All-Star Batman and Robin Is Amazing.

(no, i am not trolling you)

by Jon Bernhardt of Funnybook Babylon

The ninth issue of Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s All-Star Batman and Robin came out this Wednesday, and finally, at long last, it looks like we’ve got enough material here to accurately gauge it. Its release schedule is still highly irregular — though it’s been rapidly getting less so — and sure, it’s taken us over two years to get to this point. But here we are, and from all appearances, Miller and Lee have handed us something a hell of a lot more complex than most people thought they’d get when they picked up the first couple issues. Really, though, this is Frank Miller we’re talking about. You should have known by now there’d be something lurking there underneath all that sex and violence.

After the first couple issues of ASBAR (God I love that acronym) hit, the conventional wisdom stated that Frank Miller had, quite frankly, gone insane. That’s fine. That was more or less the conventional wisdom that followed The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Not so much following Batman: Year One, but there was still some kvetching about how Miller portrayed Catwoman. What people seemed to miss about Miller’s latter day Batman work — especially the oft-maligned DKSA, which is right now competing against itself and only itself for “Most Disappointing Comic” in some silly poll Wizard Online is running — is that Miller is doing something most comic writers seem incapable of doing: he is reacting. DKSA is a reaction to DKR and its rather blind, unconsidered acceptance by both creative forces at DC Comics and the comic community at large; the book is a mockery through absurdity. Not a lot of people got this message, and many of the ones who did still disliked it, because they found the writing or art off-putting. And to be fair, Miller’s exaggerated “ugly” style that he pulls out these days is something that takes a little getting used to.

But a lot of people — including, I’m assuming, the bright minds and hearty souls over at Wizard — disliked Dark Knight Strikes Again because they came into it expecting something they were never going to get, based, perhaps, on their misunderstanding of what Miller actually did with the character in Dark Knight Returns. The absolute worst way to engage with the text of DKR is to read it like Miller is saying that Batman’s a cool dude, totally ripping around town and kicking all sorts of asses, thinking that it’s a war and his kids in it are soldiers and that this is how things should be, thinking that creepy memorials are the way to go when a child in his care dies. DKR is not an endorsement. DKR is a cautionary tale.

So when the main line DC Comics version of Batman got his sidekick killed, it must have been bizarre for Miller to see that memorial show up, because that memorial was not a good thing for the character. What happened when that memorial went up in Dark Knight Returns was that Bruce Wayne stopped being Batman. So when DC killed Jason Todd off on their main line, and someone realized this would be a great opportunity to do a throwback to that wildly successful miniseries that Frank Miller did — which, along with Alan Moore’s Watchmen, comprised a late-eighties sea change in comics, for better or for worse — they essentially betrayed the memorial’s symbolism. Sure, they kept the inscription, the glass case, the creepy costume, all that physical stuff, but they botched the context. In DKR, that event makes Batman hang up the mask. In the main DCU, that event makes him…try to kill Joker, but get stopped by Superman because Joker is part of the Iranian delegation to the United Nations (or the one from Qurac, or Khandaq, or whatever made-up fake Arabic state is standing in for Iran these days). Then he continues soldiering on, getting kind of nutty until Tim Drake saves his soul. And there the memorial stays.

The memorial looms, now; it’s pretty much replaced the T-Rex and the giant penny as the standard stage prop you see when any DC artist does an interior of the Batcave. That’s a powerful message, and one that doesn’t seem to be that considered. And in the late nineties, dreck like Bruce Wayne: Murderer? and Batman: Fugitive cemented the bizarre, one foot in the room, one foot out the door approach Batman’s editorial handlers, Batman’s writers, and a large group of Batman’s fans took towards the character, perhaps best summed up in what was maybe the most misguided, character damaging single issue of Batman ever penned — Batman #600, the climax of Bruce Wayne: Murderer?, written by none other than Ed Brubaker. Let’s be clear: “Bruce Wayne is the mask” is perhaps the most tedious, surface-level, purely lazy interpretation of Frank Miller’s legacy with this character that you can make.

I think that is why after Dark Knight Strikes Again failed, Miller felt the need to come back and try it again, in a way that would appeal to the baser natures of some the people that gave DKSA the heave-ho. It’s slick and beautiful; Jim Lee at his finest, most insane, and fundamentally sound. Miller has Lee doing things that Jeph Loeb wishes he had the imagination to ask for in Hush. And Lee’s style fits the new approach Miller is taking to the material perfectly. Instead of using intentionally ugly art to contrast with the sickly-sweet over-pop portrayals of superheroes in DKSA (and anyone who thinks that art wasn’t intentional should reread not just his first run on Daredevil, but the issues immediately preceding it, when he was the book’s penciller; every choice Miller makes is a matter of style and is done by a man with a very, very solid grounding in his craft), Miller and Lee are using the art to emphasize the slick, fuel-injected, ultra-violent, over-the-top creature Batman has become. Everything about this book, from Batman’s ridiculous inner monologue to the 12 year old boy who’s the closest thing we have to a character we can identify with, to a six-page fold out of the Batcave, indicates that there’s something behind all this sound and fury, and that it’s something important.

The Batman of All-Star Batman and Robin is not just a dude who can bust some heads. He’s not one-dimensional. And like most characters that are not one-dimensional, he should not always be taken at his word. As we’ve seen so far, this Batman is a troubled individual in an utterly insane world — an updated analogue of the Silver Age, where the whimsy that characterized that era’s climate has been replaced by the exaggerated faux-maturity that characterizes ours. This character has built a reactive persona that he hides behind, and in Issue #9, for the first time in the run, it comes down, and we see Bruce Wayne. Issue #9 is also the first time we see a recognition that violence has consequences, which starkly contrasts with the extremely funny, over-the-top scene that comes before it. Basically, Issue #9 is the turn that the first eight issues were building to, where Miller pulls back the curtain and makes how he sees these characters explicit. Seriously. Go back and read Issues #1-9 in one sitting, and see how he does it. Miller is a master — he’s crafted a ludicrous comic that’s not only viscerally entertaining and amazingly funny, but carries on the tradition of the old DC Universe, translated into the modern era, while also giving a spin on the character that has as much weight and consideration as his work in Dark Knight Returns. Probably not as much impact, but that’s a good thing. Let’s be honest — just like with its contemporary, Watchmen, fans are a bit too blindly rabid when it comes to DKR.

It’s a good time to be a Batman fan. Grant Morrison and Frank Miller, with generally solid work by Paul Dini on the side? Yes please. It’s taken way too long, but Miller and Morrison, who are far and away the best two minds currently working on superheroes for DC, are taking a character that has honestly been doing nothing of note for almost fifteen years and breathing major life back into him (with assists by guys like Darwyn Cooke and David Lapham, of course — Batman: Ego and Batman: City of Crime complete the essential post-Knightfall Batman). This should have sea-changing effects on the Batman franchise — complete with people trying to drag it kicking and screaming back to the way he was in the nineties. But that’s cool. We won’t see the real way Morrison and Miller are changing how people view these characters until a new crop of writers gets in and starts wrecking shop. And that’s the way it should be.

Alternate Current is a series of weekly posts on thought-provoking, or simply fun, topics from bright minds all throughout the blogosphere. We take submissions, so if you’d like to get into the mix, send an email to David Brothers. This week comes courtesy of Jon from Funnybook Babylon.