Opinion Prone

On Wednesday, a friend of mine picked up the first of the two-issue release of Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?, written by Neil Gaiman, penciled by Andy Kubert, and inked by Scott Williams. I love Batman, but I have a terrible time keeping up with recent releases because some storylines suck more than others, and the good ones tend to have multiple tie-ins across various series and titles. (Organizing and keeping up with both Final Crisis and Marvel’s Civil War sucked; I gave up.) Usually, I will just wait for compilation releases like The Long Halloween or pick up the superspecialawesome oneshots like Arkham Asylum. This is probably why I end up reading more manga than Western comics, or at least, mainstream Western comics.

But since my friend had it handy, I read the issue. It was fantastic: beautiful, well-drawn, and well-written. It was nostalgic. And sad. And it made me think about how different superhero comics are from all the manga I read because there isn’t just one creator. There are hundreds of people involved in the creative process and there are generations of stories because the titles last so long. People of different ages have different perceptions of Batman because different medias are popular at different times, but just about everyone knows who Batman is. The character is immortal in that way.

So how can they write character deaths like this? How can Batman die?

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It seems like almost immediately after I made my post about upcoming anime live action movies, I read an article in the Times about the mad rush of superhero comic movies and the idea that their popularity may be just about ready to peak. It definitely makes sense. After all, there have been well over a dozen comic book adaptions in the last several years. Many of them have been very, very successful, like the entire Spider-Man franchise, Iron Man, and most recently, The Dark Knight. Others were epic box office failures, like Catwoman and Elektra (I know, we were trying to forget those two even existed, right?). It’s been quite a mixed bag, but the high end is very, very high. I guess when comic movies are breaking record after record, people are going to start to think it’s too much of a good thing. It’s gotta end somewhere, right?

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