After the break, check out the latest episode of Batman Books Are Burning In Hell, with cartoonist Cliff Chiang joining your hosts Tucker Stone & Matt Seneca!
Welcome once again to Batman Books are Burning in Hell, where this time Tucker and Matt are joined by none other than Cliff Chiang, master cartoonist behind the best superhero comic to hit the stands since some of those old ones we usually talk about -- CATWOMAN: LONELY CITY. Whip-smart, addictively paced, and visually stunning, LONELY CITY is a hardboiled "one last score" crime novel that dons Batman-universe drag and absolutely werks it while tossing off no-shit social commentary that's as cutting as it is intelligent. It's a throwback to the type of dense, creator-driven, legitimately mature Batman sagas of the late '80s and early '90s that we created this show to discuss...That Cliff is one of comics' most thoughtful interview subjects is the cherry on top. We're very proud to present this interview, so stop reading these words and start listening to it now!
0:05:14 - "Batman with guns", by Cliff and Brian Azzarello, was a never-published offshoot of DC's old circa-2010 First Wave imprint, which attempted to put some shine back on old pulp characters such as Doc Savage and the Avenger by creating a shared universe that also featured tonally appropriate DC-owned heroes of the '30s and '40s like the Spirit. A Batman in line with the original pre-WWII Bob Kane/Bill Finger version was a big feature in this short-lived line of books - and yes, he had guns. That comic would have been fucking awesome.
0:15:57 - Cliff refers here to another one of his unpublished Batman stories: Childhood Hero, written by G.P. Austin and intended for publication in the original Bob Schreck-edited Batman Black and White limited series. As Cliff tells it in his interview for Modern Masters volume 29: Cliff Chiang,
"Bruce Wayne is confronted with his childhood hero when he attends a costume ball and Tyrone Power is there wearing a Zorro costume. Bruce himself is wearing a Batman costume, but it's a last minute, ridiculous knock-off that Alfred picked up as a joke. I drew it to look like the movie serial with the real pointy ears and the cape way too long. (...) Unfortunately, Tyrone Power in a Zorro costume was a "no" for the legal department. (...) At the last minute they had to pull it, and it never came out."
This being said, you can read the complete 8-page story at gallerist Felix Comic Art's website, thanks to John Workman's vintage right-onto-the-boards lettering job. Cliff eventually made it into Batman Black and White as writer and artist with Clay, a Batman, Robin, and Clayface story in issue #6 of the 2013 second series.
0:26:05 - Cliff echoes a thought our Prey Bat-cast brought up: after a solid two decades of being crushed at regular type superhero comics by the louder, brasher, cooler Marvel, DC in the mid-'80s was able to pivot to a sovereign territory of their own with densely structured, "literary" action books that made the Marvels of the era feel not a little childish by comparison. Per usual for DC the Batman line led this charge, springboarding from Frank Miller's two shots heard 'round the world. In more recent years, DC's comics have suffered by retaining this density but becoming more and more self-reflexive with it - keeping the uninitiated out with deep dives into past storylines rather than welcoming them in with mass media satire a la Miller, or the more poetic sensibility of an Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman. The DC's of the 2010s and '20s too often mine the comic's world rather than the reader's world for their references and subplots, slamming the door shut on anyone who isn't already at least a part-time citizen of the DCU. Cliff's Lonely City, then, is truly a return to what DC does best: a dense, novelistic treatment of classic characters and action with enough broad themes and new ideas overlaid onto it to speak to a wider audience than the comic store's Wednesday faithful.
0:37:31 - Mindy Newell and J.J. Birch's Catwoman miniseries (1989), collected as Her Sister's Keeper, is a great example of the ultra-serious "grim and gritty" comics that loomed large at DC, especially around Batman, following Frank Miller and Alan Moore's tenure there. Kicking off its chapters with epigraphic quotes from William Blake, Rudyard Kipling, and St. Thomas Aquinas (!), featuring thick ladlefuls of Catholic iconography and sexual violence, it's icky and engrossing by turns - true pulp. Cliff mentions what might be the most interesting thing about a book that's ultimately sort of a bummer to read: Birch's pages-long redraws of David Mazzucchelli's Year One sequences featuring Selina Kyle. Seeing Birch's stiff, labored, very "Vertigo" drawing style suddenly grow elegant and balletic once he starts using Mazzucchelli's compositions is a great object lesson in how important the mechanics of the comics page are to the way a book reads.
0:59:45 - Steve Rude does indeed draw a sleek, lithe, swashbuckling Batman - one that carries plenty of what Tucker is referring to here, the crucial element of camp theatricality. Costumed like an acrobat, vamping like Bela Lugosi as Dracula, there's a longstanding image of Batman out there that's both very baroque and consciously of an earlier time, one in which the sordid rumors and demon-haunted shadows of legendry felt a little more real - doled out with a wink and a click of the heels. (Remember, Bob Kane's original vision of Batman swiped extremely liberally from an older pulp character, Murray Leinster's Black Bat.) The other end of Tucker's "spectrum" is well represented by Cliff's militarized Bat-Cops, though I'd argue that Dark Knight Returns, with its pig-iron, tread-mounted Batmobile and squat, thundering armor costume, is also a peak vision of the same thing. That is, Batman as self-serious, weaponized Ultimate Winner of technocratic capitalism's war on deviant behavior and extralegal economics. This rendering of the character was introduced to a mass media audience by Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, which develop over their course into a dangerously seductive treatise on the aesthetic delights of fascism. (The Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher ones are decent if not perfect cinematic representations of Swishy Camp Batman.) That both sides of this spectrum - swashbuckling fruitcake and paramilitary stormtrooper - coexist not just comfortably, but harmoniously, in an awful lot of terrific comics, is a testament to how strong a character has been erected atop the foundations over the years. More than anything else, I think, Batman's incredible adaptability is thanks to the overwhelming power of Bob Kane's original costume design. It's all in there.
