FRED Entertainment

BATMAN AND BOOMERS

After the Sci-Fi Channel announced it was canceling Dark Shadows (and in the middle of a story arc!), I turned for what has become my weekday serial drama fix to Bravo’s reruns of The West Wing. (True, the Sci-Fi Channel had been running Dark Shadows for most of the last ten years, and arguably it was time for a change. But I still suspect it will regret its decision if the WB Network picks up the projected pilot for a new Dark Shadows series, executive produced by Shadows creator Dan Curtis and, of all people, John Wells of The West Wing. It’s true: everything connects.) The West Wing strikes me as having particular appeal for Boomers who grew up in the 1960s: it presents what is in effect a Kennedy Administration transplanted into and updated for the early 21st century. The series is driven by a 1960s liberal view of government as a positive force for helping to solve the nation’s social and economic problems.

So how would I, a West Wing aficionado, react to a story in which Batman is a self-styled terrorist and traitor leading an attack on the United States government?

This is the premise of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, also known as DK2, originally published by DC as a miniseries in 2001 and 2002; the paperback collected edition was published last month. DK2 is the sequel to Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking works in the superhero genre in the 1980s. What might the sequel have to say about the direction that comics will take in this new century?

FIRST KNIGHT

The original Dark Knight had a powerful influence on treatments of Batman that followed in the comics, movies and television, and, indeed, on mainstream American comics in general. However, many of Miller’s imitators seem not to have wholly understood Dark Knight or his intentions. Dark Knight thus helped spawn the “grim and gritty” school of comics, picturing gloomy, violent, flawed heroes in a bleak, depressing world.

In fact, from the 1960s onward, the superhero genre has repeatedly been revitalized (as the average readership grows older) by taking a more serious, realistic, and darker approach. The obvious example is Stan Lee’s Marvel revolution of the 1960s, but it has also happened several times with Batman. Editor Julius Schwartz’s “New Look” Batman circa 1964 was more realistic in look and writing than the cartoonier Batman stories of the early 1960s; at the end of the decade, in a reaction against the “camp” TV Batman, Schwartz went further, returning Batman to an updated version of his original dark avenger persona of the 1930s. Each step also entailed making the world around Batman seem more contemporary.

Miller’s original Dark Knight upped the ante to a startling degree: Batman became considerably more massively muscular, and more driven and severe in personality. The criminals in Gotham City were no longer the traditional thugs of previous decades, but violent street gangs that evoked the rampant urban crime of the 1970s and 1980s. Instead using newspaper reporters (who even play a major role in the 1989 “Batman” movie, Miller depicted a Gotham in the age of electronic media, with continual commentary on events via talking heads on TV screens. In the early 1940s Commissioner Gordon publicly deputized Batman, and ever since Batman had been portrayed as working openly with the police. Miller took Batman’s vigilante status more seriously and showed a post-Gordon police administration hunting him down.

The Dark Knight Returns was thought to be set in the future, since it portrayed a fifty-something Batman. There were those who believed that the original Dark Knight was part of DC’s main continuity and that it represented Batman’s destined future. That never made sense: Miller’s vision of Gotham City and the United States in Dark Knight was clearly his take on 1980s America: he even depicted Ronald Reagan as President.

I found it more helpful to think of The Dark Knight Returns as being about a Batman who had aged in real time since the point at which Miller and other Boomers had started reading about him in the 1960s. That suggests what I regard as a subtext of The Dark Knight Returns. How does a mature, adult creator of superhero comics, who read them as a child, make them relevant to himself and to other older readers today?

So it is that in The Dark Knight Returns, Batman himself had grown older. In his interview for the notoriously little seen documentary on which I worked, Sex, Lies and Superheroes, Miller explained that he felt obliged to make Batman older because he saw him as a “father figure.” Hence, Batman had to be older than Miller himself, and than readers who are Miller’s contemporaries.

At the start of The Dark Knight Returns, Bruce Wayne had retired from his role of Batman many years before, apparently after the second Robin, Jason Todd, died in action. As a result Wayne had sunk into an empty existence, with hints of alcoholism and a death wish (through his dangerous hobby of auto racing). The fiftyish Wayne had gone beyond midlife crisis into a form of clinical depression. Wayne could be interpreted as being a hollow shell: Batman was his true self. He comes to realize this, when he is effectively reborn as Batman. Through his memories, Wayne relives the traumatic experience that spurred him to become Batman: the death of his parents. Then the giant bat from his origin story, which originally inspired him to take the identity of a bat himself, reappears. Miller treats this bat as an omen of destiny, a herald out of Joseph Campbell, pointing the way to the quest that Wayne had been denying himself.

Resuming his Batman identity, he then has to reestablish himself in this new, darker and more contemporary Gotham. Through Batman’s success, Miller demonstrates how Batman remains an effective character in this more “adult” vision of the world. Times have changed, and childhood fantasies must become more sophisticated to satisfy older readers, yet Batman remains relevant.

To cope with enemies more savage and dangerous than the bank robbers of yore, Batman himself becomes more ruthless. But Miller does not turn him into a character like the Punisher or even Wolverine. A major dramatic point in the first Dark Knight series comes when Batman refuses to kill the Joker: there was a line he would not cross. And so Batman retains his importance as a moral exemplar.

MIller also revamps the concept of Robin, casting a young girl, Carrie Kelly, in the role. In devising the slang in which Carrie and the gang members speak, Miller underlines the fact that they represent a younger generation than Batman’s, not simply in terms of years but in their cultural differences. Right from the introduction of the first Robin, Dick Grayson, in 1940, Batman has been presented as a mentor and teacher, and Miller clearly sees this as important. Batman is, as he said, a “father figure,” and in Dark Knight Returns he became a mentor to Carrie and even to the gang youths he defeated, teaching them to carry on his mission. (Of course, Batman also “teaches” his view of morality to his readers.)

It has been said that between the third and fourth issues of The Dark Knight Returns, Miller read the initial issues of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and that had a considerable effect on his own series. Miller had already shown that Batman was considered an outlaw by the Gotham City government. Moreover, Miller was already introducing elements of satire through his media parodies in the first three issues and bits like his mockery of what he regarded as the ineffectual liberalism of Carrie’s parents. With issue four Miller’s stage expands from Gotham City to the nation as a whole, and Batman finds himself hunted by the federal government. Its champion is Superman, presented by Miller as a smug sell-out, a blindly loyal defender of the status quo. In the fourth issue Miller’s flair for political satire fully emerges; it would reemerge in later works like Elektra: Assassin and the Martha Washington series.

Having read Watchmen, Miller introduces other superheroes into Dark Knight, including the liberal Green Arrow, who aligns himself with Batman against the government that is trying to stop him. Whereas in issue one it seemed that Batman had retired entirely for personal reasons, now it appeared as if the government, as in Watchmen, had outlawed all superheroes (these metaphors for individual freedom), except those, like Superman, who were willing to work hand in glove with the feds.

Amazingly, Batman finds a way to best Superman in combat. But ultimately the opposition to Batman was too great, and Batman faked his own death. But he actually stages his own figurative death and resurrection. After Wayne’s funeral, Miller shows us that Batman lives on, deep underground in the Batcave (as if in the unconscious mind), teaching Carrie and the ex-gang members, the new generation who will succeed him.

In other words, the series ends on a very positive note: Batman put up a tremendous fight against overwhelming odds, besting even Superman, beat the system by escaping it, even survived apparent death, and founded a new movement that would perpetuate his vision into the future.

Subsequently, Miller revamped canonical Batman continuity with his Batman: Year One story line, illustrated by David Mazzucchelli. In this saga of the first year of Batman’s costumed career, Miller returned to a political interpretation, showing Batman opposing the corrupt government officials who controlled Gotham. It was Miller who established that on the night that Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered, they had taken Bruce to see The Mark of Zorro. In real life, the silent movie version was an influence on the creation of Batman, and Zorro’s main opponent was an government that oppressed the citizenry. Miller was reminding us that Batman was a latter-day version of Zorro.

In both the original Dark Knight and Batman: Year One, there is an important secondary lead character: James Gordon, who seems to represent Miller’s ideal of the good “ordinary” man, who does not operate on the mythic heights of Batman, but demonstrates his own heroism by maintaining his integrity in a fallen world. (Yes, Catholicism is a subtext in Miller’s work, too, and is explicit in his Daredevil stories.)

In the 1980s Gary Groth of The Comics Journal accused the original Dark Knight series of being fascistic. The Nazi brand of fascist philosophy found roots in Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch, the dark side of the superman concept.

