Review: Dark Victory

It's been a busy couple months at the Payne home, but I haven't forgot you, dear reader.

It seems that my love of Batman is well known and understood by my family.  A couple weeks ago, we celebrated Christmas in Texas with my parents, John and JaNae, and Dan and Christina.  Dan and Christina gave me and Kate a special edition of Arkham Asylum, a famous Batman comic book.  When Kate saw it, she giggled, presumably because receiving a comic book as an adult is funny (and awesome).  A few minutes later, I opened a present from Kate: a different special edition of Arkham Asylum.

It's nice to have a thing.

And speaking of that thing, I thought I would get back into the groove of blogging by reviewing another Batman book: Dark Victory.

Dark Victory is another collaboration between Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale.  It follows directly after the events of The Long Halloween, which I reviewed a couple months back (Warning: Long Halloween spoilers ahead).  I'll start with the art.

he art is really fun.  There are, of course, lots of good "Batman is totally bad" pictures.

 There's lots of fun shots of the bad guys:

 Lots of the big blocks of color and shadow that I liked so much in Sale's other books.

 The art includes lots of empty space, often representing the empty lives of people in the pictures.

The last thing I'll point out about the art is how in several places, the main character is very small in the room.  Batman is seen as a tiny smudge in the corner of a courtroom, or Catwoman is barely visible in the shadows of the morgue.

All in all, I love the art, but it is very similar to Tim Sale's other work that I've already talked about, so there's not much to say there.

Dark Victory takes lots of the events and themes of Long Halloween and makes them take the next logical step.  For example, after Harvey Dent's betrayal at the end of Long Halloween, Bruce and Jim Gordon are left feeling lonely and suspicious.  Bruce sums it up nicely:

“I realize now that the burden of ridding Gotham CIty of the evil that took my parents’ lives… must be mine and mine alone”

This feeling of loneliness and isolation gives Jeph and Tim license to revisit the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne and explore Bruce's deep feelings of abandonment.  There is some beautiful, dream-like black and white art in the flashbacks.

Jim Gordon's obsession with catching the Holiday Killer during Long Halloween led him to neglect his family, and as a result, Dark Victory shows him alone after his wife left.  It is hard not to make this entire post about how heartbreaking Jim's story is.

He looks tired and beaten.

He looks alone

And that's what the title means, at least to me.  In Long Halloween, the good guys won, but in Dark Victory, we explore the costs of that victory.

We see those costs in very overt ways, like Jim losing his family, but also in some more subtle ways.  There are, for instance, callbacks to the iconic rooftop scene from Long Halloween where Harvey, Gordon, and Batman meet to discuss the killer, but this time, Harvey is conspicuously absent from the image.

The theme of "trusting is hard" is a good backdrop to both introduce new characters, and flesh out some old ones.  Alfred has a larger role, and is much more fun.

 Selina Kyle is back, and her relationship with Bruce continues to be complex.

And we get the introduction of Robin.  Robin is a tricky character, because he is, at his core, an annoying kid.  But, given the story, Robin fits nicely.  He allows us to explore more of Bruce's trust issues after being betrayed by one of his only friends.  He also parallels Bruce's own story, which allows for some nice symmetry.  We see Bruce's parents die:

And we see Dick's parents die:

We see Alfred raising Bruce:

And we see Alfred raising Dick:

It's really good.

This is getting long, but I really liked this book.  I would definitely recommend it, with the one caveat that you should read Long Halloween first to get the full impact.

Review: The Long Halloween

Batman: The Long Halloween is a followup to the Haunted Knight stories I reviewed a couple weeks ago.  Where Haunted Knight was a collection of unrelated short stories, The Long Halloween was a monthly special that ran for one year, from October 1996 to October 1997.  It follows the same continuity as Haunted Knight, but it stands mostly alone as its own story.  The main story is that Batman, Gordon, and Dent are all working to find a serial killer in Gotham who kills on holidays.

The Long Halloween is often praised as one of the greatest Batman comics of all time, and with good reason.  The themes of the story (though not much of the plot itself) are very strongly felt in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight movies.  I wanted to link somebody else describing all the similarities, but shockingly, I can't find anyone who has gone through and done that.  Come on, internet, get your act together.  I may come back and do that one of these days.   But not today.  Today I'm just going to talk about what I liked, what I didn't like, and how the book fares overall.  I will avoid major spoilers for this story, but I will mention plot points that are common in the Batman universe (ie, Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face, etc)

I feel like the art is even better than in Haunted Knight, even though it is the same artist.  I guess a few years of practice makes a difference.  The uses of shadow and blocks of solid color that I liked so much in Haunted Knight are more pronounced here.

I love beleaguered, haggard Gordon in his dark office

And they are used well for foreshadowing.  For example, Harvey Dent's face is often shown in half-shadow, hinting at his later transformation into Two-Face.

