After the break, check out the latest episode of Batman Books Are Burning In Hell, with cartoonist Benjamin Marra joining your hosts Tucker Stone & Matt Seneca!
Welcome to Episode 2 of Batman Books are Burning in Hell, in which regular hosts Tucker Stone and Matt Seneca are joined by Benjamin Marra for a discussion of Batman: Venom! If Marra needs an introduction you're living wrong - the cartoonist behind Night Business, Terror Assaulter O.M.W.O.T., American Blood and What We Mean By Yesterday is one of the most accomplished artists currently making comics, full stop. Marra's works are vital entries in the category of American pulp, embracing his medium's history of disrepute while avoiding nostalgia with their purity of execution and commitment to extremity. Venom, published in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #16-20 (1991), is Denny O'Neil, Trevor Von Eeden, Russ Braun, and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez's epic saga of a Batman whose commitment to workout gains ends in tragedy, madness, and punching a great white shark in the face. LISTEN UP!
0:01:17 - Venom following directly after Prey in Legends of the Dark Knight's publication schedule is one of the more incredible back-to-back storyline coups DC ever pulled off. The "Aaron Rodgers replacing Brett Favre as quarterback of the Packers" of Batman comics, if you will. How lucky are you that you get to listen to podcasts about both?
0:02:01 - Bart Sears and Mike Barr's Faith (Legends #21-23, 1991), in which Batman enlists a gang of baseball bat-wielding street kids as his allies, is an inevitable step down from Prey and Venom - but it's a solid comic that gives one of the more interesting subplots from Dark Knight Returns a deeper dive, and features some great/ridiculous panels of kids in berets whomping the living shit out of people with sports equipment.
0:04:58 - Legends debuted in 1989 with an early experiment in variant covers, each copy of the first issue featuring a simple bat logo backgrounded by one of four flat colors. They looked pretty boring!
0:06:06 - Venom's division of artistic labor between a layout artist, penciler, and inker is indeed pretty unusual in mainstream comics. The most prominent examples I can think of offhand are '60s Marvel comics featuring a new penciler's company debut, in which an uncredited Jack Kirby would often provide stick-figure layouts for the new guy to work over to ensure fidelity to the house style. Harvey Kurtzman provided similar breakdowns to the artists he edited on EC's war comics and Mad, but most of those sturdy maestros inked themselves.
0:14:33 - Ben nails it. From Braun's blog: "I started working in comics in 1989 when Joe Orlando, my teacher at the School of Visual Arts, gave me my first paying gig at DC Comics. For the next few years I learned the business on the fly, working on Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight...." Orlando, vice president of DC Comics at the time, could certainly have shepherded his student into jobs where he could learn from the best.
0:18:40 - I'll submit that this image is about as Von Eeden as it gets, finding the perfect Dutch angle to foreground dynamic action whether or not said angle also includes a big rendering of the main character's trademarked logo. Check out the points on Batman's cape acting like big arrows reminding you, reader, to consider all the important elements of the scene (you big dummy).
0:19:22 - Contrast the stone-handed obviousness of this composition with the relative subtlety of the one above it for a good primer on how Braun and Von Eeden, both artists who can do cool things, weren't necessarily finding a meeting of the minds in executing this work.
0:20:17 - Despite penning as many rock solid Batman stories as anyone short of the character's co-creator Bill Finger, Denny O'Neil will probably always be remembered first for his endlessly memeable saga of Green Arrow's sidekick Speedy discovering an affinity for ye olde Chinese rocks.
0:27:56 - Venom's opening sequence provides an interesting mirror image to one of the all time classic, first ballot hall of fame moments in superhero comics, Steve Ditko's "Spider-Man lifts the big machine" passage from Amazing Spider-Man #33 (1966) - a sequence so iconic it ran alongside the New York Times' Ditko obituary. The parallels go past the obvious: both take place in a small space filling with water, both center around not the hero's own life but their concern over the life of a female innocent, and both are truly agonizing in their depiction of something that most superhero comics wouldn't blink an eye over, taking page after page to show the kind of heavy lifting that's usually disposed of in a single panel. Ironically, Venom's echoing Ditko's big moment to sound the overture for the chronicle of a hero's failure is exactly the kind of pessimistic "anti-art" that the ultra-square Ayn Rand acolyte Ditko abhorred. Coming from O'Neil, the longhair in the Marvel offices around the time Ditko was storming out for the ideologically purer pastures of, uh, mob-affiliated Charlton Comics, it's got the delicious feel of an especially mean-spirited personal jab.