I thought Groth’s charge of fascism was an overstatement, though I could see what he was getting at. In the original Dark Knight Batman was depicted as a superior individual who could be trusted to carry out his war on crime responsibly, and yet the Gotham City police and government could not allow such a potentially dangerous man to take the law into his own hands. Miller seemed aware of the moral ambiguities of Batman’s role with regard to society. Therefore, the series’ ending seemed right: Batman accomplished his goals, but at the price of the end of his career of vigilantism. However necessary his work, he could not be permitted to remain part of the society he had helped save from crime. It’s like John Wayne’s character at the end of John Ford’s The Searchers: he accomplished an important task for the community, but remains outside it.

But is Groth’s accusation more relevant to DK2? Wait and see.

STRIKING A MATCH

Fifteen years after the first Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Strikes Again is not what I expected, or, probably most people. Most of the audience probably expects a sequel to be very much a continuation of the original, not just in story but in look and tone and themes. But fifteen years is a long time, and creative people evolve and move on. One might come to dread too long a gap between the original and the sequel, since the creator may in the intervening time have lost touch with whatever it was that made the original work so great, without even being aware of it. (For example, consider the new Star Wars trilogy.) This suggests that after so many years, a creator needs to reimagine and reinvent a work rather than simply trying to continue it just as he had done before.

That’s the course that Miller has taken with The Dark Knight Strikes Back. In so many ways it is unlike The Dark Knight Returns, although, as we shall see, it takes various themes of the original in new directions.

For one thing, there’s the look of the new series. The heroes and various other important characters are drawn in a comparatively realistic style reminiscent of the earlier Dark Knight. Heroes when bruised and battered, though, intentionally turn grotesque, going further than even some of the distorted figures from the original.

The new series is much more broadly satiric than the original, and Miller does an assortment of caricatures of real life media and political figures, many of whom are listed above. They don’t match the style in which characters like Batman and Carrie are drawn, but they are admirably amusing on their own terms.

As the series progresses, there are more and more peripheral characters, usually turning up as interviewees or talking heads on TV screens, drawn in an intentionally crude, underground cartoony style that simply does not work for me.

Whereas the city was a continual, major presence, visually and thematically, in The Dark Knight Returns, it is visually absent for much of DK2. Backgrounds are often missing or minimal. It’s as if the surroundings were abstracted. But Gotham City, or the contemporary cities it represents, is not a subject of DK2. As with Book 4 of the original, the stage is the nation, or even the world. There are indeed memorable shots in DK2 of Superman in space, with the planet Earth behind him. More importantly, the visual focus of DK2 is on the characters, not their environment. As we shall see later, there is a major exception to this rule.

Also, the original Dark Knight looked very cinematic, with pages usually broken into multiple panels of the same size, like a sequence of frames in a film; the dialogue, as divided among these panels, read very much like a tightly edited screenplay, with all unnecessary verbiage cut out. The look of DK2 is much less rigidly structured, and much more loose, perhaps contributing to the sense that anything can happen in this story.

Miller seems much more attentive here to creating memorable, even iconic single images. There are numerous shots, each often taking up an entire page or a double-page spread, that show the pairing of Miller as illustrator and Lynn Varley as colorist at heights far beyond any of their work in the first Dark Knight. There’s the montage of full page images of Superman and Wonder Woman’s lovemaking in Book 2. There’s Book 3’s image of the new Supergirl floating ethereally above a begrimed, mournful Superman, who stands amid ruins, that was in the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art show that I reviewed months ago. There’s the amazing light show that Green Lantern and Varley stage above Earth in Book 3, and the extraordinary image of Wonder Woman, astride the mythological winged horse Pegasus, wielding a thunderbolt like Zeus.

PERSONAL TIME

Like the original, which imagined Batman’s future and yet was set in the present (then the 1980s), The Dark Knight Strikes Again plays with time. It declares itself to be set three years after the end of the first Dark Knight series. But it clearly takes place not at the end of the 1980s but in the early 21st century. Miller caricatures various contemporary personages from the news media: Chris Matthews, George Stephanopoulos, George Will, Cokie Roberts, Margaret Carlson, Don Imus, Robert Novak (I think). Donald Rumsfeld is pictured as Secretary of Defense and a caricatured John Ashcroft as Attorney General. Miller’s President Rick Rickard looks something like George W. Bush. There are references to the importance of the Internet, which played no role in the supposedly futuristic original Dark Knight.

Miller plays with time in another way that should be becoming familiar to this column’s readers. Like some other major comics creators, he has devised his own variation on continuity in which the superheroes of the Silver Age are still active. Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, is still alive. So is the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan. Like Alex Ross and Paul Dini in their “JLA” books, Miller has Captain Marvel and Plastic Man work alongside the 1960s heroes. Like Ross and Dini too, Miller uses the bearded, politicized version of Green Arrow as Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams reworked the character at the time of transition from the Silver Age to whatever we may call the period that followed. (O’Neil and Adams made Green Arrow into a 1960s liberal activist; in DK2 Miller pushes Green Arrow to a leftist extreme, making him a Communist. Well, Green Arrow is supposed to be a modern-day Robin Hood, so that arguably would make him interested in the redistribution of wealth.) Surprisingly, Miller even uses the Silver Age version of Kandor, the shrunken city within a bottle, which in the 1960s was populated by Kryptonians. (So here is another example of a major comics creator who finds use for a discarded element of the pre-Crisis Superman mythos.)

Miller also uses the Question, whom Steve Ditko created for Charlton comics. Ditko’s treatment of the Question was founded in his enthusiasm for Ayn Rand’s brand of conservative political philosophy. When DC acquired the Charlton heroes in the 1980s, the Question was recast as a liberal; I recall one “Question” letter column in which the editor argues that by that point DC had done more “Question” stories than Ditko, so their interpretation was by now correct. This seems a prime case of a character being radically altered from his creator’s intentions. Commendably, Miller returns the Question to his philosophical roots. Actually, Miller takes him further than Ditko did. The Question was the basis for the more fanatical Rorschach in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a book known to have influenced Miller, and Rorschach, in his moral views and manner of speaking, seems to have inspired Miller’s Question.

A NEW AGE?

In this column I’ve already examined contemporary takes on Marvel and DC’s Silver Age characters by Alex Ross and Paul Dini (their JLA tabloids), John Byrne (Generations 2), and Neil Gaiman (1602), and there will be more to come: I intend to deal with Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier, which depicts the Silver Age DC heroes in the 1950s, and perhaps more of Alan Moore’s ABC line. I hereby dub this creative movement the Neo-Silver Age school. These are creators who are reviving Silver Age versions of superheroes, or in the case of writers like Moore and Kurt Busiek, creating new heroes in the style of earlier decades. The “Neo-Silver” school attempts to recapture the positive, genuinely heroic, iconic aspect of the 1960s characters while making them relevant to contemporary readers.

Look at the following excerpt from the interview with Alex Ross that ran in the Feb. 5-11, 2004 issue of The Onion‘s “A-V Section.”

ONION: Looking at your work, Bruce Timm’s animated series, Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics line, and, to a certain extent, Grant Morrison’s turn on JLA, there seem to have been efforts to return to a Silver Age approach. Even Superman’s dog Krypto is back.

ALEX ROSS:… We grew up with this stuff thinking of it a certain way, and we’re rejecting what was kind of knocked around on us in the last few years. Basically, what still is going on. . . especially at DC Comics, is a rejection of everything they did in the 1990s to compete with the then-hip-and-happening changes coming from . . .what Marvel and then Image did. We’re sort of in a repairing stage. Those of us who are kind of these Silver Age purists who think you don’t need to fix what isn’t broken, we’re getting our way because more of us are in control at the moment.

There are other writers who try to reinvent the classic superheroes for new audiences by turning them into deeply flawed antiheroes. But this is not what the “Neo-Silver” school intends to do. In a December 2002 interview for Comic Book Resources, Darwyn Cooke criticizes the reworking of the Avengers in Marvel’s The Ultimates series. “The problem I have is the way they’re taking iconic characters and destroying parts of what they are. . . What is it about us as people that want to bring these icons down to this level?. . .Is it because we can’t even believe in the notion of people better than us who aren’t so weak?. . . I think that’s a horrible way to think.” He wonders aloud, “if maybe everybody needs a blazing story with some decent people wielding the power and if maybe that won’t be seen as refreshing after all this time.”

But Neo-Silver creators may still differ sharply on just how to adapt that positive spirit to contemporary times, and Miller’s method hardly constitutes a return to childhood innocence. “Just like old times, hm?” the Atom asks Batman in issue one. Batman replies, “No, Not like old times. It’s a whole new ballgame.”

