Run the Reviews: The Jason Aaron Thor Era Part 1, "God of Thunder"

 Alright, back to this. First off, thanks to anyone who reads this, you're absolute class. I know it's still mostly just me kind of typing words into the abyss that is the internet but still, much like the Twitch streaming thing I picked up during this viral apocalypse, it's been a nice hobby indulgence to help keep focus off the downsides of the world out there right now. Also, just another quick note, and I probably should have mentioned this earlier because it was very much a "sore subject" kind of deal back when I was writing regular comic book articles, I am in no way trying to "deflect credit" or whatever all to the writers of these runs I talk about here. Obviously, artists, colorists, inkers etc all make the comic book magic work as much as anyone does in their production, but since I'm usually covering runs of books that are like, fifty to a hundred issues long, they almost always have a handful or more of artists that come along and help drive the book. Like in the case of this next series covering Jason Aaron's THOR era that just wrapped last year, there's tons of amazing artistic talent that worked on the series to make it as iconic as it was like Esad Ribic and Russel Dauterman and so on and so forth, but for header purposes it's just easier to simply say "Jason Aaron run" because, y'know, he wrote the whole thing. Credit will always show up where it's due, I always want to make sure artists get credit on their sections of a lengthy collection of books but for simplicity's sake, yeah. 

Anyway, how about we actually start talking about that run which, to be perfectly honest, I think may just be the best era of THOR I've ever experienced, but that may not mean the most here since I've probably only read a couple hundred issues of Marvel's version of the Norse God of Thunder in my comic book reading career.

                    

I heap this high praise upon this run for one main reason: This half decade era of Marvel's Norse pantheon reveled as much in it's brand of "epicness" as it did its irreverence. Not to say Jason Aaron and those involved spent all their time cracking wise at this brand of godlike lore but for every instance where we would get something like, well, a Gorr the God Butcher in the opening arc of this era, Aaron and company would make sure to spin a tale of a younger, immature Thor who makes drinking buddies with a doggy-looking dragon. Trolls are eaten. Basically, this run revels in everything that makes both comic book ridiculousness and Norse revelry such ridiculous fun but with that twinge of "fuck yeah!" adrenaline running down your spine from seeing a centuries, old mass murderer of gods being beaten down with magic hammers by three Thors from different time periods plus his granddaughters. 

That's the culmination of the opening salvo to this run, the "God of Thunder" series and this Gorr the God Butcher introduction, which is easily one of the most vicious and harrowing Thor stories I've ever consumed. Aaron, joined by one of the most epically polished comic book artists in the game, Esad Ribic, just pitch perfectly show us one of the best renditions of Marvel's hammer-slinger because it might be him at his most human. It starts off with the normal doses of whimsy and brashness you would expect from the Odinson but then turns quickly into something we don't usually see expressed on the god's face: pure fear. Thanks to the handy-dandy trope of some time travel, Aaron and Ribic in very short order establish Gorr as a force of terror so great that he haunts Thor for literal millennia. From rendering a more youthful Thor paralyzed by the trauma of his first run in with Gorr all the way to the bone-weary version of Thor thousands of years down the line who just wants to collapse alongside the crumbling Asgard he rules over, Gorr is a pillar to the God of Thunder's very existence, even if he only shows up every thousand years or so. Every issue is a cool piece of puzzle that makes a picture of pure awesomeness as it develops over ten issues and several thousand years, establishing Gorr as a merciless yet actually tragic figure (as we see in his origin issue "What the Gods Have Wrought") that haunts the God of Thunder to his core; no small feat from both a character building standpoint and a scripting one. 

Oh, and it of course looks glorious. Ribic's line-work is the perfect balance of playful when it needs to be and then packs pure power when things get really moving. The man just has such a gift for scope, knowing exactly how to frame a set of panels that will go from standard posturing to a jaw-dropping splash for the "breath-taking" effect the juxtaposition will produce, or just having a great sense of how to sequentially ramp up the energy in a scene over a handful of panels. I would say it's the absolute best possible skillset you could hope for when it comes to pencilling a Thor comic, but I need to save a lot of praising words for the Dauterman addition to the run the next volume over. 

