After the break, check out the latest episode of Batman Books Are Burning In Hell, with Tucker Stone, Matt Seneca...and Joe McCulloch!
Welcome back to Batman Books are Burning in Hell, where today we pioneer a brand new "enhanced interrogation" podcasting format to befoul the good name of... wait, it's him? Say hello to Joe McCulloch, everybody! Co-editor of TCJ.com, formerly of Comics Comics, Savage Critics, and the legendary Jog the Blog, Joe is the headliner of our main show Comic Books are Burning in Hell, and the best comics critic of the internet era. There's no other way to say it: no one since Gary Groth has contributed as much high level writing and thinking about the form as Joe. But even the greats are fallible! Case in point: this episode, in which he deigns to babble about Bryan Talbot and Batman at great length with us. That's right folks: it's time for a podcast about some all-time Serious Superhero Comics, the great Legends of the Dark Knight deep cut BATMAN: MASK. Wanna listen?
0:03:19 - You can download our First Ever Podcast right here, if you don't mind a little lo-fi listening. The origin of The Crew (minus Chris Mautner), and the only episode Joe felt it necessary to preface his notes for with the disclaimer "I swear we're not baked." Mask(s?) is indeed discussed!
0:12:27 - Luther Arkwright, Bryan Talbot's long-gestating, ultra-dense sci-fi/fantasy opus, which I swear listening back to this episode 3 years after we recorded it makes me kinda want to try to read again, was most recently published by Dark Horse in 2020 as a 568 page all-in-one collection. In a classic case of Dark Horse Brain they printed them at 6x9" manga digest trim size, further reducing a comic that was drawn for magazine format and already hella hard to read in the comic book trade paperbacks it was originally crammed into back in the '90s-'00s editions. Talbot's art is so meticulous and the Luther books' lettering is so tiny that I literally cannot imagine anyone reading all the way through 700 pages of it at digest size without giving up - we're talking Chris Ware levels of difficulty here, but at least Chris Ware knows what size his comics are going to be printed at when he is lettering them! Dark Horse previously pulled their Rick Moranis bit on Paul Chadwick's Concrete, another originally magazine sized comic that for my money is one of the most lushly drawn and colored books the mainstream has produced in the last 40 years. They took the colors out of those ones too, just as an extra middle finger in your eye. You would be better off tracking down the 8" x 11" Arkwright Integral hardcover from 2014, although copies are not cheap right now.
0:20:40 - The proof is in the pudding: aside from a few random pin-ups in DC Annual or Secret Files special issues and the like, this is indeed the only superhero comic Bryan Talbot's done. That's pretty astonishing for any cartoonist who's spent a 45-year career in mainstream comics, especially during the period when the doors were gaping open for weird British guys to come grab some quick and easy American dinero by doing whatever with some random old DC superhero everyone had forgotten about. The closest Talbot got was a few Vertigo fill-in issues in the late '80s and early '90s - some pivotal chapters of Sandman most notably, though both Joe and myself are quite enamored of his very weird Arthurian-age saga in Hellblazer Annual #1 (1989). Talbot's furry steampunk series Grandville has some superhero comics DNA to it, but minus most of the genre's crucial signifiers... which is what one imagines makes it a job Talbot wants to do. A resume like his speaks to a pretty impressive integrity: getting paid to make action comics for decade after decade with a mere two Batmans as your total superhero output is not an easy thing to do.
0:21:18 - All the above being said: God, it would have been fucking awesome to see Bryan Talbot draw a Spider-Man vs. Mysterio comic.
0:28:08 - Darwyn Cooke's Ego (2000), one of a few "test drive" type comics by the veteran of animation from before he fully committed to a career in the art form, is an alternately gripping and fan fictiony triple-sized one shot set in the Year One timeline. Less cynical and assured than Talbot's master class, it feels a little like A Christmas Carol for Batman, with an unnerving spirit-visitation setup giving way to a sentimental ending for Our Hero.