BOOK ONE

Although the first words of issue one of DK2 are Batman’s, he himself does not arrive onstage until its final pages. The whole first issue builds to his arrival; Miller knows how to give his lead actor a grand entrance.

My overall reaction when I first read this first issue is that Miller is a master storyteller in a sense that is widely absent in today’s comics. People act as if Marvel’s great revolution in the 1960s was almost wholly in its more complex characterizations, its greater sense of realism, and especially the heroes’ flaws and the unhappier aspects of their lives. But Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and company were also master entertainers, who could seize the audience’s attention and, in this static medium, frozen in panels on paper, take them on a roller coaster ride of thrills and excitement. They knew how to stage stories and action sequences entertainingly, and so does Miller. Grim and gritty, hah! After reading the first issue, I wondered why other comics writers and artists can’t seem to create as much sheer fun as I had in reading this.

The initial pages set up the basic premise. president Rick Rickard, who looks and speaks something like George W. Bush, addresses the nation over one of Miller’s ubiquitous video screens, proclaiming that the United States has become a virtual utopia. Rickard places especial emphasis on the country’s prosperity. Obviously, Miller started this project before the boom went bust, but seems not to have been taken in by those who glorified it as the start of a new and better age.

A middle-aged Jimmy Olsen, on his own video screen, meanwhile accuses Rickard of “repealing the Bill of Rights” and turning the country into “a police state,” which is way more than one could expect could ever happen in the real United States. Eventually Rickard proves to be only a CGI image, like Max Headroom, I suppose. Even considering the large degree of suspension of disbelief required of readers of DC Universe titles, this story device in itself signals that this story is not meant to be taken realistically. As we watch this year’s primaries on television, it should be clear that no one could become President without coming in personal contact with many thousands of citizens. To a far larger extent than the original Dark Knight, this new series is a satire. Whereas, say, Ross and Dini take pains to place their superheroes in a realistic world, Miller takes the opposite tack: since superheroes are fantasy figures, he feels free to use unrealistic exaggerations of political reality to make his satiric points. One of my favorite lines in the new series comes when a blindly loyal citizen asks, “Who cares if the President doesn’t exist? He’s a great American!”

Sometimes, though, Miller’s efforts at satire seem more heavyhanded than witty: he refers to “National Security Enforcement director Bill Prick.” That’s a little too obvious for my taste, though in the same tradition as the name that Steve Gerber gave a corrupt businessman in his 1970s Man-Thing stories, F.A. Schist.

Jimmy asks if people just think of superheroes as “costumed clowns” and declares that they were actually “men and women. . .with unbridled courage ““ who battled tyranny and defeated it at every turn! What happened to them? Where are they? Where are our heroes?”

So, like the start of the original Dark Knight, or, for that matter, Watchmen, this is a world that no longer has (active) superheroes and needs them. Beyond the literal level of the plot, through Jimmy, the now middle-aged superhero fan, Miller is again raising the question of how one makes the superhero myth relevant for older audiences. Through Jimmy’s reference to “costumed clowns,” perhaps Miller is pointing to our culture’s widespread dismissal of the superhero genre as juvenile trash. Later in the issue a woman named Attorney General Snark (before Miller replaces her in Book 3 with the real life John Ashcroft) says, “There’s been quite enough talk about these so-called superheroes. Isn’t it time we all grew up?”

But Jimmy and Miller are insisting that the courage and moral passion that the superheroes represent is something that society needs. One can also read Jimmy’s speech as an evocation of the more positive, hopeful comics of Miller’s youth, the ones that portrayed the superheroes as such positive forces, and asking whatever happened to them. Terry Gilliam, who once intended to direct a movie version of Watchmen, described the retired superheroes of that series as symbolic of 1960s political activists ““ of the same decade as the Silver Age ““ who regain their fervor for bringing about change. In Olsen’s evocation evoking the lost superheroes, Miller also seems to be asking for a revival of the spirit to stand against political wrongdoing.

This time Miller characterizes the news media as show biz, often of a sleazy kind. It’s not all exaggeration, either: Miller’s News in the Nude is surely based on the actual Naked News from Canada, available on the Internet or cable television. The luridly sexual commercial for “Uforia Investments” on page 3 seems another satiric jab at the mindset during the late ’90s boom. Miller emphasizes tawdry sexuality on television so much that it begins to seem puritanical. But his attitude seems to be more complex by the time he gets to the Superchix in Book 2.

Miller shifts to a handsomely illustrated sequence that turns out to be portraying the Atom as a sort of naked, primal warrior battling a monster in a watery realm. It turns out that he has been deprived of the costume that enables him to change size and was trapped, in shrunken firm, in a petri dish. But this also seems to be Miller’s tribute to Gil Kane’s Sword of the Atom series, which recast the Atom as a swordsman hero in a miniature world.

The Atom is rescued by Miller’s new Robin, Carrie Kelly, who has changed her identity to Catgirl, in a nod to Catwoman but also a declaration that, at 16, she has outgrown the identity of an apprentice like Robin. There follows one of Miller’s entertaining action sequences, as Carrie and the Atom try to escape the bad guys’ headquarters. Seeing Carrie reminds me that Miller was a pioneer of the now familiar figure of the woman ““ even the young girl ““ as action hero. Perhaps Carrie’s Robin in the 1980s was another influence on comics aficionado Joss Whedon’s creation of Buffy. (Carrie says her full name is “Caroline Keene Kelly.” Is this a joke on “Carolyn Keene,” the pen name of the “Nancy Drew” authors, as an ironic indication of how much teenage heroines in pop culture have changed?)

DC’s 1960s The Atom series, edited by Julius Schwartz, written by Gardner Fox, and drawn by Gil Kane, continually came up with memorable, iconic visual images, featured on covers, that took inspiration from the Atom’s tiny size: for example, the Atom trapped in a lightbulb, or stuck to a spinning tire. Miller is just as inventive, and with a sense of humor. The Atom, who could shrink down and ride electrical impulses through telephone lines in the 1960s, in this series can do the same trick with wireless cellphones and over the Internet. Later the Atom succeeds in helping defeat Superman by shrinking enough to enter his inner ear and play havoc with his sense of balance. The Atom even hides in Carrie’s mouth and accidentally gets swallowed!

After President Rickard is exposed as a CGI image, Miller reveals who is really the power behind the throne: Lex Luthor. Together with Superman’s other classic archenemy, the alien artificial intelligence Brainiac, he controls the United States government, and by extension, it seems, the world.

Now this provides an interesting parallel to the official DC continuity, in which Luthor, despite his public record of nefariousness, somehow got elected President of the United States, and the superheroes just stand by. (In real life, of course, even lying about having “sexual relations with that woman” can nearly get one disqualified from the Presidency.) Did Miller develop this idea independently, or is this his criticism of current Superman continuity?

Miller’s take on Luthor is very different from the other familiar versions. Usually Luthor has not been portrayed as seeking to rule the world. Traditionally he has been portrayed as a scientific genius, a man who is cerebral and intellectual by nature. As revamped by John Byrne and Marv Wolfman, Luthor became a corporate colossus, masking his criminality behind a facade of social respectability. (Actually, in this they seem to have been following Miller’s lead in his revamp of the Kingpin for Daredevil, the forebear of all the corporate villains in comics who followed.) Much as he wants to eliminate Superman, the comics versions of Luthor are not into committing mass murder. As we shall see, Miller’s Luthor is willing to massacre millions, even billions of people to achieve his ends. (Can it be that Miller is drawing on the otherwise ludicrous movie version of Luthor, who was willing to destroy California to increase the value of his real estate holdings?)

Though Miller calls DK2‘s Luthor a genius, he does not seem particularly brilliant. He actually comes off as a low-rent version of the Kingpin, fat, grotesque, speaking in vulgar threats, physically beating up a captive Batman in Book 3. He seems apelike both in stance and manner. There is no complexity to the personality of this version of Luthor. Like the inhuman machine Brainiac, he is pure evil; he is more like a symbol of political oppression than a multidimensional character.

The Question, when he appears, reiterates Miller’s theme about the lulling effect of prosperity: “The people are so intoxicated by luxury that they have forgotten everything that makes us more than house pets,” including “freedom.” The puritanical streak turns up in the sexual imagery that the Question uses: “Evil has seduced mankind. And mankind has shown all the chastity of a three-dollar whore.” The Question, though, will not compromise his own ideals: “Yet I will not yield. I will not bend. I will not accept the corrupt new way of things.” He intends to “document” all the wrongdoing he opposes, calling it “My challenge to any free mind that may find it.” Hey, that’d be like writing The Dark Knight Strikes Again, wouldn’t it?

