Frank Miller, Daredevil, and my problem with Batman

I have mixed feelings on Batman. Gotham is an ultraconservative's wet dream, a dystopian world where the unwashed masses of the city can't depend on Big Government to take care of them. They turn to a suburban Old Money libertarian to rise above the law and save the urban plebes from themselves. Christopher Nolan's recent film trilogy capitalizes on this interpretation of the character, and Scott Snyder's current run on the Batman comic does the same.

Or he's just a goofy guy in tights who lives with a young boy and butler/father figure. The 1960s Adam West TV show uses this iteration of the character, from the Silver Age Batman comics.

Frank Miller's work on Batman in the 1980s was pivotal in establishing the Serious Business version of the caped crusader. 1986's The Dark Knight Returns is one of my all-time favorites. I recently got around to reading 1987's Year One, but I came away with a foul taste in my mouth even though it's cited by many as the definitive Batman origin story and one of the best comics of all time.

I absolutely love Year One's art, by illustrator David Mazzucchelli and colorist Richmond Lewis. Both artists previously worked with Miller on Daredevil: Born Again the year before, and while Born Again is a great story, the art takes a huge step forward in Year One. The difference is Lewis' coloring, which she re-did for the collected edition release. Colorists are often overlooked in comics, but she made a huge difference here.

That leaves Miller's script as my source of Bat-strife. He's one of the most influential comic book creators of all time. What happened?

Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Daredevil: Born Again, and Batman: Year One comprise a trilogy of sorts. Dark Knight Returns and Born Again were published concurrently in 1986, and Year One came the following February. While people love to compare the two Batman stories to each other, you'd be remiss to overlook Daredevil.

Batman and Daredevil are very similar characters. Both are orphaned rich guys who spend their free time fighting crime in gritty urban locales, both wearing costumes that use traditionally evil imagery. But while Daredevil is a hero of the people, Batman is only a hero for the people.

Daredevil's alter ego Matt Murdock was born and raised in the rough Hell's Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan. He grew up poor, but got into law school and worked his way up the social ladder. Nevertheless, he remains connected to Hell's Kitchen, and does the majority of his crime-fighting there. In Born Again, Murdock constantly talks about how despite the rampant crime and poverty in Hell's Kitchen, it's still his beloved home.

Batman's alter ego Bruce Wayne grew up as part of Gotham's upper crust. Though he fights crime in the inner city, he lives on the outskirts at Wayne Manor, far away from the riffraff downtown.

Ten comics I've been reading

I've written reviews for Ultimate Spider-Man, Batman, and Daredevil, but I've been reading a lot of other comics lately without reviewing them on the blog. Instead of writing one article for each series, I'm writing mini-reviews for all of them here.

100 Bullets

Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso

Most of the comics I'm reading are modern-day comics still in their current run, but 100 Bullets is an acclaimed neo-noir series written over the course of a decade, from 1999 to 2009. It's well-written, but I can't read this without thinking of Frank Miller's seminal Sin City, a superior series that came eight years earlier.

Hawkeye

Matt Fraction and David Aja

I'm no fan of the Avengers, so I was as surprised as anyone when the Least Interesting Avenger turned out to have the Greatest Superhero Comic on Shelves Today. Plenty has been said already about how awesome this series is. The creators understand Hawkeye is the Least Interesting Avenger, so they run with it as a story about a regular guy trying to fit into a superhero's world. David Aja's minimalist art style (look at those covers!) and Matt Fraction's satirical writing style compliment each other perfectly. Hawkguy is by far my favorite Marvel or DC comic book series.

Side note: Matt Fraction also has the Greatest Comic Creator Twitter Account of All Time.

Animal Man
Jeff Lemire, Travel Foreman, and Steve Pugh

As a new comic book reader, this was my first time reading a series of a superhero I'd never heard of before. Eventually I heard about Grant Morrison's original run on the series, but I started with this new reboot. And it's fantastic. The metaphysical horror aspect is what draws you in to the series, and you stay for the relatable family-man hero. The grotesque artwork is stunning. It's got a slow first few issues, but now I'm hooked.

Swamp Thing

Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette

Jeff Lemire's Animal Man does a lot of crossing over with Swamp Thing, since both characters exist in the same world. I wasn't planning on reading Swamp Thing, but Animal Man is so good that its compelling depiction of the Swamp Thing made me want to read the sister series. Unfortunately, despite great artwork by Yanick Paquette, Scott Snyder's writing doesn't live up to it. Maybe it's because Snyder is a hotshot at DC Comics right now and Batman is his main creative output. It makes sense that he's leaving the series now, since Swamp Thing is an afterthought to him. I haven't given up on the character as a whole, though, as I've heard great things about Alan Moore's vaunted Swamp Thing of years past.