0:34:23 - As an illustration of human potential's constant expansion, here is then-Oklahoma Sooners, now-Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts squatting the exact amount of weight that stood between Batman and that little girl's life on that fateful night back in 1991. Presumably steroid free! Denny O'Neil was surely shaking his head in total dismay when ESPN used this clip in a hype-up commercial for the 2019 college football season. "No way is that guy stronger than Batman!"
0:37:56 - O'Neil passed on June 11th, 2020, which means it took us like a year and a half to get this podcast out into the world, jeez. Can you hear that amount of care in every second, listener?
0:43:51 - We actually did record a podcast about Kraven's Last Hunt - another comic that really just slams the "needlessly upsetting" button till the cows come home - once upon a time! Check it out.
0:52:50 - Namely The Black Mirror, quickly becoming this show's shorthand for the fallen world of overwritten, gross-but-bland Batman comics a la Scott Snyder that we must somehow grapple with existence in.
0:54:52 - The image Ben describes here is one I swear to god I can picture in great detail, complete with Ross's cruel-looking, slightly Clark Gable Batman gazing pensively into the Batcomputer's display - but damned if I can find the actual image I'm thinking of anywhere! Maybe it's this sequence from Batman: War on Crime (1999)? Or this random pin-up? This pencil-sketch print? Arrrrgghhhhh! In all instances, Ross seems to have compensated for Batman's verboten belly by giving him an absolute whale of a barrel chest.
0:56:08 - The ultimate expression of the Snyder era's Batman ethos is probably Detective Comics vol. 2 #27 (2014), in which Snyder and Brad Meltzer, who arguably kicked off the current lapsarian era of DC Comics with 2004's Identity Crisis, conjure a Batman who exists as a reassuring bedtime story for the terminally pop culture-brained. Our own Joe McCulloch had by far the best take on this bewildering Batman For Babies here.
0:59:40 - Peter Milligan's run on Detective Comics comprises issues 629-633, 638-640, and 643 (1991-92). Good ones!
1:01:23 - I'd argue the hallmark of DC-brain Tucker describes here began with Superman #199 (1967), with the first of the innumerable Superman vs. the Flash races - a type of story that eventually saw so many entries that they published a whole fucking book full of them. (Alex Ross cover, natch!) Perhaps significantly, that first story's writer, Jim Shooter, was 15 years old when it was published. Nobody's splitting the atom in these story conferences, folks.
1:11:41 - Tucker's roasting 1999's 10-issue maxiseries Batman and Superman: World's Finest, by Karl Kesel and Dave Taylor, which indeed seems to exist mainly so that readers can discover how our two favorite boys felt inside about each other during DC's endless parade of ill-considered '90s crossover events.
1:13:09 - Mike Barr and Jerry Bingham's Son of the Demon (1987) is a very solid book that features a few "moments of weakness" from Batman. One of these is Finally Allowing Himself to get laid, which is sorta funny, but the better one is taking his ball and going home when a chess game he's playing with Ra's al Ghul ends in a stalemate, because ties are bullshit and what is this, soccer?!? That's the Batman we all know and love.
1:17:29 - The "big scandal" Ben mentions was best encapsulated in Laura Hudson's article "The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and their 'Liberated Sexuality'", which hasn't aged a day since its 2011 publication. Jesus Christ I can't believe that was ten years ago. Ugh! Bye till next time!
Enjoying the show as always, but the annotations to these Batman episodes are next-level!
Posted by: Josh Lambert | 2021.10.29 at 11:37
There's a Frank Miller interview (in the book The Many Lives of the Batman) in which, IIRC, Miller asserts that stories about Bruce Wayne having romantic relationships are always insipid. He goes on to argue that Batman should be too neurotically fixated on CRIME to have energy for gentler pastimes. Nuts to that; viva the Batman Who Fucks
Posted by: Aaron White | 2021.10.31 at 23:12
For fuck's sake - HERE is the image of Batman sitting at the Batcomputer that I had in my head, but it's by Simone Bianchi not Alex Ross. They're not even similar artists! Uggghhhh
https://www.previewsworld.com/SiteImage/MainImage/STK343078
Posted by: Matt Seneca | 2021.11.03 at 15:05