                    

The second half of the "God of Thunder" saga makes a miracle out of a comic book industry "staple" (at least since the 2000's began) and in its own right makes this run impressive: It has Jason Aaron take what was obviously a movie-related use of Malekith the Accursed (as he was the villain in the Thor movie sequel of the same time frame) and take him beyond just being a simple "mandate." Aaron and all the company around him went to great lengths to make Malekith more than just a returning flavor because there was a spotlight on him, Malekith became a Marvel Universe-level threat that plagued the God of Thunder (in all the godly variants) for the majority of this era and became the focal point of a company-wide event, "The War of Realms."  It does seem like a rather innocuous reemergence for the dark elf, but there's enough meat on the bone to see how it could be grown into a universal threat, which is the crux of why this Thor run is so excellent; the world-building is as good as it gets for an establishment title like this Marvel icon and the little things here and there at the beginning pay dividends literally dozens of issues later. 

Essentially, Malekith raises enough of a ruckus across the Realms that it causes Thor to do somethings he's not particularly great at; playing politics and playing with others that aren't the Avengers. Teaming up with representatives from various other tribes across the Realms - the Giants, trolls, dwarves, elves, etc - what looks like a standard "mischievous" villainous jaunt by Malekith ends up being the beginning of power-grabbing machinations by the dark sorcerer, but the story starts out as playful as can be given the circumstances, largely in part to the oddly jocular adventures of Thor's "League of Realms" compatriots. Between drinking contest with the giant of the group, the dwarf of the group, Screwbeard, constantly wanting to just blow everything up, and stuff like Thor's average reaction to the troll of the group to be to punch him in the face, the mission here ends up being full of quality gags and one-liners that really do make you think that it's going to be more a one-off adventure than something that is the first domino to fall leading toward near-oblivion for the Realms. "Escalation" is definitely the other 'e'-word that Aaron was masterful at when it came to this run, alongside "epic."

On the way to the real, real big shakeup of this book that I'll start the next part of this series off with, Aaron really ramps up that escalation with the last "God of Thunder" arc by moving from the Malekith stuff to amping up some catastrophic events the future Thor is dealing with in the wake of Gorr and by introducing a new bag of vile personified to antagonize Thor, Dario Agger. Dario is the new head of long-running Marvel universe corporate sleeve outfit Roxxon and is basically greed personified. He's also a frikkin minotaur and targets Thor specifically. Thor is left to team with another new character of Aaron's creation, SHIELD agent and potential love interest Rosalind Solomon and, well, it's excellent. It's all excellent.

The world-building is excellent. Going from Malekith who is a known quantity to Agger who is an immediate presence and rival to Malekith's despicableness starts to put some extra balls into Thor's hands for the juggling and properly ramps up the tension of the book. That said, the adventuring remains excellent. Agent Solomon plays off Thor perfectly in both how able she is and the flirtatiousness they have toward each other and helps cut through some of the horrors Thor has been enduring between the two villains. The cuts to the future are excellent, both with their amusing interactions via Thor's granddaughters and then just the sheer scope of destruction they and Papa Thor are being privy to at this part of the timeline, which is essentially the end of time and the death throws of the universe. Yippee! 

The book is just excelling at this point though, two years(ish) into the run. Between the characters and how they bounce off each other, the ever-increasing stakes as Aaron and his compatriots start to up threat levels with each and every arc despite starting off with a doozy of a tale with the Gorr saga. While each and every arc does keep heaping more and more calamitousness onto the god's plate the book does well to keep a playfulness about it, largely in part thanks to these side-characters like Roz and the Granddaughters of Thunder. And it always, always looks glorious thanks to having a hell of a rolodex of top-quality artists to take the reigns for an arc or a one-off story. Simply, this was just how an "instant-classic" run should be building itself for the long-haul. The fact that it immediately shifts into a universe-shaking plot-twist starting up the next volume and really throwing everything for a loop after all this effort just puts this run up on a tier that only the most special creative tenures reach.

And that will be that for a couple more weeks before I come back with the "Goddess of Thunder" material. Sorry this was a bit longer, I kind of focused a bit more on the Twitch-type stuff recently than reading and writing about comic books. I also kind f need to start reading more comics again so I have more runs about, so I'm doing my first STARMAN reread in like a decade. Thanks again for reading, I'll be back sooner than later, hopefully. Cheers!