The Question also touches on another of Miller’s themes when he says, “The mind of man must be reclaimed ““ if not by this generation, or by the next, then some day.” With the aging of the Boomer generation of comics creators who were originally inspired by the comics of the 1960s, the question (so to speak) arises as to how they can make the superhero genre, so long considered to be for children, relevant as a form of personal expression by the middle-aged. (Keep in mind that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were themselves middle-aged when they revolutionized the genre in the 1960s. It’s a question that one sees rock musicians facing as well as they grow older.) One method seems to be the theme of one generation mentoring the next, showing them the way. In DK2 Batman is doing just this, with Carrie, with the former gang members she calls the “Batboys.” who soon make their entrance in DK2, and in the next issue, other members of a new generation who have embraced the trappings of superheroes as a “fad.”

Miller’s version of the Question, like Rorschach, comes off as a fanatic in love with the sound of his own preachments, and his grasp of reality may not be entirely firm: he is soon raving that “computers can’t be trusted.” But he also makes points that Miller appears to approve of. In fact., when Batman’s voice reenters the first issue (only a page after the Question’s scene), he reiterates the Question’s attitude about moral commitment. “No more compromises,” Batman states. “No more deals. . .Not one more lie. Damn the consequences. The war begins.” Perhaps Miller’s Batman has become something of a Ditko/Rand-style hero himself.

In the course of what a newsman terms Catgirl and the Batboys’ “terrorist attack” on a power complex, one of the boys, Spike, “crosses the line,” in Batman’s words, and kills a guard. Later, Carrie criticizes Spike for doing so, and he protests that “they were the enemy.” She counters, “They were the enemy’s slaves. We don’t kill slaves.” But the attentive reader will note that Carrie is speaking on Batman’s behalf, and Batman is not ruling out killing in all cases, as will become clearer in later issues. This is a big change: Greg Rucka in “Batman: The Ten Cent Adventure,” reviewed in an earlier column, emphasizes the traditional interpretation of Batman as refusing to kill.

The Atom and Catgirl, after witnessing some astonishing Varley color effects (like the gigantic fingerprint-like pattern on page 44 and especially the explosion on page 46), find Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, who has literally been enslaved by Luthor’s government, forced to run in a kind of wheel “like somebody’s pet hamster” to generate electricity. (Like Luthor’s other captive, the Atom, Allen was kept naked. Miller is using the superhero costume as a symbol of power, identity, and personal freedom.)

Interestingly, Carrie presents Barry with a new, black version of his costume, saying the old design “was really. . .old” The Flash responds, “Kids, these days. Can’t tell the difference between just plain old and classic.” Only three pages later one of Miller’s sleazy female newscasters announces the return of the Silver Age Flash: “If you don’t know who this hunk is ““ ask your Dad!” And Miller then repeats the Flash’s line about “old and classic.” It looks to me that once again Miller is dealing in a neo-Silver subtext, telling young readers that this isn’t an “old” (and by implication, dated) version of the Flash but a “classic” one, who still has worth and vitality today.

Miller reminds us in the Flash scene of Barry’s marriage to his Silver Age leading lady, Iris West. In last week’s column I noted the emphasis that Ross and Dini placed on Barry and Iris’s marriage. Perhaps this is another sign of the Neo-Silver Age: older writers and artists praise marriage and the family, in contrast to the traditional superhero’s single life. (And it was Lee and Kirby who pioneered the concept of marriage and the family in superhero comics through the wedding of Reed and Sue Richards and the birth of their son.)

The scene shifts to Superman, who is not the smug, clueless, self-satisfied government flunkie that he was in the first “Dark Knight.” This time round Miller treats him both more harshly and more sympathetically. In his initial scene in DK2 Superman is infuriated by Batman’s war on the government. Superman too addresses the theme of moral commitment, but he takes the opposite position from Batman and the Question. “Never an inch of compromise for Bruce Wayne,” Superman fumes. Superman sees the world not divided into moral absolutes of black and white, but into grays (which is considered a more mature approach, though not in this series). “We who live in the world of men have to consider the greater good ““ and come to terms with the way things are.” Miller has Superman repeat that last phrase, separating it into individual words: “The. Way. Things. Are.”

Miller pegs this as Superman’s excuse for not rebelling against the system. I can see his point: I’ve had conversations about negative aspects of the comics industry at present with friends who say, rather bleakly, that one just has to resign oneself to The Way Things Are.

Superman and Batman’s contrasting points of view on this issue are one aspect of a larger issue that Miller raises in the later issues of DK2, that of determinism versus free will. Can individuals alter “the way things are” or are they helpless to defy what seems to be the workings of fate?

Remember Superman’s phrase, “We who live in the world of men.” As we shall see in Book 3, Miller does not regard this as Superman’s proper place.

Next Miller introduces us to Green Lantern impostor Wilfredo Mendoza and praises the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, who has “vanished.” Can this be a comment on DC’s replacement of Hal with current GL Kyle Rayner?

Then former Police Commissioner James Gordon, a major figure in the first “Dark Knight,” makes his only appearance in the new one: it is no more than a cameo, but a powerful one. Furious at the state of the country, Gordon defiantly takes pleasure in the superheroes’ return. Yet another nude newscaster tells us that Gordion is the author of “Triumph of the Pygmies: Why We Killed Bruce Wayne.” Wayne, as noted, feigned his own death at the end of the first Dark Knight: the first issue of DK2 depicts his figurative resurrection. Study the title of Gordon’s book carefully: he is proclaiming that Batman is a far superior man to the rest of us, “we,” “the pygmies.” This theme, with regard to Batman and Superman, too, will also continue through the rest of the series, with some disturbing implications.

Superman meets with Wonder Woman, who hasn’t aged, and Captain Marvel, who has, aboard the Justice League’s satellite. With his tufts of white hair, Captain Marvel now looks amusingly reminiscent of another character from his mythos, Uncle Marvel.

As Miller turns his “camera” on Superman from back to front over three panels, he depicts the Man of Steel as utterly sunken in depression. In other words, Superman in Book 1 of DK2 finds himself in a similar mental state as did Bruce Wayne at the beginning of the original “Dark Knight.” (Or, for that matter, Matt Murdock midway through Miller’s “Daredevil: Born Again” story line.)

Miller gives Superman an understandable reason for supporting a morally corrupt government: Luthor and Brainiac are holding the population of Kandor, all ten million, as hostages. Similarly, they are keeping Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel in check by threatening to kill people they care about. The image of Luthor’s face hovering outside the satellite, spying on the heroes, evokes Orwell’s all-seeing Big Brother.

Showman that he is, Miller succeeds in topping the battle between Batman and Superman in the first Dark Knight with the colossal combat between the two heroes here. Batman first softens up his opponent with attacks by other heroes, a fake tyrannosaur (presumably the one from the Batcave trophy area), and even a robot that looks and talks like the 1960s version of Bizarro (yet another Silver Age reference). Then, at last, in the last three pages of the first issue, Batman makes his grand entrance to deliver the knockout punches: the final page shows Batman standing triumphant, his “resurrection” complete.

As subsequent issues will show, Batman’s beating of Superman is actually the first step in knocking some sense into him (from Batman’s point of view, anyway), much like Miller’s character Stick thrashing his student Matt Murdock. Those readers who came to DK2 expecting to see an exploration of Batman’s psychology are looking in the wrong place.

In The Dark Knight Strikes Again, there is no real character evolution for Batman: he is steadfast from start to finish in knowing and pursuing what he wants. The major character arc here is that of Superman. This series may be named after Batman, but as the next two issues will show, this may actually be more Superman’s story than his own.

As so often happens, I’ve got much more to say about a topic than will fit into a single installment of this column. But you’ll have to wait two weeks for the rest of our Dark Knight discussion. From time to time I will be acting as a reporter for IGN FilmForce on events relating to pop culture. So next week you’ll be seeing my report on Toy Fair, and then I will strike again at The Dark Knight Strikes Again the week after that.

–Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

Though this may at first seem to have nothing to do with comics, I ask you for a moment to consider the plight of the classical music critic of The New Yorker. He surely must feel he has reached the pinnacle of his profession. Yet if he conducts a Google search on his name, he will surely wonder just how famous he is. You seem, this New Yorker critic is named Alex Ross, and a Web search on his name will turn up pages and pages devoted to this other guy who works in funny books. I wonder what the classical Mr. Ross feels about this. (Then there’re the Scots playwright John Byrne, Karate Kid actor Ralph Macchio, High Noon villain Frank Miller, and Steve Martin’s role in Bringing Down the House, named Peter Sanderson ““ all with their comics doppelgangers.)

