the version we see in latter-day Frank 'Unedited' Miller's work.

The other hat Batman wears is the hat where, for all of his crazy skillz, he is just a human being. He can be caught off-guard by other normal people. Hell, he can be defeated by other normal people, because even a punk-ass can get lucky.

The most successful interpretations of the Batman let him wear both hats.

The Dark Knight Returns is awesome. Everyone remembers it for the story where Batman holds his own in single combat against Superman (without using Kryptonite for most of it). It also includes a story where Batman is defeated in single combat by a non-super teenage lunatic bodybuilder. There's no contradiction, either. Those two stories handily fit in the same volume, and no-one cries foul.

Part of what helps is the frequent glimpses you get inside the Batman's head during the whole four-issue run. Even as he's pulling off his crazy badass nonsense, Batman's inner monologue is frequently noting how much of what he gets away with is luck, or how desperately he has to work at it all. It gives him a kind of vulnerability that is necessary. That the art mercilessly depicts the potato mash that is made of his face or ribs or whatever when he screws up doesn't hurt on that score either.

The Dini/Timm animated version of the Batman is similarly layered. He can take on a swarm of super-androids in one episode, and struggle against a few normal thugs in the next; and it all feels perfectly coherent.

Some people like Batman because he exceeds the human. Others like him because he doesn't. The most compelling versions somehow reconcile both.

Brevity is the Soul of...

I've recently been reading a bunch of the old-school 2000 AD magazine. A lot of the features are based around telling complete stories in 4-6 comic pages. That is awesome story discipline.

Lots of them have to do a whole three-act structure in those few pages: introduce the futuristic concept, set up the conflict, resolve the conflict. Bam! There's no room for gimmicks or long filler fight scenes. Most combats are one panel gunfights Old West style. It maintains a really high content to length ratio, and it is amazing to see how tight the crafting is.

A lot of it isn't very good, but that's fine, because the bad stories are over quickly, and a reader can just shrug and move on to the next one. And a lot of it is quite good story, beyond the necessities of the form. I'm loving it to pieces.

Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite in 30 seconds

I'm not going to lie to you, Chris Sims and his Invincible Super-Blog are at least half of the reason why I started to blog myself. He has an annual contest about hilariously summarizing comic-book stories, with deliberately terrible art. This is my first entry and I hope you like it.

I want it to be clear that the art could have been much more creatively terrible if I had better software. The images aren't displaying at full size for some reason, but they should get bigger if you click them.