GRAPHIC NOVEL and TRADE PAPERBACK (TPB) REVIEWS

"..when his parents were murdered before his eyes, Bruce Wayne...trained himself to wage relentless war against crime as the dread avenger of the night..."

Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth 1989 (SC & HC GN) 128 pages
a.k.a. Batman: Arkham Asylum

Written by Grant Morrison. Painted by Dave McKean.
Letters: Gasper Saladino. Editor: Karen Berger.

Rating: *  (out of 5)

Number of readings: 1

Suggested for "Mature Readers"

As I've mentioned other places on this site, I used to read comics, stopped, then came back to them. Arkham Asylum was released in that period when I had fallen out of the fold, but I was certainly aware of it. Even though I wasn't reading comics, I continued to have an interest in the field and kept abreast of trends through things like TV's Prisoners of Gravity. When first released, Arkham Asylum was considered a ground-breaking work, pole vaulting the medium forward into adult narratives with Dave McKean's eclectic painting style and Grant Morrison's dark, tortured script. But as I got back into comics some years later, and gradually collected some of the seminal works that I had missed the first time around, I began to notice something: Arkham Asylum didn't actually seem to get mentioned that often. While The Watchmen, or Neil Gaiman's Sandman, continued to enjoy critical accolades, and even Batman: A Death in the Family continued to evoke debate, Arkham Asylum seemed less like it was a seminal work, and more like it was becoming just a blip on the cultural radar. I'd even begun to come across frankly dismissive reviews of it.

All of which meant I wasn't really sure what to expect going into this graphic novel set within the asylum for the criminally insane that has become one of the touchstones of the Batman mythos.

The story starts out effectively enough, with a flashback to the turn of the Century, and the diaries of Arkham founder, Amandeus Arkham. Then it moves forward to modern times as Batman is summoned by the police after the inmates have rioted and taken over the asylum. Their demands? Batman.

McKean's style is a mixed bag of paint and photography, of surrealism and Impressionism, but also realism, where faces and figures really do look like faces and figures at times. Much was made of the art of the book, but it threatens to get just too jumbled and messy at times, where it's difficult to tell even what's going on. But still, it works reasonably well at first, lending a dark, brooding mood to the piece.

Batman arrives, meeting the Joker...and the first hints of a problem occur. It's unclear how literal scripter Morrison intends the story to be. Batman exchanges himself for the hostages...except not all the hostages are released, but this doesn't seem to phase Bats. As well, he doesn't really seem to have a plan to quell the rebellion at the asylum. Morrison obviously is using the "plot" as just a framework to hinge his ideas on, putting sub-text ahead of text. As such, it doesn't really pass the litmus test of plausibility. Still, things remain O.K. for a bit, as Batman questions whether the treatment inmates like Two-Face have been receiving is really helpful, or even humane, and we periodically flash back to Amandeus Arkham.

However there's a feeling the book is trying to create a sense of complexity, and obliqueness, not through a dense narrative, but just through confusing tricks, like Joker's dialogue written in a jumbled red font that means it is, literally, hard to read -- and it even spills off the page at times, losing words (which may be a printing error).

Then Batman is sent off into the asylum, to be hunted by the inmates...and right about here it completely falls apart.

McKean's art, already a bit murky and confusing, gets even moreso, so that you often can't tell what's happening or why. He also likes to use the "splatter" effect of scattering drops across a page for no reason, presumably 'cause it makes him look like a real artist (other painted comics, and comics that are meant to look painted, have done the same). Morrison's script doesn't offer much clarification, either. Batman wanders through black corridors, encountering inmates that maybe we're supposed to recognize, but it's unclear, because some of them McKean has reinterpreted visually, and Morrison has re-fashioned character-wise. But are they part of the group hunting Batman...or are they just inmates wandering the halls? And why does Batman cold-bloodedly kick a man in a wheelchair down the stairs? Who's the man? You see my predicament.

Alan Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke carried the tagline "A cold hard look at insanity" -- and my opinion of that worthy tome is already a matter of record. Here, Morrison seems to want to treat these comic book villains as if they really were insane people, postulating -- I assume in his mind -- a more realistic vision of them. The Mad Hatter as a child molester, Maxie Zeus obsessed with his own feces. But that takes us...where, exactly? As a story, or as an exploration of the human condition? The characterization is also a little repetative, as well. And does Morrison really have enough insight into mental illness to make this any more plausible than any other comic book, anyway? Allusions to the movie "Psycho" kind of make one infer Morrison's grasp of psychology was gleaned at the local Bijou. As well, he trots out stock cliches: Batman is emotionally scarred, perhaps as crazy as the people he fights. Nothing very fresh or sage there, I'm afraid.

