Remind me of the meta in Kingdom Come, will you?
I just don't see the story as possible without viewing it as a commentary on superheros themselves. I guess at this stage every superhero comic has a degree of self-consciousness (which is why I think it's a mannerist era), but Kingdom Come struck me as particularly invested in being the last word on superheroes, a culmination.
In contrast, the batfamily titles of the last ten-fifteen years seem to be burrowing down into the mythos opened up by Batman: Year One. That rebooted the mythos, fixed certain elements of Batman's and Jim Gordon's characters that made a range of other stories interesting and possible.
The comparison I would make would be the development of Bebop as a an approach to jazz. Other musicians played in that new stylistic space for a good 20 years afterward without doing it in a mannered, or self-conscious way.
Am I the only one who doesn't see Batman: Year One and DKR as that big a deal? I don't think it was revolutionary as much as what the character had been evolving towards ever since Adams/O'Neal. If DC had assigned someone other than Miller to reboot the character, it would have ended up looking pretty much the same.
Am I the only one who doesn't see Batman: Year One and DKR as that big a deal? I don't think it was revolutionary as much as what the character had been evolving towards ever since Adams/O'Neal. If DC had assigned someone other than Miller to reboot the character, it would have ended up looking pretty much the same.
I don't think DKR was a big deal for the Batman mythos (though it certainly drew a ton of mainstream media), but I do think Batman: Year One was the reboot that most of the current canon is built upon.
::waits patiently for Ple, victor, amych or teppy to explain my thorough wrongitude::
I've always thought that Batman: Year One is much more about Jim Gordon than it is about Batman/Bruce.
Teppy, I agree. I was surprised by that when I finally read it.
But I love Jim Gordon, so that ended up being fine with me.
My favorite Era of Jim Gordon is No Man's Land. He kicks so much ass.
The friend I saw
Batman Begins
with hadn't read NML (which was the only place I'd seen Scarecrow before), so I let her borrow it. Jim
is
pretty awesome in it.
I do think Batman: Year One was the reboot that most of the current canon is built upon.
Batman was probably the major DC character that was least affected by the Crisis reboot. The character was pretty much the same post-crisis as he was for about 15 years pre-crisis. Year One changed some of his backstory, but even then a lot of it was retconned away later on.
I'm skipping a year's worth of posts to share this -- [link] -- It's Denis Kitchen's daughter and it's really good!
Just read WE3. Wow. That's really, really good.