Dial H

China Miéville and Mateus Santolouco

Dial H is a dark, fun, crazy story about a slacker who suddenly gains the ability to turn into random superheroes. He doesn't get to choose what he becomes--it could be anything imaginable, from Boy Chimney to Iron Snail to Open-Window Man. At first this series just seems like an excuse for the artist to design hilarious, gimmicky new superheroes, but as it goes on the story gets more complex. It feels like an indie series, not something DC Comics would put out, so of course it's being discontinued later this year. R.I.P.

Saga

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Stapes

I didn't want to buy into the Saga hype. It was called the best comic book of 2012 by basically everyone. Described as a Star Wars-style space opera about new parents, it seemed a bit too much for me. I love the complex alien galaxy of Star Wars because I was introduced to it as a small child, but as a jaded adult, I didn't think I could embrace a guy with horns and a girl with wings and a naked lady bounty hunter with no arms and eight spider legs. It was at the top of so many year-end lists, though, that I had to cave. And I'm glad I did. I called Hawkeye my favorite superhero comic book because Saga is my Favorite Comic Book. Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples weave a beautiful, alien, and ultimately human tale with Saga. I hope to be delving into their world for years to come.

Captain Marvel

Kelly Sue DeConnick, Dexter Soy, and Emma Rios

Comics are mostly a sausagefest, so I was excited to read Captain Marvel: a series about female characters, with a female writer and (for many issues) a female artist. Unfortunately, the Woman Factor is the only interesting aspect of this book. Other than that, it's an incredibly generic superhero story where she flies around and blows up bad guys.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

Frank Miller

I finally got around to reading the most famous Batman comic of all time! The brooding, dystopian-cyberpunk-future 1986 tale by Frank Miller is credited with ushering in a whole new era of "grimdark" comics. And it's not the most fun book to read--tons of Walls of Text with many pages featuring sixteen panels each--yet it's obvious why this book was so influential. It's interesting to see a superhero at the end of his career, when he's old and weak. The ending is a bit of a cop-out, but The Dark Knight Returns is still a satisfying read. I especially like all the narration done through TV broadcasts; the local news anchor is just as much a character in the story as Bruce Wayne himself.

Batwoman

Greg Rucka, J.H. Williams III, W. Haden Blackman, Amy Reeder, and Trevor McCarthy

This is actually two separate comic book series. The "Batwoman: Elegy" story arc from Detective Comics in 2010, and the standalone Batwoman series that began in 2011. The Detective Comics story written by Greg Rucka and drawn by J.H. Williams III is absolutely fantastic. Rucka is one of the best writers in the business, and JHW3's intricate multi-page spreads are gorgeous. But when Batwoman got her own standalone series, Rucka was nowhere to be found. JHW3 pulled both writer and artist duties alone for a while, and the series suffered because of it. He's a great artist, but a subpar writer. To make matters worse, eventually JHW3 stopped doing the art altogether and enlisted a revolving door of artists to pencil his mediocre writing. I'd strongly recommend the Rucka/JHW3 run, collected as Batwoman: Elegy, but stay far away from the standalone Batwoman series.

The Massive

Brian Wood, Kristian Donaldson, Garry Brown, and Dave Stewart

I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic settings and geopolitical globetrotting, so The Massive is right up my alley. It's the story of a group of environmental activists trying to survive in a post-global warming world. At first I was put off by what looked like fairly generic artwork, but if you give it a chance, The Massive is intelligent and suspenseful. I consider myself a pretty Worldly Dude, and even I had to look up some of the topics in The Massive on Wikipedia. The characters are from all over the world, travel everywhere, and deal with all sorts of real-life issues. I didn't know anything about Tamil Eelam or Unalaska before I read this series. And even the art, which I thought was unremarkable to start, hits its stride after the first issue. The Massive is a text-heavy comic book, but it's intellectually fulfilling in a way not many other comic books are today.

Reluctantly embracing Batman

I've been getting into comics lately. I just finished catching up with Ultimate Spider-Man, and I figured the next series I should tackle is the one on everyone's "best comics of 2012" list: Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's reboot of Batman, subtitled in its first collection as The Court of Owls.