Maybe Morrison has audited a few psychology seminars, and some reviews of this book praise its use of Jungian symbolism, and I'm sure there's plenty of ego and id contrasts and the like. But psychological analysis, first and foremost, is about revealing character. In one scene, Batman performs an act of self-mortification. But it's not enough to say some people do that. A story teller has to convince us this character would do this thing in this situation. And if he can't, then all the psychobabble in the world doesn't make it a penetrating character exploration.

And the episodic nature of the scenes, as Batman encounters various foes, just so they can spout off, before he moves on, is a little, well, dull. Eventually he gets into a fight with Killer Croc, seeming to kill the man -- which just adds to the sense that this is, nominally, an Elseworlds story, not meant to be considered in continuity. While, through flashbacks, we learn Amandeus Arkham was unhinged himself. Though it doesn't seem that Amandeus became deranged (that is, character development)...just that he was like that all along. Eventually there's a twist, relating to a character that, frankly, barely made an impression to begin with (I found myself going: "who's he?") and then Batman leaves...um, with the inmates still in control of the asylum which was, like, kind of why he went in in the first place.

As a plot -- whether an adventure story, or a human drama -- Arkham Asylum starts out O.K., but gets dderailed along the way, failing to satisfy as a simple story, while intellectually never justifying its own self-importance. But even as a mood piece, it loses its effectiveness, as McKean's initially intriguing art just gets confusing and unclear. I'm beginning to see why, after all the initial hype, Arkham Asylum may be quietly fading into the sunset of cultural obscurity.

Soft cover price: $20.95 CDN./ $14.95 USA 

Batman (movie adaptation)
see Batman Elseworlds section

Batman: Absolution 2002 (HC and SC GN) 96 pages

Written by J.M. DeMatteis. Painted by Brian Ashmore.
Letters: Sam Konot. Editor: Dennis O'Neil, Matt Idelson.

Rating: * * * 1/2 (out of 5)

Number of readings: 2

An urban terrorist group bombs Wayne Enterprises, killing some employees, and Batman spends the next ten years -- off and on -- hunting the female leader of the group, tracking her down to various safe houses, only to have her escape again. The trail eventually takes him to India where she has joined a charity order working with the poor and the ill; but is it just a ruse, or is she truly seeking to make amends for her past?

There's a lot to like and admire and applaud about Absolution...even as there's other ways it doesn't quite live up to its own ambitions.

On the plus side:

The book is clearly meant to be deep and meaningful, positing profound questions of right and wrong, justice vs. vengeance, punishment vs. redemption, and even faith and God. It's a brooding character study as we see the driven Batman pursue the terrorist through the years, determined to bring her to justice, and unwavering in his Insp. Javert-esque, black & white view of reality, where there are no shades of grey, and no room for redemption. Yet, at the same time, writer J.M. DeMatteis presents a slightly kinder, gentler, more human Batman than a lot of modern writers do, a Batman who identifies some of the Wayne Enterprises victims as "friends" and who later remarks that he, however grudgingly, kind of likes an underworld stool pigeon of his. Batman with friends? Who can like a low-life informer? Will wonders never cease? As well, despite his hard line attitudes, this is not the hyper-violent Batman -- he'll get into fights and beat up bad guys, but there's little of the gratuitous reveling in brutality that some current Bat-writers think makes the character cool.

I liked the, more or less, real world environment Batman inhabits, devoid of garish super villains, or equally outrageous serial killers and mobsters. And I enjoyed the employing of an exotic, foreign locale that really makes you feel like you're seeing another country. And despite the archly-pretentious intentions, it's reasonably well-paced, breaking up the introspective bits with enough action and adventure -- and a plot twist or two -- to keep the story chugging along. And it's all delivered with fully painted art by Brian Ashmore.

On the down side?