Run the Reviews: The Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka Batman Era (Part 2)

Alright, once more into the breech. This time the "breech" is my going right at all the stories that really defined Ed Bubaker's and Greg Rucka's tenures in the Batman Universe in the early 2000's and the stuff I kept saying over and over again last piece that needed special addressing in a future column. Well that time is now and the stories I'm talking about are the "Officer Down" and the "Bruce Wayne: Murderer/Fugitive" storylines, as well as the showstopper series, GOTHAM CENTRAL. For better or for worse or for "arguably on of the best comic books ever written" when it comes to GC (to bury the lede on my discussion of that series) those were the stories that really emphasized what these two scribes were going for when it putting a stamp on this branch of the DC Universe. 

                                                 

This smaller, one-month crossover between the Bat books in 2001 was really an eye opener for me when it came to comic books. It was a very personal tale with Jim Gordon as both the lynchpin of the story and showing how much of one he was to the Batmanverse, wherein this tale Gordon takes a bullet in the back and his survival rate is low. All aspects of every part of Gotham mobilize immediately and take drastic action on finding out who did such a spineless act on one of Gotham's most beloved citizens and it just shows what the character means to so many characters in that city and in the echelon of comic books in general as one of the best supporting characters ever created. To Batman and Nightwing he's a father figure, obviously to former Batgirl Barbara Gordon he is an actual one, and to a whole swath of some of the best developed tertiary characters in comic books like Harvey Bullock and Renee Montoya, he's the mentor of all mentors. The emotional turmoil and how that resonates through the pages of all these Batman centric titles is palpable, especially when you get to the really dire material of Batman himself being so distraught that his stoic "always have a plan" facade drops and all he wants to do is revert back to that child in that alley thirty years ago who lost his biological father. That kind of material really hits hard because this is a character that always tries so hard to force people away when you know he really wants people in his circle to know how much they mean to him but he is afraid to attach like that; it really puts a pin on how broken Batman is at his core despite his whole mystique being that of the person who always is on top of everything. 

And honestly it's a roller coaster ride of a tale. Between all the emotion above broiling around the idea that we might lose one of the most important B-characters in all of comic book history, it's just a good thrill ride for a handful of issues. Catwoman gets caught at the scene of the crime so there's a race on to find her and see what role she played in the crime, there's the ER type drama of Gordon facing multiple surgeries in a short span of time to stay alive, and then when the prime suspect comes to light you get the dichotomy of a bunch of characters who dress up in costume and solve most crime with their fists being at the mercy of a couple detectives working the suspect in an interrogation box trying to get him to blurt out his guilt because the evidence on him is shoddy at best. Watching characters who stand toe-to-toe with literal gods sometimes be at the mercy of criminal procedure is actually one of the most thrilling and harrowing things to happen in a Batman comic ever because of the stakes in play and the character that is Jim Gordon. And the absolute shock of the prime suspect actually walking away from everything and the ramifications of that conclusion and how they play out over the next couple years in the remainder of this Brubaker/Rucka era is just *Chef's kiss* good and tragic. I hate crossovers most of the time but between the raw emotion, the brevity of the story, and the impact and consequences it had for years to come, "Officer Down" is easily one of the best crossover stories I've ever read in comic books.

Next up, though, are a couple of events that kind of pull some of the better traits "Officer Down" brandished, but also some of the worst ones that make event comics relatively despite in my nerd eyes.

Yes, we're talking the "Fugitive/Murderer" sage of the Batverse; a story line that teases to be "the end of the Bat Family as we know it (!!!)" and sends Bruce Wayne to the slammer when the body of sort of girlfriend Vesper Fairchild is found in his mansion and he is the primary suspect. On it's face this is a cool and interesting story to tell. The "World's Greatest Detective" gets caught in a frame job that threatens everything in his life and the family he's built around him and we, as the readers, get to wonder who could do such a thing and actually pull it of and how? Who actually knows the secret of the Bat and is able to take advantage of all the chaos in his life to sneak into his mansion and set things up in such a way that just as he's getting back from one of his "night excursions" he can be caught literally "red handed?" And on top of it all, Rucka and Brubaker, playing off the emotional distancing that they have committed the Batman to in the wake of Commissioner Gordon's near death experience and subsequent retirement, do well to play up the idea that, well, maybe Bruce finally went over the edge? Obviously that's never going to really be the case, but the .000001% chance that it's an actual possibility due to his mental state and how there is no actual alibi for him because he was home by himself, in an Alfredless mansion for a handful of minutes before Sasha joins him from patrol is enough to make you go hrmmmm. At the least, it plays up the tension of the family dynamic that it sows just enough doubt in them to permeate some of it into our brains as we go along for the ride. The rest of that ride, though, is where I get a little hand-wringy about this pair of events.