Despite its critical acclaim, I was hesitant to embrace Bruce Wayne. Much like how Spider-Man was the "it" guy in superhero movies during my formative years, Batman is the popular one these days due to Christopher Nolan's film trilogy. He's so popular I instinctively don't want to like him, because I'm that sort of person.

This is the cover of a real Batman issue.
You wouldn't see this in a Chris Nolan film.

While I enjoyed Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, I thought they weren't the Greatest Movies of All Time like many other nerds have deemed them. And The Dark Knight Rises was... mediocre at best. I understand Batman is a "serious" character, but at the end of the day he's still a guy in a bat costume punching bad guys. Nolan's trilogy takes itself too seriously, both in terms of tone and in terms of realism in its art direction.

Inception: A flawed psychological beauty

I was skeptical going into the theater last night to see Christopher Nolan's latest work, Inception. It's nearly impossible to shake the Batman connotations. He's the same guy who directed 2005's highly-acclaimed Batman Begins and 2008's orgasmically-acclaimed The Dark Knight. I'm skeptical because although I really liked The Dark Knight, I didn't think it was the greatest film of all time, like many seem to believe it is. To make matters worse, the primary Inception theatrical poster is nearly identical to one of The Dark Knight's theatrical posters.
I hoped this wasn't just cashing in on Batman's (or really, the Heath Ledger's) success. After all, the premise was intriguing: manipulating dreams. And the film features one of my biggest man-crushes, Cillian Murphy of 28 Days Later fame. And the week of the film's release, it was universally praised by critics. So I thought I'd finally cave in and see it.

It's a great film. The psychology of it all immerses you in the experience and makes you really think deeply about it. The characters talk about a lot of things pertaining to dreams that we've all contemplated but not put into words. The idea that when you sleep for five minutes, your dreams can feel like they last an hour. The idea of never remembering how dreams begin: we always start in the middle of everything, in medias res. And there are always things we know are wrong--your girlfriend's hair is red instead of brown, or everyone has three arms--but we don't really think about the fact that they're wrong until after we wake up. The film explores how while we only use a fraction of our brainpower when we're awake, we can use it all when we're asleep, because we're fully connected to our subconscious; we can dream as fast as we can think.

The crux of the story revolves around controlling one's dreams, actively using your subconscious to shape the dreams however you want. In addition, there's this concept of "shared dreams," where you can go into someone else's dream and interact with it. However, the more you disturb their dream, the more their "projections" of people within the dream will realize you don't belong there, and become hostile. People don't leave this dream world unless they wake up in real life, or die in the dream.
Unfortunately, Inception falls into both the trappings of being a Hollywood film, and earning a PG-13 rating. Hollywood means the film is full of stars: Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page play the leads. While they don't ruin the movie, they're not exactly riveting actors either. And while the film's concept seems like it would provide endless possibilities for crazy dream scenarios, the accessible mainstream nature of the movie means instead of acid trips or social statements, the dreams the story takes place most in are...

• 
  
  A car chase through New York City
• 
  
  A fight in a fancy hotel, and
• 
  
  An attack on a snowy military base.

Because we haven't seen those scenarios thousands of times before in cinema. An immaculate idea becomes a wasted opportunity, as the characters spend most of the time doing things they could've done in the real world without this sweet dream-controlling ability.

I'm also disappointed Inception went for a money-making PG-13 rating. "But Jake! The Lord of the Rings, your favorite movies of all time, are PG-13!" you may retort. But not all PG-13s are created equal. The Lord of the Rings was based on an epic fantasy tale written in the '30s and '40s, and published in the '50s. It was great filmmaking without needing more blood and swearing or more controversial, risky decisions--making such an epic film trilogy in the first place was risky enough. Inception, on the other hand, is a modern psychological thriller written for the 21st century. Yes, people actually bleeding when they get shot would have been nice, but I truly believe this film could've been so much more with an R rating. The dreams could've been made more disturbing and "out there," the subplot involving DiCaprio's character and his deceased wife could have been much deeper and more twisted, and Inception would've benefited as a whole. Instead, Nolan & Co. went for PG-13, because adults would still see it while at the same time capturing the lucrative "teenagers spending their parents' money" demographic.
In the end, though, I can overlook these faults because if you just take Inception for what it is and roll with it, it's an engrossing film experience. Its psychology is thought-provoking, and the concept makes you walk out of the theater thinking about it more. I'd be willing to bet if I watch this movie a second time, I'll get more out of it, and that's the sign of good cinema. Plus, Sir Michael Caine appears in a couple scenes, and he's one of my favorite people ever. It's not a Picture of the Year, but Inception is worth a viewing or two.