Despite the ambition, despite the character exploration, despite DeMatteis' genuine talents as a writer, I'd argue the story is hampered a little by Batman himself. I've mentioned before that ever since comicdom embraced the notion that Batman was a rich, emotionally complex character...he has been written more and more simplistically, defined almost entirely in terms of one or two character traits. The current era Batman, far from being a complex, multi-faceted human being, shaped by a childhood trauma, has become a one note cardboard cut out. Batman is blindly committed to his once-a-villain-always-a-villain philosophy, even when he sees evidence to the contrary, and he never wavers from that belief. It's a 96 page graphic novel in which the main character doesn't really seem to evolve much over time. What's more, DeMatteis presents his themes in a ham handed, "spell it out clearly just so the kids get it" style, with Batman, in his voiceovers, explicitly stating his views again...and again. Yet DeMatteis contradicts himself. After all, would this unwavering Batman admit to "liking" the informer I mentioned earlier?

At the same time, there is an act of Batman's in the final scene that, though not echoed in the captions, suggests a certain softening and ambivalence in his attitudes.

Released after September 11th, 2001, a story about the bombing of a skyscraper that asks whether terrorists can be forgiven, would seem a controversial thesis for a comic -- for any medium! Yet, curiously, Absolution didn't seem to generate the controversy for which I'm sure DC Comics was braced (maybe even for which they were hoping). That may be because the story, for all its real world traipings, exists in its own, somewhat inspecific bubble. While modern America knows the face of terror as either Islamic fundamentalists, or homegrown, ultra-right wing fanatics, the terrorists here seem more modeled after long ago 1960s radicals, and even then, DeMatteis paints them as more apolitical anarchists. And the charity work in Indian is not really specific, I don't think -- are they sheltering the poor? Lepers? Who? What?

I don't entirely object to painting the issues in broad, inspecific strokes, seeking to say something profound by tackling ideas in the abstract. At the same time, it threatens to simplify, to "comicbookfy", what is meant to be a sophisticated, realist story.

Ashmore's painted art is also problematic. On one hand, it is fully painted, which can be pretty cool, and he is particularly good at using light, shaping figures by the way sun light plays on them, contrasting with the shadows, creating a warm, washed out look. And I like that his Batman is not all exaggeration and bulging muscles, but looks like a man. On the other hand, Ashmore's underlining pencils aren't always that strong, his handling of figures can be a bit rough -- admittedly, its deliberately Impressionistic at times. And the action scenes can be a bit confusingly presented, so you aren't always instantly sure who's doing what. His faces, too, can be a bit indistinct, at times, with a couple of scenes where it took me a moment to figure out who was who. I liked the art, but it has its shortcomings.

Strangely -- and this is something I'vbe noticed in a lot of modern comics, and I'll leave it to the sociologists out there to answer why -- Ashmore seems reluctant to paint truly dark skin pigments. A large part of the story takes place in Indian...yet few of the characters actually look, well, Indian. Mediterranean, perhaps, with lightly tanned, olive complexions, but not the darker hues one associates with many Indians.

Another quibble is how tiny the lettering is. You get used to it, but anyone with weak eyes might find it a real problem. One wonders if the book was originally going to be published in a larger-sized format, but then the brass at DC changed their mind, but didn't bother re-formatting the lettering for the regular size.

The bottom line is I did like Absolution -- I liked its attempt at being about something provocative, and I liked it's understatedness, with a physically human Batman and where the action scenes are often more about fights and car chases than anything too outrageous or cartoony (not that I object to those as a rule). It's undeniably moody, with DeMatteis' lyrical writing and Ashmore's atmospheric, painted art. But it never quite fulfills its own ambitions, being a big, complex idea...that is handled rather simply.

And, with apologies to the current editorial regime at DC, Batman is rapidly becoming a shallow, one note personality. And that, perhaps above all, prevents Absolution, despite its length, from truly being a great graphic novel.

Cover price: $27.95 CDN./ $17.95 USA

Batman: Archives, vol. 1 1990 (HC) 304 pages

Written by Bill Finger, Gardner Fox. Illustrated by Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson.

Reprinting: The Batman stories from Detective Comics #27-50 (1939-1941)

Additional notes: introduction by Rick Marschall (pop culturist); covers.

Rating: * * * (out of 5)

Number of readings: 1

DC's Archives books are hardcover, exorbitantly expensive tomes collecting chronological runs of early comics. The Batman Archives volume 1 collects Batman's inaugural appearance in Detective Comics #27 as well as the succeeding 12 page Batman stories from roughly the next two years of Detective Comics (Batman was only one of the features to appear in the anthology title Detective, but the other features aren't reprinted). Of course, during this period Batman began appearing in his own, self-titled comic, so it's not like this is the complete early adventures of the Batman -- the stories themselves are all self-contained but, as an example, the Joker appears in these pages...but Batman had already fought him. Or one issue ends with a panel ad for another Batman story...but it doesn't appear in this collection, because the story actually was published in Batman comics (The stories from Batman comics are collected in the series Batman: The Dark Knight Archives).