                

The "Murderer/Fugitive" trade paperbacks, when you put them side-by-side, are two pretty beefy boys, as you can imagine given how many Bat-titles there were in the early 2000's. As you can also imagine, if you have partook in any comic book "event" in the past handful of decades, most of those parts have nothing to really do with pushing the actual narrative of this murder mystery forward; they are just freebies to slap a shiny crossover label on because they have place in the Batverse and to score some sales they would not usually get in a month because of coimpletionism tendencies from the fanbase. And, man, there are some EGREGIOUS examples of this during the "Mur/Fug" story (sorry, tired of typing out those words out so much). There are some GOTHAM KNIGHTS issues in these volumes that barely even try to be related to the overarching story as they're just a one-off tale here and there telling generic detective stories while characters like Alfred are commenting at an escaped-jail-after-Bruce-Wayne-was-denied-bail Batman "shouldn't you be figuring out who set you up?" to grumpy "I've got work to do" retorts. Chuck Dixon, writing ROBIN, NIGHTWING, and BIRDS OF PREY at the time, obviously had a big case of the "hey, I'm already doing my own shit here's" because for every crossover issue he wrote that had substantial interaction with finding the murderer or confronting Bruce, there was an issue where the contribution was a page where we see, like, Oracle get an analysis of something and yell "it was a frame!" The amount of padding in this story overall just screamed "drive them sales" in a way that was a far cry from all the tertiary world building stories being told while the "No Man's Land" was in full effect, which is why they are especially frustrating here. 

And even the main books under the hand of Brubaker and Rucka were dedicated to either finishing up what they were doing before they initiated this storyline, like Batman having to deal with a mutated Triad gang leader in the wake of what Ra's al Ghul lackey, Whisper, was pulling in Gotham before the trial, and Brubaker has some random two-parter where some guy named Nicodemus goes on a revenge spree that culminates in kidnapping the mayor and sure. Batman has decided he doesn't need Bruce Wayne and is just going to be Batman. I get it, except I don't. "MurFug" DOMINATED these books for something like eight months and half of the pages printed about it couldn't be arsed to discuss it outside of Bat-family characters occasionally yelling at Batman to get his head out of his ass or a couple panels an issue of someone in the Fam finding a slight tidbit to help the case. Honestly, the best material in all of these issues probably came from Rucka putting a spotlight on Sasha Bordeaux as she is left behind in prison to fend for herself in all this and shows a greater dedication to preserving Bruce's name than he does (and also builds up her eventually revealed romantic feelings for him) and then sets her up for bigger things in the DCU as she gets recruited and sequestered away by the clandestine group Checkmate while Batman is off clashing with his own ego. Also, Cassandra Can as the new Batgirl gets a lot of props as she never gives up on Batman and her dedication to him helps win him back over plus her tenacity and physical skills really help "break the case" so to speak and find some pivotal evidence Bruce is innocent and needs help. Also, the grand reveal of (twenty year old spoilers!!) her father, world-class assassin David Cain being the man who almost destroyed the Batman "raises the stock" of the family line and what they are capable of, her being such a prodigy a his now being pushed as top tier threat.

Overall, though, "MurFug" tries again to tell a pretty interpersonal BatFamily tale and reaches mild success. If it were as tight as "Officer Down" was in conveying how important the relationships these people beyond their crimefighting bonds or the greater struggle of banding together in the face of cataclysmic adversity like "No Man's Land" was, then it could have completed the cycle of the Batverse being three-for-three on meaningful event-level stories. Instead this is just so much bloated storytelling, with a lot of the emotion being driven by an overwrought need to be moody for the sake of tension and conflict. Some characters shine and move on to bigger and better things, but for the most part this failed in most aspects except to be an okay murder mystery once it decided to be one about forty issues into the whole ordeal. And the real shame of it all is that this is essentially how both these writers ended this collaborative era of theirs on the Batbooks proper. But, as much as this was a letdown for the immediate BatFamily, the dynamic duo was simultaneously producing simply one of the best comic book series' ever created, GOTHAM CENTRAL. 