The comics version of Alex Ross has grown even more celebrated of late, even getting profiled in the October 30, 2003 edition of The New York Times. Presumably the interview was arranged to promote Ross’s recent coffee table book, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross, published by Pantheon. Now, the Times‘s piece on Ross was not in the art or books section, but in the Sunday House section (“At Home with Alex Ross”). Hence, the profile was less interested in Ross’s artwork (described, perhaps condescendingly, as “earnest photorealism”) as in his house full of action figures and other collectibles and his Halloween party full of adult guests dressed as superheroes. In short, the article is about adults happily playing like kids (not that there’s anything wrong with that) rather than about comics art being taken seriously.

Still, this article is in one respect better than the piece that New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell wrote about Jack Kirby in the Aug. 27, 2003 issue of the Arts section of the paper. Mitchell praised Kirby’s work and hailed his influence on contemporary movies (and not just those directly adapting his co-creations, like Hulk and X2) in this article marking the tenth anniversary of his passing. That’s right: the Times honors Kirby ten years too late for him to have seen it. It’s commendable that in 2003 the Times ran a number of articles about important figures in comics. This is a good start, but they would be well advised to do pieces on surviving members of Kirby’s generation while they are still with us.
Alas, I didn’t receive a review copy of Mythology, but I have procured copies of Ross’s two new tabloid-sized books about the Justice League of America that were published in 2003: JLA: Secret Origins and JLA: Liberty and Justice, co-plotted by Alex Ross and Paul Dini, with painted art by Ross and scripting by Dini.

What first impresses me about these two books is that, like John Byrne, Frank Miller, and Darwyn Cooke (as will be seen in a future column) in recent projects, Ross and Dini have chosen to ignore contemporary canonical DC Universe continuity and devise their own, centering on the DC heroes of the Silver Age (roughly 1956-1970).

JLA: Liberty and Justice is set in the present, and it presents what is essentially the Justice League of America of the Silver Age. Though both were killed off long ago in DC’s current canonical continuity, Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, and Hal Jordan, the Silver Age Green Lantern, are alive and active in Ross and Dini’s JLA books. Aquaman appears in his original costume and has not lost one of his hands. (How did the recent Captain Hook version of Aquaman manage to swim with that thing?) All the other JLAers depicted in these two books were either members of the League during the Silver Age, or (like Zatanna, Adam Strange, Metamorpho, and Elongated Man) were allies of the League during that period and in some cases joined in the 1970s. The two exceptions are Captain Marvel and Plastic Man, who did not join the League in stories published before Barry Allen’s demise in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Yet both are classic characters who originated in the Golden Age of Comics of the 1940s and are still prominent today, so they fit into Dini and Ross’s vision of the Justice League. It is this set of characters whom Ross and Dini profile in their Secret Origins book.

Interviews with Ross and Dini in the back of JLA: Secret Origins proved enlightening about their intentions in devising this contemporary extension of the Silver Age. Ross explains, “Essentially, the JLA is so much an invention of the Silver Age, and the characters featured are the primary icons of that era. The Silver Age Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and all the subsequent versions of older, long-running characters like Superman, Batman, Aquaman ““ all of them come through the filter of the new Silver Age that [came about] under the editorial influence of Julius Schwartz and the creative writing of Gardner Fox. Particularly as an editor-writer combination, these two put the most thought into recrafting DC’s super heroes and ultimately creating the legends that would stand for years to come.” There are others who deserve credit, too, particularly John Broome, as principal writer of the Silver Age Flash, Green Lantern and 1960s “New Look” Batman, and Denny O’Neil, for revamping Batman and Green Arrow at the close of the Silver Age. But basically Ross is right: Schwartz’s editorship reshaped and revitalized virtually all of the classic heroes in Ross and Dini’s JLA.

Speaking of the Silver Age versions of these DC heroes, Ross says, “Well, they are the most legendary, well-known forms of those characters, the ones that have lasted the longest. For the case of, say, heroes like the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman ““ these are versions that have lasted for, like, forty years before there were any revisions made to either their looks or their identities.”

But wouldn’t the Golden Age versions of these concepts ““ those that were around in the 1940s ““ like Jay Garrick as the Flash and Alan Scott as Green Lantern ““ be preferable since they were the original versions? “To my mind,” Ross answers, “it’s a division between what the Golden Age gave us in terms of an idea, versus what was refined ten or so years later. I believe that, to their credit, guys like Julius Schwartz and Gardner Fox took these earlier designs and reworked them in a way that made them stronger.”

Then DC editor Charles Kochman asks if contemporary readers would feel that the current Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner, is the superior version. Ross agrees, and says, “Basically, this is an opportunity for Paul and myself to do the versions of the characters that we appreciate the most.” Ross was actually born right after the Silver Age ended, but he and Dini grew up reading those versions of the characters, as they continued to appear in comics before 1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. Obviously, they have also gone back and read the Silver Age comics, too. In their interviews Ross and Dini both admit that they used these versions of the characters because these are the versions they grew up with.

But is their preference for the Silver Age versions really just based on nostalgia? Ross argues that the Silver Age versions of Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman are genuinely superior as artistic creations to their Golden Age counterparts; I agree. I also wonder if Kyle Rayner and Wally West, say, as the current Green Lantern and Flash, and the series built around them, really are characters as memorable and iconic as their Silver Age predecessors. “Even though a big part of our fan base was not even alive when this version of the Justice League was around, it is still the version we feel a lot of people remember,” Dini says in his interview. “Those versions of the characters are very archetypal.”

Will younger readers have the same strong attachment to West and Rayner decades hence as older readers retain for Allen and Jordan? Ultimately, only time will tell. But still, the recent resurgence of interest in DC’s Silver Age characters by comics creators, not just by Boomers like John Byrne and Frank Miller, but by members of a younger generation like Ross and Darwyn Cooke, suggests that a shift may be in progress. In longrunning comics series, as I have observed before, important concepts and characters that are cast aside in one period will inevitably return as times and tastes change once more.

The resurgence seems to be yet more evidence that DC was wrong to kill off Silver Age versions of characters in Crisis on Infinite Earths and the subsequent period of radical revamps. Important writers and artists still want to use them and are introducing them to a new generation of readers.

SUPERHERO HISTORY PAINTING

Frank DeCaro, who wrote the Times profile of Ross, observes, “But everyone seems to agree that his real accomplishment is making superheroes more real than anyone has ever before ““ filmmakers included.” That’s true. Way back when I recall first admiring Gene Colan’s Marvel artwork because his style, closer to magazine illustration than other Marvel artists’, made not only “normal” characters like Tony Stark but the superhuman figures like Iron Man look so convincingly real; Neal Adams’ work on Batman and other series had a similar effect. But Alex Ross’s work has gone even further in capturing a photographic sense of realism.

DeCaro is also quite right to state that Ross makes superheroes look more realistic than filmmakers, who actually shoot film of real human beings, do. Now, how can that be? It is conventional wisdom that in real life people in superhero costumes look silly: just ask the makers of the X-Men movies, who contend that audiences wouldn’t accept costumes and who substituted dull black uniforms instead. Or the makers of TV’s Smallville. (But Spider-Man’s costume didn’t prevent his movie from attracting an even bigger audience.)

Part of the solution is that the wearers of the costumes must have the appropriate heroic build. (Adam West does not strike me as having been particularly physically imposing as the title character on the Batman TV show, though, come to think of it, Julie Newmar was as Catwoman.) Ross famously has live models pose for his art; I continue to be astonished that he actually knows so many people who look like that!

Another factor may be the stylization of the reality within which the superhero operates on film. Some, like Christopher Reeve’s Superman and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man, who have relatively simple costumes, look fine against normal backgrounds. But in the Tim Burton Batman movies, Batman’s costume works because the production design around him is so stylized. Another reason why Batman seems ludicrous on the ’60s TV show is that he is operating in such a mundane-looking world; the low-budget Columbia Batman movie serials are even worse in this regard.

But Ross does not deal in obviously stylized settings. His superhero characters look like real people, wearing real fabrics, within a recognizably everyday world. DeCaro states, “Mr. Ross… gives the same kind of earnest photorealism to portraits of well-known superheroes that Norman Rockwell gave the faces of doctors, letter carriers and firefighters.” Ross himself has repeatedly credited Rockwell, the most celebrated magazine illustrator of the last century, as a major influence.

Through most of the twentieth century, with the triumph of abstraction, the fine art world has tended to look down on drawing and painting that tries to recapture the exact look of reality, which has been ceded to the world of photography and film. In recent years, however, figurative art has made a comeback, and Rockwell’s work has received serious appreciation in critical and academic circles, as demonstrated by a touring retrospective that ended up at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum in 2001.