The book has some very interesting themes, both for the good guys and the bad guys.  On the bad-guy side, it talks about the transformation of Gotham from a mob-run town to a super-villain-run town.  The old mobsters are shown trying to deal with the influx of "freaks" into Gotham, and trying to hold on to their power and influence in a changing world.

On the good-guy side, we see the unsteady alliance between Gotham's police force (Captain Jim Gordon), prosecutor (District Attorney Harvey Dent) and Batman (Batman).  Each of them suspects the other two of being the villain (for reasons that are believable and well written, I might add), but has to rely on them anyway.  This theme of unsteady, forced trust makes for a surprisingly thought provoking read.

Now, for some of the bad.  One problem stems from the way this story was told (13 "chapters" released as 13 separate comic books over the course of a year).  There is a single story running through the whole thing (an unknown serial killer in Gotham), but each chapter has its own story as well.  And each chapter's individual story is about a different villain from Batman's Rogues' Gallery.  The first time I read this, it didn't bother me, but this time through it felt a bit forced.  In January, Batman investigates the Holiday Killer and faces off with Joker.  In March, Batman investigates the Holiday Killer and faces off with Poison Ivy.  Every month could be summed up that way.

Though this does lead to some pretty cool cover art for the different months

This could be explained away as "Batman is crazy busy, and even when he is in a long, drawn-out investigation there are always other fires to put out," but it just didn't feel that way to me.  Like I said, not bad, but a little forced.  I don't like when I can see what's going on backstage in the author's head.

Another problem is with the story itself.  I enjoyed it right up to the end, when it felt like Jeph Loeb traveled 15 years into the future, watched the LOST finale, and said "man, what a great way to end things!"

What if the whole thing was just a dream the polar bear had?

The big surprise ending was kind of dumb.  Like the villain-of-the-month problem, it just felt forced, like the publisher really really wanted a surprise, but the writers hadn't planned on one.

The last criticism I have will be a bigger problem for some than others.  That is that this book is not as accessible as it might me.  There were a few times reading it when I thought "if I didn't know a lot of Batman mythos, I'd be lost here."  So, not a bad book by any means, but probably not the one I'd recommend as someone's first book to read.

All in all, a very satisfying read (even if the ending was marred with a dumb, dumb twist), with beautiful art and a good story.

Review: Haunted Knight

It surprises no one that the Payne family is in to Batman.  It might surprise some people to see how much we are in to Batman.  We go for the apparel

Full disclosure: this is not his only Batman onesie.  Or his only Batman socks.

The video games

The World's Greatest Detective doing...detective stuff...I guess

We own all the movies

Well, all the good movies

And for Kate's birthday, I got her a couple of my favorite Batman books (I'll avoid the term "Graphic Novel" because it makes me feel like an even bigger dork).

It's important to teach him Batman's origin story very young in case something happens to me and Kate

The point is, we love us some Batman.  Knowing this, and knowing that Kate has spent a lot of time stuck in bed lately because of her blood clots, Lance loaned us a couple of his favorite Batman books.  I read one of them yesterday (it was pretty short and I had some time on the bus) and I thought I'd review it here for anybody looking to get a taste of Batman comics.  I'll try to do the others as I get to them, but no promises.  Turns out the next few weeks are going to be busy.

Haunted Knight is actually a collection of three short stories, published as Halloween specials in 1993-1995.  The stories are relatively simple, which makes them nice for a new Batman reader.  In the first, for example, Scarecrow is terrorizing Gotham on Halloween, so Batman finds him and punches him really hard.  Fin.

Although the surface stories are simple, these stories have lots of flashbacks to formative events in Bruce Wayne's life.  Because the stories are Halloween-themed, the flashbacks go back to Bruce's fears, nightmares, and traumas.  His character gains a surprising amount of depth.  The second story shows us one of my favorite characters, Police Captain Jim Gordon, trying to keep his family together while doing his job protecting Gotham.  The story is actually very touching and I almost cried on the bus reading it.

What I really love about this book, in addition to the surprisingly touching story, is the art.  Tim Sale uses shadow, silhouette, and big blocks of color in very interesting way.  It's hard to describe, so I'll just include a couple pictures.

I love the use of just black, grey, white and red

I also like the way he depicts the vast emptyness that is Wayne Manor.  Such an empty, lonely place for Bruce to live.

My biggest worry before I read any comic books was that I would get lost trying to keep up with 75 years of backstory.  The nice thing about this book (and most of the ones I will review in the near future if I get around to that) is that it is pretty self contained.  You don't really need to know anything going in other than that Batman is a guy who fights villains and criminals in Gotham.  I would recommend this book to anybody who wants to try out reading a comic book without a lot of time commitment.  Easy to read, satisfying ending, beautiful art.