            

Look up the Michal Fassbender "Perfection" meme lifted from "X-Men: First Class" and this should slot right into it. I'd make one myself except I'm nearing 40 and never used a meme generator in my life and don't plan on starting now because I have better thing to do like slowly die while lamenting my life choices. But building off the success that was "Officer Down" where it was shown just how impactful the secondary characters running around in a Gotham dominated by Batman and the psychopaths he fights, GOTHAM CENTRAL is an amazing picture of life on the street's of Gotham and just how insane it is that this is a commonality that it's denizens have accepted in their lives. Of course, this is extra nuts for the cops caught in between the Bat and the super-powered crackpots that it's debatable exist because of him, not in spite of him. The forty-ish issues that comprise this run are some of the most character-centric, interpersonal, and human stories told the pages of a "Big Two" comic, and they don't skimp on the super heroics either. As they say, "not all heroes wear capes" and GOTHAM CENTRAL showcasing the adventures of the badges at the GCPD is a prime example. 

What is the actual "best" about how GC works on the lives of the officers is that it isn't always just a case of such-and-such running amok and they have to stop them because it's their duty, but Rucka and Brubaker just weave these little tales about the messed up circles these villains draw around them and eventually normal people get pulled into their gravitational well and get crushed by it in some way. The opening two-parter, "In the Line of Duty," kind of epitomizes this presentation. We get introduce to a lot of new faces that we'll become familiar with as the series moves on, but in particular here we start off with a Detective Driver who, while pursuing leads with his partner about a kidnapping case, ends up staring down the barrel of Mr. Freeze's cold gun and watching that particular device turn his turn said partner into a popsicle and then shattered into a dozen pieces. As that harrowing experience plays out, we find out that while this was a horrible case of "wrong place, wrong time" for Driver, there were machinations afoot as Freeze was building to basically cryo-bomb an award ceremony honoring now retired Commissioner Gordon, but still. This wasn't some giant blow out fight in the middle of the city where Batman and his family are knuckle-dusting Freeze and a dozen goons dressed up like Eskimos and the GCPD badges got caught in the shrapnel, this was just officers chasing leads and all of a sudden one of them is gone in a horrific manner than can only happen in a work of fiction. 

For the vast majority of it's three-plus year run, Brubaker and Rucka were just executing a master class of building these little lives of these characters with one of the most harrowing and entertaining backdrops in all of comic books. It's just a fantastic cop drama in an absolutely engaging world that also plays that world out in ways that defy norms. Take the "Soft Targets" story arc, the Joker-centric storyline you just knew would happen and be one of the most devious things ever and was, but it was executed in a manner so simplistic it was more horrifying than anything you could have imagined. It wasn't the Clown Prince of Crime holding the city ransom with another nerve toxic or some maniacal kidnapping or any of that jazz, it was literally just the Joker popping people off with a sniper rifle. Of all the possibilities that was it. The Joker at several hundred feet and cackling with the fear he was instilling in a city, and that city was right to be terrified despite seeing the Joker perform larger-scale atrocities in his time. 

                                

Again, though, the main attraction of this book is the characters that have to deal with the chaos, particularly Renee Montoya, who is arguably the closest thing this series has to a main protagonist and was an obvious pet project for Greg Rucka. Watching the worst thing to happen to Montoya in a world where she's watching coworkers become popsicles and getting EMT brain chunks on her from a Joker sniper shot be her outing as a lesbian and the fallout of that as her parents disown here is the ultimate "oh hell" defining moment of this series. How Rucka and Brubaker navigate that kind of storytelling in this still very superhero-influenced backdrop and in the time period it did when we as a society were just starting to become a little bit normalized to homosexuality in our pop culture like that is a master class. It, again, showed that there were greater stakes to be played at in the pages of GOTHAM CENTRAL, even though any issue could feature some being with the ability to liquify a city block crashing down on its pages at any time. Writing like that was definitely very prescient in and of its time and has ramifications in the medium even to this day. 

One of the few downsides to rereading this series, though, also has a lot to do with time-framing and hindsight because, woo-boy, in a modern era of watching militarized police forces beating on protestors like they were pinatas, seeing some pretty shady police procedures go on and be justified by the circumstances these folks went through is kind of cringey. Renee has no problem with regular beatdowns on everyone from shitty paparazzi to uncooperative store-owners and so on. Yes, these officers are dealing with the worst of the worst on a day-to-day basis and that's part of the story for sure is how your level of morality being keepers of it can be pushed in such extreme circumstances, but it gets to the point in this book where it feels like standard police procedure is to knock on a door to ask a few questions and then immediately toss the person around by their collar. "Grey area" is a bit of an understatement. 