However, I think it’s a mistake simply to regard Ross as a latter-day Rockwell who paints superheroes. True, Rockwell and Ross each specialize in creating iconic images, transforming people into archetypal figures. Both artists seek to depict representations of classic American values.

But Rockwell’s perennial subject is the American everyman (and woman and child). He idealizes and celebrates small-town Americans and their lives. The people he depicts are prettified, and viewed through a glow of nostalgic affection, but they are meant to be the folks next door.

In contrast, Ross’s specialty is depicting and celebrating the superheroic. His style persuades the observer that he or she is seeing superheroes depicted as real people in a real world. But in fact his art style heightens reality, making not just the superheroes but even their ordinary settings seem grander and handsomer than they would in real life. Going through the JLA books, I am struck by how even the “normal” supporting characters and bystanders look larger than life. Perhaps in part Ross’s costumed superheroes so real because the “real,” noncostumed people in his books look so idealized. The two groups are not so far apart: the fireman on page 4 of Secret Origins looks nearly as heroic as one of the superheroes.

I can only begin to analyze the methods by which Ross heightens reality: the cover for JLA: Secret Origins demonstrates some of them.

The perfect human figures are obvious. The main figures are arranged in a wedge-like formation that projects towards the reader, with Superman, the most monumental of the figures, in the foreground. There’s also the theatrical play of light and shadow on the figures. As in a John Ford western, Ross continually uses up shots in the book and on the cover, as well: the reader looks up at the heroes, who tower above us. Ross takes the effect further by creating two tiers of heroes, one rising (flying, in fact), above the others, so we have literally two sets of heroes rising above us.

In Ross’s interview, editor Joey Cavalieri refers to the Silver Age JLAers as “the archetypes,” and I wonder if Marvel Silver Age heroes would prove equally suitable to this kind of treatment by Ross. Perhaps they wouldn’t, since the classic Marvel heroes’ human personalities tend to be more important than their mythic powers and images. Peter Parker’s personality is more important than his spider-powers.

Most of JLA: Secret Origins is comprised of two-page spreads depicting the origins of each major Justice League member. In his interview Ross says that they were inspired by the original two-page origin sequences that Siegel and Shuster and Bob Kane did for Superman and Batman circa 1938-1940. Ross notes that the images used in these sequences made them “iconic.” Explaining why each of his origin sequences is mostly monochromatic, Ross explains, “I meant to invoke a sense of how this is a bygone age. That this is the past, this is a story that’s legendary.”

In other words, this book deals in the history and mythology of superheroes. This made me see a connection, however unintentional, between Ross’s work and the “history painting” of the 18th and 19th centuries. “History painting” was the depiction of scenes from mythology or actual history, portraying noble figures with heroic builds enacting great events. In fact, during this period, the art world considered history painting to be the highest form of painting, superior to portraiture, landscapes and such. (Since history painting presented narratives, the connection with comics is clear. Moreover, as noted, history painting could also depict scenes from classical mythology. Remember the title of Ross’s coffee table book?)

One example at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is said to be its most popular painting with tourists: Emanuel Leutze’s enormous “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Probably many of you have seen this painting reproduced and can envision Washington’s noble stance: Ross speaks in his interview about his “glory shots” of superheroes, and the term could apply to Leutze’s positioning of Washington, too.

Another of the Metropolitan’s history paintings that has a considerably higher reputation among art historians is David’s “The Death of Socrates,” whose central figure not only radiates nobility but seems to have been working out more than one might expect from an elderly philosopher. But the heroically proportioned human body has been a prime subject of Western art from ancient times up to the twentieth century, when, as noted, figurative art fell from favor in the art world.

But subjects of such longstanding popularity as the portrayal of the idealized human form and the depiction of mythic events (real or fictional) must obviously have innate appeal to the human psyche. So if the art establishment suppresses these subjects, they will inevitably pop up again somewhere else, perhaps in a popular form of art that the establishment overlooks: in this case, in Alex Ross’s work.

Each of the Ross-Dini origin sequences follows the same format, and it behooves the reader to pay attention to the variations at certain points in this standard format. Each sequence is primarily monochromatic: which color does Ross choose? What do Dini and Ross choose to picture in the introductory panel, which ranges all the way across two pages. Each sequence closes with an image in full color; what do Dini and Ross decide to spotlight in this fashion?

The dominant color of the Superman sequence is what Ross calls a “very brown, earthy tone meant to invoke his very earthy origins. Despite the fact that he’s from another planet, he’s really this guy from the Midwestern United States.”

Ross also states that he tries to depict the origins in what Cavalieri calls an “inclusive” manner, so that each is true both to the original version and to any later revamped version. Hence, as Ross points out, the “exact configuration” of the vehicle taking the baby Kal-El to Earth is obscured by speed lines, so it could just as well be Joe Shuster’s 1938 rocket or John Byrne’s 1986 spacecraft. So Ross is depicting the essence of the origin tales, rather than the details of specific versions. I note too that Ross does not specify a time period through the clothing in this sequence: the overalls Clark wears in one panel could belong to the 1930s or today. In demonstrating Superman’s emerging powers, Dini and Ross adhere to the classic catchphrases: leaping tall buildings with a single bound, faster than a locomotive. Superman is not shown as flying, presumably since, in 1938, he had not yet been given that power.

The Superman origin sequence emphasizes the character’s childhood, and despite the destruction of his native world, Ross shows it as idyllic. There is the baby Kal-El smiling up at his adoptive parents; in the next panel, despite the shadows obscuring much of the boy Clark’s face, it is still clear from his body language that he is smiling. This is a happy childhood that produced the most optimistic and altruistic of heroes. Dini’s text emphasizes that Clark/Kal-El is an immigrant who has happily embraced his adoptive world.

In the panel in which Clark describes becoming a reporter, the bespectacled Kent has turned away from the viewer. Ross regularly portrays Clark Kent as hiding his face. Perhaps this is simply a recognition that, with Ross’s realistic style, the convention that Clark is unrecognizable as Superman becomes even less credible. But it also makes a good psychological point: that Superman, as Clark, retreats from the spotlight, concealing his true self from the world.

The final picture, which bursts into full color, is an iconic shot of Superman pulling open Clark’s shirt to reveal the Superman insignia beneath. This is the sequence’s only shot of Superman in costume. The implication is that the emergence of Superman is the end result of the all the events depicted from Clark’s childhood: the sacrifice of his parents, his Rockwellian upbringing and education in Midwestern American moral values, and so forth.

The very next origin sequence, Batman’s, presents a sharp contrast. The color now is not Superman’s warm reddish brown, but a dark, chilly blue, perhaps even evoking “blue” emotions. (So, this is Alex’s Blue Period?) The opening panel is a Gotham cityscape, contrasting with Clark’s open, Midwestern plains. Batman appears in silhouette, his head outlined by the moon: he is a creature of the moon and night, as opposed to Superman, who literally derives his power from the sun. The “creature” aspect is heightened by the flying bats in the sky, and the parallel Ross draws between the Batman and the gargoyle on which he kneels, both serving as guardian figures meant to frighten off intruders.

Superman did not appear in costume until the end of his sequence, but Batman in costume is in the first two panels of his. Perhaps this implies that Clark is Superman’s true self, but Batman is the reality within Bruce Wayne. As if to reinforce that point, we are never shown a clear view of the adult Bruce Wayne’s face.

Whereas the Superman sequence was a celebration of family life, the Batman sequence centers on the destruction of the idealized family. The killer of Bruce Wayne’s parents, whether it is Joe Chill (in old comics continuity), Jack Napier (in the movie) or some unknown party (since the Zero Hour continuity revision), is a Jungian shadow figure almost entirely covered by literal shadow: at one anonymous and an embodiment of dark forces. The shot of young Bruce with his parents’ corpses is a nod to artist David Mazzucchelli’s iconic image from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One.

The final panel here shows as full color image of the young, brooding Bruce Wayne kneeling, hands clasped, as if in prayer, taking his oath to war on all crime. It is our first direct look into his eyes, as they radiate the vengefulness that will drive his whole life. He stares eerily at the reader, as if wondering if the reader is a potential target, as the shadow of Batman looms above him. It is as if a kind of monster has been born within this child. The final image in color signals that within the adult Batman this vengeful, emotionally wounded child still exists.