(A more economical collection of chronological Batman stories (from bothDetective and Batman) have been released as the softcover Batman Chronicles.)

There are plenty representations of early Batman mythos here...from his origin, to the origin and introduction of Robin ('tec. #38). Bruce Wayne has an occasional love interest, Julie Madison (who is largely written out before this collection ends) and Commissioner Gordon appears, but in a fairly minor role (as Batman has yet to develop his close ties to the police). Alfred has yet to be introduced into the series, and Batman's high tech devices are fairly minor (I'm not sure if the Batcave appears). And the Batmobile -- assuming the colours are reproduced faithfully -- is red!

Batman's costume evolves a bit in these early stories (initially he wore gloves that ended at the wrist, not gauntlets) and Batman shows an occasional ruthlessness, even carrying a gun in a couple of the earliest stories.

These Archive books are useful, in that the original issues would be next to impossible to collect and ridiculously expensive. At the same time...aside from the nostalgia, a modern reader might not find the stories worth the cost (hence the appeal of the cheaper Batman Chronicles). The story and art is rather crude. And though I could say it reflects the period, and the still fledgling medium -- which it does -- it's also true that there were better written and drawn series (particularly in the newspaper strips) even at the time.

Yet there's no disputing Batman struck an instant chord, becoming viewed as one of the archetypes for zillions of later super heroes even as he himself borrowed, sometimes shamelessly, from earlier pulp characters -- a fact acknowledged in this collection's introduction, but not fully (no mention is made of the pulp hero, The Bat, who also dressed in a black, ridged cape).

Then again, the very fact that Robin was introduced maybe hints there was some concern sales needed a boost.

And the stories do improve as things go, both in story and art. The art becomes a little stronger technically but, more to the point, develops more style, introducing intriguing trademark quirks like exaggerated shadows cast by the figures. And the plots, which initially are fairly rudimentary, sometimes incoherent, and emphasizing daring escapes from implausible death traps, become a little more structured, some even being mystery/whodunits (a concept introduced in the very first Batman story). Stories, such as strange happenings at a boy's boarding school (where Robin goes undercover - 'tec. 41) and the introduction of the original Clayface, about murders at a movie studio ('tec. #40), are actually fairly decent gothic mysteries (albeit, since later readers know who Clayface is, the mystery is rather muted). There's even an intriguing Human Drama ('tec. #47) one as Bruce Wayne/Batman becomes embroiled in the troubles of a dysfunctional rich family.

The characterization remains minor, the development of the stories crude and unsubtle...but, frankly, the nature of the stories actually seem more ambitious, more eclectic, than modern Batman comics which tend to rely on repetitively recurring super villains, or unceasing mob wars.

It's hard to imagine a Batman story written in the last decade or so where Bruce Wayne, witnessing the domestic troubles of a friend, decides to look into it as Batman -- even before he knows an actual crime is involved! And you know what? The modern comics are the poorer for it.

In fact, recurring villains only appear in a handful of stories here -- and only the Joker really qualifies as a costumed villain. The others are Hugo Strange, Dr. Death, and Clayface. And, significantly, the stories featuring returning foes are often the weaker ones.

In plot and concept, there's a lot modern writers could learn from these stories...even as, in actual execution (writing, art) these are what they are, reflective of an earlier, less disciplined era in comics.

Interestingly, the period isn't always obviously evoked. Nowhere in these stories would you even be aware that a World War was already raging in Europe, for instance!

For hard core completists, this is, of course, a worthy tome. The introduction by Rick Marschall provides a lot of context, even acknowledging Batman was not just the work of Bob Kane (despite his name alone on the cover), though it is, after all, a hyperbolic ode to Batman, DC and comics in general. At one point Marschall mentions comics' "universal" appeal even as, in the same paragraph, acknowledges they're more popular in the U.S. than elsewhere (and Canada, though he doesn't mention that). But to more casual readers, there's some novelty, some interesting aspects. But there's also a lot of chaff among the wheat, too.

Original price: $49.95 CDN./ $39.95 USA