Olaf
Posts: 23390
Joined: 26/2/2007
From: 41°N 93°W
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The lack of those things in Nolan's TDKR are totally why it totally sucks. ESPECIALLY the lack of Ronald Reagan caricature.
quote:
ORIGINAL: AxlReznor
I hated that era of comics long before Nolan's take on it. Had no interest in Batman even as a child until I became one of the first in my class to see Burton's 89 film (I was like, 5 at the time, and we managed to get our hands on a pirated copy before it was released in cinemas). Now this Batman was cool. Not the fat man in a stupid costume from the TV show that my dad kept on trying to get to me to watch. To this day, the only thing about the 50's and 60's Batman that I can like is the Batmobile from the TV show. Everything else about it was awful.
I got The Black Casebook which compiles some of the Silver Age stories that Grant Morrison was drawing from for his run on Batman, and even if the stories themselves weren't awful, the writers make whoever wrote See Spot Run look like Tolstoy. (Caption: And then Batman reached out and grabbed a ledge, saving himself from the fall, Villain: Oh, no! Batman grabbed a ledge, saving himself from the fall!, Robin: Wow, Batman! You just grabbed a ledge, saving yourself from the fall!... I'm not even exaggerating... that was the quality of writing). Hell, I'd take Batman & Robin over the 50's and 60's...
Early Spider-Man and X-Men did tend to be a lot better than that, though, I agree. Never liked Fantastic Four.
Probably a fair point about the tv show, and it did have an impact on the comics (though I can honestly watch it quite happily - one of the great joys of my undergrad was finishing early enough in the day and our whole house watching repeats on ITV4 all afternoon, so that may have influenced my appreciation), but the period before that during the late 50s/early 60s is what I get the most out of. The writing can be a bit stilted, but I just treat it the same way I treat silent movies and Douglas Sirk films - the style of expression is naturally going to be a bit dated but I try to focus on the ideas and the other aesthetic concepts or whatever. (it's not for everyone, I'm more than willing to admit.) In all honesty, I absolutely hate the proliferation of sub-Miller hard-boiled first person narration that came after TDKR more than any bad Silver Age writing, and it's still going on without having the excuse of working in a relatively new medium or what have you.
it's a shame because there's really brilliant writers working in the medium today, but the general movement in the mainstream comic book industry is *still* rehashing Frank Miller and Alan Moore without the originality that those two initially brought to the medium (something that the success of Nolan's films has contributed to even more imo - though I genuinely really love Batman Begins since it's got a bit more character than TDK). Just like when the book hit a creative low fetishising the campness and family-friendliness of the Adam West show, recent Batman writers are hung up on fetishising the 'cool' 'grown-up' version from the 80s - which has since been pretty definitively debased into just an adolescent version of the character - while neglecting the silliness and the irreverence that those 80s books had (the good ones anyway). I want a less reverent version of Batman, basically.
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RE: Charlie Brooker and superhero films - 
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