1:14:52 - Batman: Reptilian (2021) is Garth Ennis's recently concluded 6-issue miniseries, fully painted in 1980s style by Liam Sharp. Sharp's bizarre art and Ennis's often rocky way with the single-issue format sunk it for me; had it been drawn by the late Steve Dillon, as originally planned, I might have been able to get further than issue 2. Whoever edited that book must have been in an odd frame of mind to assign a script written for the solid, plainspoken, ultra-quotidian Dillon to the fanciful expressionist Sharp, and then tell him to go full mixed-media Dave McKean on it. Weird comic, one for the Tucker in your life.
1:15:56 - Now we're talking. Got a Date With an Angel, published in The Batman Chronicles #19 (1999), by Steve Englehart with Javier Pulido and Dave Stewart, is a truly fantastic little piece of Batman noir by the writer who probably provided the definitive take on the "swashbuckling" end of Tucker's Bat-Spectrum, Strange Apparitions (1977). Set shortly after Year One, it's got a hilarious setup, applying the classic "Secret Origin" flashback format to Batman's neurotic refusal to laid. (Englehart, not coincidentally, created perhaps the most memorable of Batman's civilian girlfriends, the smart, tough, white-haired avant la e-girl lettre Silver St. Cloud.) A charming tale with a brutal twist ending, this one's also notable for featuring early art by Javier Pulido, these days mainstream comics' closest answer to Jaime Hernandez, but back then a more fluid and gestural artist flashing a serious aptitude for Dutch angles.
1:21:00 - The Batman Beyond episode in which our hero does indeed manage to hit it without causing untold misery is Dead Man's Hand (1999 too! Something in the air about fuckin' on a deadline that year - I blame Bill Clinton), episode 8 of the cartoon, written by Stan Berkowitz and directed by Dan Riba. I'm only noting this because everyone should go watch that one, it's amazing - a great Batman story whose romantic subplot carries some moments of real beauty.
1:24:28 - The Secret Origin of Man-Bat, in Secret Origins #39 (1989), written by Jan Strnad and drawn by Kevin Nowlan, who's credited with "everything else", is an early star turn by one of mainstream comics' most underrated talents. Nowlan's master class of elegant staging and minimalist drawing, combined with his amazing pre-digital, benday dotted self-coloring job, is a dream of a world where Alex Toth, not Jack Kirby, became the dominant influence on superhero art. This is one that old Comics Journal columnist Frank Santoro used to proselytize for as an object lesson in comics making quite convincingly.
1:26:00 - The Broken City story arc by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso ran in Batman #620-625 (2003-4), slapping the100 Bullets team with the unenviable task of following up Jim Lee's Hush - then the bestselling Batman comic since the high water marks of the mid-'90s. The grilling/drinking scene Tucker mentions, memorably drawn by Risso, appears in issue #621; that chili pepper/grilling story is by Lauren Collins, and is probably my favorite long-form New Yorker story ever. Azzarello and Risso, hardly unaccustomed to noir trappings, always deliver on Batman - their strip in the tabloid-sized, newspaper-format Wednesday Comics (2009) is incredible, and the crossover tie-in miniseries Flashpoint: Knight of Vengeance (2011) uses the unlikeliest of opportunities to deliver a pitch-black, downbeat shocker with the kind of "real ending" superhero comics are rarely allowed to deliver - much less in the context of a line-wide master story involving multiple alternate time streams. (EDITED TO ADD) Or at least it DID until none other than longtime Tucker 'n' Matt bete noir Geoff Johns decided to wade in and fuck it up with the currently running Flashpoint Beyond miniseries, which is at least still unintentionally hilarious and has some great Risso art in it.
1:29:16 - Here's Fungus the Bogeyman. You be the judge!
1:30:37 - Killer Croc: Fast Train to the Wet Dark, by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones, rain in Batman #521-522 (1995). Moench and Jones were an odd pair, producing a ton of classic one- and two-issue stories without ever feeling like they were working exactly "on-model", or even as a part of the established Batman universe. Much of this is due to Jones' writhing, steroidal, ultra-dark artwork, as printed on glossy, almost sticky "web" paper in most issues - but that feeling must hit on an institutional level, as the run went 20 years without being reprinted, saw a blink-and-you'll-miss-it revival as an expensive, limited-run hardcover series, and very quickly lapsed back into obscurity. More's the pity, but it wouldn't be one of our shows without reference to a comic that's way too hard to find!
Didn't think of Justice League Unlimited while reading the new Lonely City, but did recall the Batman Adventures annual Dini and Timm did (later adapted into an episode of the animated series) that was dedicated to Jack Kirby.
Posted by: Brian Nicholson | 2022.04.23 at 10:01