Just read The Killing Joke. Good. Liked the ending.

I would like to state for the record that I blame Plei and Shrift. It is All Their Fault.

There I was, standing in the looooooong line at the local Value Village, my basket full of black lacey, mesh, ruffly goodness. The endcap right by where I was standing was full of comic books, all for 49 cents. I glanced, and saw that one of them said Nightwing.

I now have Nightwing 86-90. Plei, you better loan me 91-93.

The endcap was full of what looked to be fairly current Robin, Green Lantern, JLA, Detective Comics, Batgirl, Aquaman, Green Arrow, Spiderman, Spidergirl, Hawkman, and various X-titles I didn't recognize. Kinda battered, but 49 cents an issue.

91-93 will wing their way to your house tonight.

I'm cackling, btw. Sorry about that.

Okay, who watched Justice League tonight?

Because, EEEEEEEEE.

Someday, I will look back on this as the day that comic books characters wholly and irrevocably ate my brain.

GL/Hawkgirl ! secret identities ! Alfred ! "That's. Not. HELPING." ! Flash hugs !

So, so smitten.

Well, Justice League was pretty awesome.

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Didn't they already reveal their secret identities in the first season?

Speaking of art, No Man's Land 2 was giving me whiplash from the extreme range of quality and style in the art. Yeesh.

Read The Long Halloween which I enjoyed quite a bit. I can see why folks didn't get all het up and schmoopy over it, but it is a great work of mythos building, doing a fantastic job of transitioning from Frank Miller's (and Mazzuchelli's) gritty Batman Year One to the freakshow Gotham we know and love. Harvey Dent's story was the perfect pivot for that.

The reason Batman Year One is so essential to the current bat mythos and has been so influential has less to do with Batman himself than Gotham. Miller gave Batman a reason to exist that hadn't been there since the thirties. In short, he made Gotham deeply corrupt so that Batman was something other than a vigilante. He was essential. This is such an obvious and regular part of the mythos now, it's difficult to recapture how radical this was at the time.

I also mulled over Batfam titles. Marvel's key breakthrough in the sixties was (I think) Spider-Man, where they fully embraced the notion of teen angst as Nobody Really Understands Me (no really, because I'm superpowered and special and different from the rest). This was such a powerful myth that Joss and the WB recycled it whole.

X-Men's huge popularity in the 80s and after was essentially the same myth updated.

But reading The Long Halloween, it was clear that Gotham's players have a different core myth. Which is (obviously): We're all deeply damaged and fucked up. It's there in all the villains being grotesque physical manifestations of various mental breakdowns. It's clearly there in Batman, Nightwing, Oracle, Huntress and the various Robins. Actually it's a bit more like We're All Deeply Fucked Up (but we're still fighting). Anyway, it's a very appealing myth in a different way from the Marvelverse.

X-Men's huge popularity in the 80s and after was essentially the same myth updated.

I think it was more than updated. Translating from an individual to a community genetically marked provided a playground for more political parallels. Which is where I lose the similarities.

"all het up and schmoopy", Hec? Can you give me a good reason not to be insulted?

"all het up and schmoopy", Hec? Can you give me a good reason not to be insulted?

Uh, because I didn't mean it in any insulting way? I just mean I can see why it might not have had the same emotional pull as some of the other batman arcs. "Het up and schmoopy" wasn't intended to demean anybody's emotional involvement, just short hand for affecting. My appreciation of The Long Halloween was a bit more distant and cerebral, less involved than other stories which have affected me more. More appreciating the craft of building a narrative bridge from Batman Year One to the current Bat mythos than swept up in the story.

God, I must have sucker tattooed on my forehead.

Anyone read the manga "Kill Me Kiss Me"? Is it any good?