0:32:18 - Tossing Batman into the visual world of a post-apocalyptic horror movie was of course a facet of Dark Knight Returns, but one Frank Miller was more interested in mining for plot than the deep dark ambience Talbot conjures with the panels below. Tip of the hat to Steve Oliff's great color job here, especially on that ghostly Bat-Signal. Berni Wrightson reached for a similar primal terror in The Cult (1988), but Bill Wray's lysergic colors ironically make it feel more hallucinatory than Talbot's scenes of Actual Hallucinations. And of course, current-day Batman comics from DC are predicated almost entirely on placing Batman in what feels like a series of bizarrely optimistic Slipknot videos, following a mold established by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo in the early/mid-2010s. But those ones are mostly just absurd or farcical - Tucker's point holds. There is an unadulterated power to Talbot's nightmare vistas.
0:37:54 - The Marvel comics of Kirby, Ditko, and Lee had of course introduced superheroes to a sort of real world feel a generation before Moore and Miller. I suppose a better way of putting what I'm trying to get at is that Dark Knight and Watchmen, both thematically and narratively dense works, were able to introduce the real world's host of complicating variables to superhero stories. In the neurotic '60s Marvels, as well as DC's "socially conscious" after-school special comics of the same era, the "real world" becomes an additional antagonist, another difficulty for superheroes to struggle against and triumph over. Spider-Man gets a cold and he has to fight the Vulture; Green Arrow balances crime busting and a drug-addicted sidekick. Then in the following issues, with these hazards dispatched, we rinse and repeat. Where Moore and Miller deepened things was by showing how far afield everything - culture, psychology, politics - would need to go from our own norms to comfortably accommodate a figure like a superhero, in the process creating fraught environments where their stories of paranoia and social decay could play out with an almost predetermined logic. Talbot, for his part, applies a kind of Murphy's Law, proposing that one individual's damaged psychology is an easier way to turn our world into a superhero universe than the exhaustive world-building and alternate history behind a Watchmen.
0:42:29 - Here's the final splash page of Mask's "Director's Cut", as printed in the Dark Legends collection (1996). Talbot is just goin' for it!
0:49:40 - Does just not using an old character again, no matter how racist his origin, sound like something a superhero comic would ever do? I didn't think so. And if you hadda guess who would be the guy to bring back a WW2-era film serial bad guy played by a white dude in "yellowface", would your first answer not be Roy Thomas? Yes, the writer so slavishly devoted to maintaining his corporate masters' in-universe continuity that Jack Kirby created a savage parody version of him named "Houseroy" decided to bring back Dr. Daka in issues 42 and 43 of All-Star Squadron (1985). After the 1970s WW2 series The Invaders gave Thomas a way to slot all the messy, pre-continuity Marvel stories of the 1940s and '50s into a neat in-universe chronology like a pencilnecked geek carefully filing away his back issues in their mylar, Thomas turned around and sold DC a version of the exact same thing starring their characters - even the ones, it would seem, from a terrible, racist film serial nobody else on earth had seen in 40 years. The metaphor of a pig in shit seems particularly apt for Thomas and the stinky ass corn kernel he unearthed here. Unbelievably, Dr. Daka was exhumed yet again in 2020 (!) for the Valentine's Day-themed one-shot DC's Crimes of Passion. Jesus. Only in superhero comics, people. Bryan Talbot mighta been onto something staying far away!
Joe Adds some Jog Facts: The Roy Thomas version of the Daka character is “Prince Daka”, a more orthodox superhero wartime villain in the mold of a military leader, rendered with all the sensitivity the anti-Japanese scare of the early-to-mid ‘80s would suggest. Mike Baron actually dialogued issue 43, from Thomas’ plot. Both issues were drawn by Arvell Jones & Bill Collins. The image below is from the 2020 Crimes of Passion short titled "More than Maybe", written by Steve Orlando and drawn by Greg Smallwood. Daka is a “disgraced hypnotherapist”, which sounds more like a reference to the Talbot comic than anything…
The official Bryan Talbot twitter account writes in to assure our listeners and Gotham City that Bruce Wayne is not *dead* in the extended version of Mask (see splash page above); he has actually fallen comatose. Perhaps “Batman” is just an eternal dream in his unmoving body…
Posted by: Joe McCulloch | 2022.05.14 at 14:11