But, that aside, this comic book is about as perfect as it gets from how it handles these characters, how it gets you invested in them, how it pushes them to their limits and regularly leaves you mouth agape at how often justice being served is just not a thing that happens in Gotham City. The plots and cases that play out are fantastic, the art between the likes of Michael Lark, Stefano Guadiano and Kano throughout the series is the stuff that Noir dreams are made of, and in general the book is a (mostly) timeless, character-centric read that plays at a different set of daily stakes than you usually see in a comic book that takes place in one of the two biggest universes in the medium. Everything in those aspects that Brubaker and Rucka tried and failed to play at in the "Murderer/Fugitive" saga looks especially pale in comparison to how well they achieve it here in GOTHAM CENTRAL. In some ways that's probably not a fair statement to make, a proper Batman story has more editorial restrictions than a book like this that was obvious a passion project, but Brubaker and Rucka obviously wanted it all to play together even if GC felt a little insulated and at the end of the day you can help but hold these stories up side-by-side. And this one dwarves the other; hell it dwarves everything Brubaker and Rucka did in the entire era even though there was a lot of good material in there. This is just an all time great series, period, no need to even draw comparisons.

Aaaaaand that's another one of these down. Yay. I like these. I'm going to keep doing these. But they'll also probably keep coming about once every few weeks because I'm trying to prioritize things like Streaming and, y'know, finding a new occupation a liiiiittle bit more than writing them and, as important, reading more stuff to fuel them. Next up will be the Jason Aaron Thor era because, well, that's amazing, and I'm working on a reread of James Robinson's STARMAN run because I want to know what it's like to feel joy again so, yeah. Those will be the next two of these for the couple dozen of you who actually check these out. Thanks again for reading! Cheers...

Run the Reviews: The Ed Brubaker & Greg Rucka Batman Era (Part 1)

Another one of these!! And another anecdote to intro the whole thing, because my experiences are all that matter! So, let's talk about Batman for a second, or more specifically my involvement with the Dark Knight of the comic book world. 

I've mentioned before I started pretty young in comic books (age 11ish) and had absolutely no idea what was going on with them so I just started buying the "greatest hits." I bought some Iron Man because the War Machine armor just debuted and that was, to a pre-teen, the hottest shit. I bought X-MEN Volume 2 #1 because literally everyone in the world did back then, and multiple copies at that. And I bought Spider-Man because it was Spider-Man, duh. Batman I never really latched onto, though, despite Batman also being the HOTTEST SHIT at the time. Between the two Michael Keaton led movies and Batman: The Animated Series (TAS) just being the best take for the character possible, in my opinion (which is one I still hold to this day and will divert to in a second), it was literally the best time to be a Batman fan and yet when it came to my newfound love of comic books, I never really tried to make the pointy-earned one a staple in my allowance-based purchases. 

A large chunk of the reason why I think I never got wrapped up into a monthly Batman fix in my youth is, quite simply, because he was handled so well in other media. While the movies may have fallen apart after those first two Keaton/Burton movies those were enough of a springboard into the character for me to fall head over heels in love with The Animated Series, which was just and is (again, to me still) the purest distillation of the character and his universe. Every weekly adventure of this animated version of the Caped Crusader had a huge emotional impact because it was typically such a hyper-focused lens on the malevolent or tragic backstory of an important Batman character, usually the villains. I don't remember much about my childhood but to this day I still feel goosebumps about episodes like when Harvey Dent is scarred and finally succumbs to his Two-Face split persona, or the melancholy end to Clayface's debut episode where he becomes a literal husk of what he used to be after the brutal accosting that made actor Matt Hagen the monster he was. Batman in both the movies and the cartoon were simple, idealized versions of the character and his beloved Gotham City that in any time will always stand up on their own because of how perfectly they presented those variations of the Batverse. Meanwhile, at this time, the Batman books themselves were... not so much.

Batman in the early 1990's was kind of the breeding ground for what was wrong with comic books in the 90's. One, there were like six different Bat-books at the time at any given moment because of course their was, he was hands down the hottest property in the world. And all of those book were heavily embroiled in another one of the worst offenders of comic books of that era and that was the giant, multi-mulit-multi-part crossover "event," in this particular case the "Knightfall" saga. As a relative newbie to comic books at the time with a whole five dollars in his pocket on a weekly basis to buy funny books with, seeing several months of story consuming this landscape of Batman books with crossovers stories that numbered legit upwards of twenty parts was very daunting to say the least. Oh, and then there was the whole idea that for a solid year-plus, Batman wasn't even Batman, he was a series of replacement actors after getting his back shattered, which adolescent me couldn't reconcile.  

