I can remember one of the first things I was ever able to read by myself was a batman comic, and from that point on he was the first fictional character that I can remember just being totally awed by. I also love comics, I like “proper” literature as well, but comics to me represent a synthesis of things I value; words and art. Unfortunately there are very few Batman comics that I find transcendent; it’s not that I want every issue to be literary I just want something fun and clever and smart featuring a guy dressed up as a bat. It was this want that years ago led me to read Batman: the Long Halloween. For those who don’t read comics or care about the admittedly inane storylines Batman and his family of books had been going through massive event style stories. What that means is that during that year if by chance you had the strange itch to read a comic, and an even stranger itch to visit a specialty shop because comic books could no longer be found on a newsstand, than you would be met with a storyline where Batman fought the Ebola virus. To be fair Batman: Contagion might not have been a yearlong but it was just as awful as described and part of a larger trend that comic book publishers still follow which is to make their books as inaccessible as humanly possible. It’s in that weird market place that a book as mediocre as Long Halloween can find success because it feels at least on a superficial level to be a Batman book and as an added bonus doesn’t feature Batman fighting the Ebola virus.
Jeph Loeb’s name attached to any product is clear warning sign that a reader should stay as far away as they can from the contents of the media they are about to consume, but in those heady days of the mid nineties his name was synonymous with readability. The basic idea that Wizard, the guide to comics used to perpetuate was that Jeph Loeb was a successful Hollywood writer slumming it in comics and we should grateful that the writer of Teen Wolf and Commando has decided to set his sights on comics. The art by Tim Sale is brilliant in some ways and horrendously ugly in others. Art will always be a matter of personal taste, and his art is highlighted by moody washes of ink, elongated forms, and distorted features I personally like his artwork but I don’t really feel like the script he is served with best suits his particular talents.
The Long Halloween has this unfounded reputation for greatness, it’s the sort of situation where such a great character like Batman has never had the kind of stories that really don’t do the best job of extolling the richness of his character (Batman: The Killing Joke withstanding) and something marginally competent is published and is henceforth sets the goalpost for quality.The Long Halloween is by no means good, but buried somewhere deep in the listless text is an idea that is worth expanding on.
Overreach is probably the best way to describe this works, because it clearly has ambitions but the execution is just terrible, but what do you honestly expect from the writer of Teen Wolf and Commando. It wants to be a story about the early days of Batman, and wants to sort of touch on the decline of friendship and the passing of the “good old days”. At the same time it wants to be a Batman book that has huge swaths of the Godfather, Silence of the Lambs, and Batman: Year One sewn into its narrative. On top of this already wobbly narrative it wants to be a murder mystery, essentially Jeph Loeb has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the wall in an attempt to produce a story. The Long Halloween fails because it has no sense of its own identity, no sense of its characters, and because it is too dependent on other media and cannot stand on its own narrative.
In our next installment we request your attention as we discuss why Character matters.
it's still one of my favorites
ReplyDelete