Wonder Woman’s sequence is brown, but without the reddish tone of the Superman origin: here the brown perhaps indicates the archaic nature of Amazon history, or perhaps the clay from which she was formed. (“I created a living daughter out of the Earth itself,” Amazon queen Hippolyta says here about Wonder Woman’s variation on virgin birth.) The opening panel pictures the war between the Amazons and male warriors led by Hercules, here a silhouetted figure whose traditional lion skin makes him seem more beast than man: this establishes the background for Wonder Woman’s mission against male warfare and oppression of women. There is again an emphasis ion childhood: the literal molding of the child Diana, and the sight of the grown Diana peering around a pillar at her royal mother, like a shy girl at once awed by her parent and wishing she could equal her achievements. In the end Diana surpassed her mother, who stands downcast as Diana emerges into full color in the costume of Wonder Woman. (I like Ross’s kangaroos in this sequence, too. In fact, my favorite part of his Shazam book was his portrait of Mr. Tawky Tawny, making him look like an actual tiger.)

The Flash sequence is in red, matching the Scarlet Speedster’s costume. There’s something of the feel of a horror movie here, with scientist Barry Allen sitting in deep shadow as the lightning that will give him his powers crashes outside with godlike power. Here the concluding color image shows the Flash, in costume but unmasked, kissing his wife Iris. Though the Silver Age DC superhero series have been castigated as adolescent fantasies, Ross and Dini celebrate the Flash from a mature perspective, showing him as one of a pair of young married lovers.
No surprise here: the Green Lantern origin is in green. The top panel, the only one showing Hal Jordan in costume, depicts a large number of Green Lanterns in flight together like a flock of birds. In this sequence Dini and Ross are emphasizing not an individual Green Lantern so much as the entire Green Lantern Corps, its origin and history. The concluding color image here is that of the alien Green Lantern Abin Sur passing his ring to his successor Hal Jordan: the focus is on the continuity of the Green Lantern tradition, more than the individual.

The Aquaman sequence is in the blue-green color of the sea. Babyhood is a motif again, but notice that, while the infant Clark was shown smiling at his foster parents, the similar shot of the baby Aquaman conceals his face: this throws the emphasis on his parents, and, amusingly, the father has Popeye’s hat and corncob pipe.
This also fits into this sequence’s focus on marital as well as parental love. The shot of Aquaman’s father rescuing his mother is the stuff of romance. Another panel is devoted to the wedding of the adult Aquaman to Mera. (Unlike Superman and Martian Manhunter, Aquaman returns to his native realm.) The final color panel echoes the shot of the infant Aquaman with his parents: now it is Aquaman and Mera holding their child. With the Flash, Ross and Dini celebrated young married love; with Aquaman they celebrate the next phase, parenthood.
The Martian Manhunter’s sequence is the dull reddish color of the Martian landscape. That terrain is the subject of the first panel: desolate, devastated, “as barren as it is lonely.” In both JLA books Dini makes the point that unlike Superman, only an infant when Krypton was destroyed (or, in Byrne’s version, not yet born), J’onn J’onzz remembers the destruction of his civilization; hence, while Superman, who could easily fit into the human population, has a sunny, optimistic disposition, J’onn is lonely and gloomy. Dini here calls J’onn an “immigrant” who “found a way to assimilate,” but the panel shows him, in human guise, as faceless: he has not truly fit in. Ross cleverly depicts J’onn’s emergence on Earth, making it unclear whether his true form is humanoid (as in the original continuity) or inhuman (as in the recent revision). I am very pleased with Ross’s rendition of J’onn’s benefactor Dr. Erdel, making this 1950s cartoony caricature look credibly real. The final image shows the Manhunter soaring into space, alone, apart from Earth.
The Green Arrow sequence is green, too, naturally, and Dini’s text emphasizes that he is a modern “urban Robin Hood.” Green Arrow, like Robin Hood, is a form of the mythic “green man” archetype, the man of nature. But here only the opening image of Oliver Queen as a kind of latter-day Robinson Crusoe, learning to survive on a deserted island, has a mythic feel.
With the Hawkman origin Ross and Dini are very specifically doing the Silver Age version, and not those that preceded or followed. The final shot here makes Hawkman and Hawkgirl look eerily birdlike, thanks in part to the lighting effects. It is significant that Ross and Dini show both the Hawks in this panel: this is another celebration of love, in this case, of a couple who are partners in action as well as in private life.

The Atom’s sequence is in blue, but a lighter, warmer one than Batman’s, perhaps to emphasize how the Atom figuratively draws his powers from the night: literally from a meteor from a white dwarf star that fell at night. I’m pleased and amused by the shot of the Atom running atop molecules drawn like science class models of the 1960s.

The gray of the Captain Marvel sequence suggests the archaic ““ the ancient idols of the “Seven Deadly Enemies of Man,” Shazam’s resemblance to an Old Testament prophet, and the bleakness of orphan Billy Batson’s life in Depression-era New York. Here the color image signifies life and vitality appearing amidst age and dreariness. Both Billy and Captain Marvel are in color, putting the focus on the joyous ascension of orphaned child to powerful adult.

The only false step in these origin sequences lies in Plastic Man’s: deleting the monk from the story weakens the theme of Plas’s spiritual rebirth. It’s impressive indeed how Ross can make Plas’s cartoony stretching (especially the shot of him pulling on his face) look so real: as I said in a previous column, making Plastic Man and his world look real makes his stretching funnier. For once Plas even looks believable disguised as a table.
There follow portraits of other JLAers from the Silver Age, including one of my favorite shots of Zatanna ever. The “story” ends with a very impressive two page shot of the major League members standing imposingly together. And here one can see another of Ross’s virtues: unlike so many comics artists, he gives his heroes distinctive faces from each other, and even gives them varying heights.

In short, then, this is a magnificent showcase of comics art. Should any one wish to make a case for the mythic grandeur of the superhero concept, JLA: Secret Origins should be Exhibit One.

TAKING LIBERTIES FOR JUSTICE

While JLA: Secret Origins deals with the Justice Leaguers’ legendary pasts, Ross and Dini’s JLA: Liberty and Justice is a new story set in the present, and, intentionally or not, it raises some intriguing questions not just about the figure of the superhero but about today’s international politics.

The Pentagon asks the Justice League to stop the spread of an unusual, lethal virus, which has appeared in a wartorn region of Africa. Hoping to avoid worldwide panic, the Pentagon also wants to prevent news of the outbreak from spreading.

Inevitably in the information age, the JLA has much more success in controlling the virus than in keeping its existence quiet. Early on, the Flash wonders aloud if they have the “right to intervene,” but it is decided they must to save lives. Nonetheless, in the course of their mission, the JLA find themselves obliged to combat various foreign military forces. This inspires suspicion and mistrust of the Justice League, both in America and in other countries, as voiced in various television reports we are shown. One speaks of “the Justice League’s largely secretive response to the situation”; elsewhere on that page we are told that “the President has remained unavailable for comment.” Another talking head, noting the crisis posed by the virus, asks, “How does that mitigate Superman and the others acting without the approval of the U.N. or any African government?” Superman gloomily reflects that “Power always seems to intimidate, no matter how familiar the face or altruistic the intentions,” and that “Our biggest battle may be against public perception.”

Like 1602‘s invasion of Latveria, the story of JLA: Liberty and Justice seems to reflect the course taken by the United States after September 11, 2001; whether the parallel was consciously intended by Dini and Ross, I do not know. But the fact that the JLA are working with the Pentagon, and that the story links the JLA’s secretiveness to the American President’s, makes the connection clear. In the real world, the only remaining “superpower,” the United States, has asserted a right to intervene unilaterally in other nations to combat threats to its security, as it has in Afghanistan and Iraq. As in Liberty and Justice, America’s interventions, whether justified or not, have resulted in hostility, fear and criticism from other countries, and there are those who accuse the United States of being the real threat to the world.

In the Justice League’s case, couldn’t the American government have done anything to forestall the criticism? Couldn’t the United States at least have informed the United Nations that the Justice League was being sent to deal with this emergency? Once the news of the virus got out, couldn’t the government have explained the situation to the worldwide public, instead of retreating into secrecy?

For that matter, couldn’t the JLA themselves have been less secretive? Certainly, they had their hands full coping with the virus. But later in the book, when disorder breaks out across the country, the active Leaguers send out a call to their “associate members” to come help out. Well, couldn’t the JLA have earlier assigned an associate member to be a liaison with the news media or send explanatory messages to the U.N.? (Hey, Dini and Ross could have put old-time JLA mascot Snapper Carr into the story and had him do it!) I very much like the way that Dini and Ross have Green Lantern use his power ring to perform analyses and research and to speak its findings to him, as it did in the Silver Age: it’s as if Silver Age GL editor Julius Schwartz and writer John Broome had anticipated the portable personal computer. Well, why couldn’t Green Lantern have used the ring to send off a few messages about what the JLA was doing to the U.N. and several news sources?