Despite all my better judgement, though, I hopped onto the "Cataclysm" event train a little bit due to cajoling by my LCS guy who had gotten me hooked on the Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel NIGHTWING book of the time, which I adored. I was convinced by him and some regulars that this was an event actually worth catching. "Cataclysm," for those who don't know, was a Batverse story where a sizable earthquake hit Gotham and completely decimated the city to a point where it and its remaining citizens were essentially abandoned by the rest of the country; not the best thing to be when your city is home to some of the most sadistic and murderous human and super beings alive. But I was won over to that version of the Batverse because, as with Batman: TAS mentioned above, the event was very much a character-centric one that really emphasized the personalities of Batman's villains and his Gothamite supporting cast, especially the likes of Jim Gordon and Renee Montoya (who existed in the comics basically because she was about to exist in TAS) during such a harrowing scenario. And seeing as how one of the biggest architects of Renee's push to the secondary character forefront during the time after Cataclysm known as "No Man's Land" was, yes, Greg Rucka (IT'S ALL COMING TOGETHER!), well, when he took over DETECTIVE COMICS following the event, that's when I started buying Batman comics on a monthly basis for the first time in my then-young life. 

                            

Okay, now that the "Internet recipe anecdote" intro is done and I laid the groundwork for what lured me into this era of Batman, let's talk about what made this few years of Bat-comics my favorite ever and one of my top Batman works behind TAS, Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," and Frank Miller's "Year One." It goes without saying, given what I aimed at with the last few paragraphs and talking about writers like Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker (now being introduced into the fray on the BATMAN book coming out of Cataclysm and No Man's Land) and what they have produced in their careers, it was all about their character work and injecting some actual factual emotion into the pages of one of comics' most iconically stoic figures. While being the "World's Greatest Detective" is cool and all and it's probably nice being one of the top martial artists on the planet, you know what else is pretty riveting material to have in a comic book? Relationships! Having a butler that basically raised you as their own child and the dynamic that creates, the friendships you make growing up and especially what they mean to an orphan, having a bunch of wards and sidekicks doing their best to both impress you and soften your oft times unbearable level of stonewalled emotion. This is the type of material Rucka and Brubaker emphasized more often than not in their Batman adventures and that's why their hold on the Bat-books stands out to me so much going on twenty years now of Batman buying. 

First we'll start with Rucka, since he was the established guy on Batman content going into this. There's two things about Rucka's material that really shine. One, that since he was already working with the Batverse before he pushed to keep "Cataclysm/NML" material reflective of the state of Gotham City, like how the city ended up being split and consumed by several gangs, the idea that Gotham Park was basically owned by Poison Ivy now and off limits, stuff like that. And, second, there was the introduction of Sasha Bordeau as a bodyguard/foil for Bruce Wayne then turned new sidekick and then an evolution into star-crossed lover by the end of the Rucka/Bru tenure on these books. Topping all that with a pinch of some Renee Montoya here and then wrapping it all up in a "Ra's Al Ghul and his agents pulling some fuckery again" in Gotham and it really created a nice filling meal on what can make a Batman book a hot commodity in the medium. 

Every issue there was just something engaging happening. While Batman is dealing with an all out territory war between several gangs, Ra's agents (Whisper and Abbot) are maneuvering these gangs against each other and working Gotham's socialite circles for connections. While Jim Gordon is wrestling with the loss of his wife during the Cataclysm, the Batman is being constricted by the aforementioned Sasha Bordeaux being forced into his life by Lucius Fox and Gotham Enterprise's board of directors trying to keep him safe also due to that (literally) earth-shaking event. Ivy's staging a last stand in Gotham Park, the Mad Hatter starts pulling his brand of nonsense via corrupting GCPD officers with his tech, Bruce starts dating a photojournalist named Vesper Fairchild who is looking to find and identify the Batman while at the same time Sasha discovers the secret and then becomes a part of it, and on and on and on. Every issue pushed a little moment or unfolded a bigger conspiracy or exposed the emotions of a side character in a relatable way to pull together a two year run that felt great for all the reasons that TAS did, with art by folks like Shawn Martinburough and Rich Burchett that actually captured the same visual aesthetic as that cartoon as well, fittingly enough. If there's anything "bad" to say about this run it's how some of its momentum got cut off due to how the way and story Rucka and Brubaker went out on, but I'll get to that in the next piece about this era. 

             

Ed Brubaker, who at this point in his career (I believe) was still really only known as "plucky Indie writer" and was getting his break doing SCENE OF THE CRIME for DC's Vertigo imprint which landed him the Bat. Obviously he's established himself since then as a big hitter in comics writing very atmospheric and character-centric stories and Batman was no exception except that, unlike Rucka who had the running start that he did working on Batman material, was a little more time limited and therefore good, but not quite as impactful as what Rucka managed in two years on DETECTIVE. Like Rucka, Brubaker really emphasized the state of Gotham post-Cataclysm and personalizing Batman/Bruce Wayne a little more by tying the story into his private life, not the one he spends most nights in costume living. The thrust of this tenure was bringing an old childhood friend, Mallory Moxon, into his life by running into her at a socialite mixer. Of course, in true Batman fashion, there's a darker side to Bruce just getting to relive some few, happy moments from his childhood as it's quickly established that Mallory's father is a long-running underworld boss trying to make waves again and there are hints at him having dealing's with Bruce's father before that fateful night that left him and Bruce's mom dead and created the Bat. 

This is really the only story Brubaker gets to tell during his tenure that stands on its own, extenuating circumstances that I'll get into next time dominate the back half of it, but while it's running the story with Moxon's is a good and much needed one for DC's Dark Knight. For a character always so brooding and mopey, watching Bruce Wayne's eyes light up seeing an old friend and him reverting to "the good old days" before the world blew those lights out always leaves an impression. Obviously, though, these are short lived insights as the world around Mallory's dad, Lew, is steeped in the world Bruce has chosen to reside ever since he lost his parents and his machinations brought a new wave of crime and a new menace by the name of Zeiss into the Bat's domain. 

Again, there's just a lot of personal touches that make it a good little run, though it's also a little crowded and unfocused is really the concern. For every badass, action-focused issue that features Batman facing down Zeiss - who thanks to some tech basically has the Taskmaster powers of "technique duplication" - or there's an issue where Deadshot is in town to put a hit in on Mr. Moxon, there's a weird two-parter where an alien crash lands in Gotham and Batman has to protect him because, yeah. There's all these neat little moments throughout the run where you have, like, Batman feeling bad for once he did his usual disappearing act on Jim Gordon without considering how inconsiderate that may in the wake of Gordon losing his wife and then there's flashbacks to Bruce with his dad at a costume party and looking up at him in awe as he's dressed as Zorro and they're wonderful. And then there's a Joker Santa thrown into the mix because at the time DC was doing a "Joker month" where he infects a bunch of villains (mostly D-listers) with Joker juice and they run amok and, yeah, sure. The heart of the book is fantastic, it showed some of the most emotionally poignant moments I've seen in a stretch of Batman books possibly ever, but some weird creative choices and company mandates kind of cut it off at the knees (a trend that, again, will be something to talk about next time) since Brubaker himself didn't get to run his own act as long as Rucka did and the collaboration of the two talents was obviously the highlights of this couple year stretch on the Bat books.  

One more thing to note before walking out of here and coming back to talk the real meat of what Rucka and Bru did together is that this stands out as one of my favorite Bat eras because of the art teams that paired with the all star scribes. I mentioned Martinburough and Burnett earlier and how their styles so reminiscent of the Batman Animated Series made DETECTIVE COMICS sing, but Scott McDaniel doing the art chores for almost every issue of the Brubaker BATMAN book is one of my favorite things about all of this era, or any Batman era. He was just the quintessential Bat-family guy for several years as his playful, animated, and highly-kinetic style was just perfect for the kind of shenanigans the Bat family got involved in, especially when it came to Nightwing and his tenure on that book with Chuck Dixon. I personally think he's one of the best Batman pencillers of the past quarter century and give the man his due, he really ramped up the quality and enjoyment of this couple year stretch. 

But, yeah, that's the first half of this. I'll pop the second one out sometime in the next week or two; I got kind of hyperfocused on making sure I was streaming games on Twitch the past month because there was just so much to do between Cyberpunk 2077 and the Demon's Souls remaster and yeah. I still jones for my old comic book columnist days so I'll keep on myself to get a few thousand words out a month about something in comics I feel deserves a couple thousand words about it. So, yeah, take care and be safe out there. Cheers!

(Credit to Bill Sienkiewicz, John McCrea, and Scott McDanielon the image pulls, respectively)