Actually, if the JLA existed in reality, they probably would have to have a support staff, including a press secretary. One of the odd aspects of superhero comics is the fact that writers will give the heroes vast, impressive headquarters and provide no more than, say, an middle-aged butler like Alfred or Jarvis to do everything from maintaining the high-tech equipment to making beds and sweeping up. (Mark Gruenwald tried to treat the situation more realistically by creating the “Avengers Crew,” that team’s support staff, but later editors and writers didn’t get the point and dropped it.)

In a variation of this assumption that the heroes don’t need outside help, Liberty and Justice purports that Batman, who is not a physician or trained biologist; the Atom, who is a physicist; and the Flash, who is a forensic scientist (Yes, the Silver Age Flash verged into C.S. I. territory four decades early) are capable of concocting a cure for the mystery virus. Well, sure, the Atom’s ability to shrink to the size of the virus, and the Flash’s ability to work at superhuman speed give them advantages that normal researchers do not, but wouldn’t it seem more credible if the JLA had actually called in real medical doctors and biologists as advisors?

Dini and Ross’s treatment of the world’s attitudes towards the Justice League differ sharply from Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s take on the same subject in the recent “JLA/Avengers” mini-series. Busiek and Perez made the point that on DC’s Earth, its leading superheroes are respected, trusted and beloved, whereas on Marvel-Earth, superheroes are regarded with suspicion. Certainly this was true during the Silver Age, but Marvel’s 1960s revolution of the superhero genre influenced new generations of writers who worked on DC’s characters as well. It’s no surprise, then, that Dini and Ross show that the world can easily fall into resentment and fear of the Justice League. Still, I like the distinction that Busiek and Perez drew between the public attitudes towards superheroes in the Marvel and DC Universes, and I think it’s a good thing if the Big Two companies take such different approaches to the subject. It makes more sense, too: the JLAers have publicly performed so many good works up to and including saving the world repeatedly that one might think most people would give them the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, one can easily observe in real life how the natural tendency of most of the American public is to rally round the flag and support the President in times of crisis, to trust him and the presiding administration in times of emergency. Surely there’s be a sizable proportion of the public who would have the same faith in the JLA.

It’s not just that the JLA are just doing their work and just suffer from having their good intentions misinterpreted. How about the sequence in which Aquaman, realizing that a frightened Russian submarine captain is holding a gun, confirms the poor man’s worst fears: Aquaman summons whales to attack the sub and throws a temper tantrum, raging, “Am I making myself understood?” Well, no, considering Aquaman is speaking to them in English, despite the fact that he had earlier demonstrated his fluency in Russian.

Panic within the United States leads to crime sprees and rioting. The JLAers find themselves using force to restore order: “In the span of one day, humanity’s benevolent guardians had become its hostile wardens,” Dini writes, describing the heroes as “diving upon them like vengeful gods.”

I wish that this sequence didn’t make it seem as if virtually everyone in the country was running wild. In depicting superheroes, one should be careful to avoid conveying the idea that the powerful elite have to keep the irresponsible common people in their place.

The thematic turning point follows the traditional mythic motif of figurative death and resurrection: a despairing young woman leaps off a bridge but is rescued by the JLA’s central figure, Superman. From then on, the story takes a more positive turn: Flash and Green Lantern perform what is significantly called a “miracle” to rid Earth of the virus, and Superman, perhaps motivated by the suicide attempt, tells the other Leaguers that it “still has much to heal.”

This leads to the JLA’s appearance before the United Nations at the story’s end: Superman addresses the General Assembly to tell them it was not the JLA’s intention to “provide misinformation, or hide the truth,” and then can’t go through with “this deception”: “Superman” shapeshifts into the Martian Manhunter, who explains that Superman is busy elsewhere. (Actually, that seems to be Superman, as Clark Kent, in the audience on the next page.) So what was that all about? Even in an address to the United Nations and the world, the JLA intended to lie! Even after J’onn J’onzz admits the deception, would that inspire confidence and trust? Even people who supported the JLA’s actions would wonder why the Leaguers even considered perpetrating such a deception and what else they might have lied about. This reminds me of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Back, in which the President turns out to be merely a CGI image, manipulated by Lex Luthor, the country’s real and secret ruler.

Still, this penultimate scene in the United Nations does play a necessary part in making this entire story work. By appearing before the United Nations to explain their actions, the Justice League is acknowledging its authority and that of the nations of the world. J’onn J’onzz, speaking for the League, states that because of unusual circumstances ““ “a global threat” in which they “had very little time to act” ““ the League took “extraordinary measures” in order “to safeguard lives and property.” Though he never actually says so, J’onn J’onzz’s implication is that with the emergency over, the League no longer seeks to place itself above ordinary humanity. “Our greatest power,” he says, “comes from your belief in us, as your allies and friends.”

The key to J’onn J’onzz’s speech lies in his declaration that the JLAers, despite their powers, are not the people’s superiors but their equals, and, indeed, members of the people themselves. “Yet in our hearts we are no different from most people,” he says. “We are part of the work force that makes up society, each of us having the same goals for a happy life, free from worry. No one in our company has ever aspired to world conqueror… We cherish your trust, and hope you will always find is worthy of it.” That is an act of submission to the public will: the JLA have declared themselves to be not the public’s masters but their servants.

This is what distinguishes and redeems the American superhero from the potentially fascist concept of the Nietzchean ubermensch from which it derives: the emphasis on the superhero’s humanity and service to his or her fellow men and women. J’onn J’onzz refers to the “delicate balance” between freedom and order; there is likewise a delicate balance that must be achieved in the depiction of superheroes between the image of aggressive power and compassionate humanity.

Whether J’onn J’onzz’s speech is really as reassuring as Dini and Ross presumably intend is questionable. The JLA does not pledge never to act without legal authority again; they simply ask for the world’s trust that they will do what is right. But remember a series that Ross greatly admires, Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme, which is inspired by the Silver Age Justice League, in which a superhero team assumes control of the United States after a devastating war in order to rebuild it into a utopia. Gruenwald made the argument in the series that the road to hell is paved with the best intentions, that even the altruistic Squadron members ended up violating human liberties, and that even benevolent dictators are still dictators who must be overthrown.

In the course of telling its tale, JLA: Liberty and Justice is full of wonderful touches. Those readers who think that Barry Allen and Hal Jordan lack the personality of their successors should study Ross’s portraits of their unmasked faces: Barry is a crewcutted Midwesterner who has a look of innocence to him, while Hal looks very much the slightly roguish young leading man. Dini does a wonderful job in a page consisting of a conversation between Flash and Green Lantern: one can see the chemistry that made these two disparate personalities into friends. Wonder Woman displays an ethereal beauty (and, I repeat, Ross seems to actually know people who look like this!). Dini’s dialogue for the Martian Manhunter reminds me of what Marvel’s Silver Surfer used to be: J’onn, the alien outsider, wonders why humans cannot appreciate the beauty of their planet as much as he does. In a montage of scenes from classic Justice League stories, I am especially taken with the shot of Kanjar Ro, shadows disguising his cartoony appearance, imperiously commanding his Slave Ship of Space. Batman is not present onstage when the JLA appear before the U. N., presumably to maintain the idea that most people on DC’s Earth consider Batman to be an urban legend. (But is that Bruce Wayne smirking in the audience, the light on his face mimicking the shape of Batman’s cowl?) My favorite shot of Batman in the book has him wedged within a panel at the Pentagon, spookily spying on his fellow Leaguers from hiding. There’s the extraordinary double-page first shot of Green Lantern soaring in space against the background of a blue Earth swathed in white clouds, or the shot of Aquaman, lit by strong sunlight, standing astride a whale charging towards the readers. And there’s a nighttime depiction of Hawkgirl and Hawkman, lit from below standing atop a ledge, even more impressive than the Secret Origins shot.

And in the end JLA: Liberty and Justice reaffirms the moral idealism of DC’s Silver Age superheroes. Having ventured too far into dominating mankind rather than serving them, the JLA effectively apologize by recognizing their common humanity (even shared by the alien members) with the people they protect.

I wonder if all this new attention to the Silver Age isn’t a sign that the audience may be growing for just this sort of approach. A significant number of major comics creators are trying to make the Silver Age characters work in the more sophisticated writing styles of the present and for an older audience. (And that Spider-Man movie was pretty positive and true to the Silver Age stories on which it was based, and look how much money it made.) True, the antiheroic school of comics writing still predominates. But perhaps the pendulum is at last beginning to swing back.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson