Post-Crisis, Pre-52 Appreciation 2020

[David Walton]

Well, I know that Johns and Didio are responsible for several changes I think are really destructive. I don't know quite what they're responsible for in terms of the way the Batfamily is characterized though.

Didio is on record that he doesn't like Nightwing because he feels like Dick Grayson's development accelerates Bruce Wayne's aging process. That makes sense when you think about how the New 52 attempted to narrow the age gap between Bruce and Dick to about five years and sowed a lot of confusion about Dick's Teen Titans years. So I think Didio's instincts tend to run contrary to the kind of progression embodied by the 90s Bat-family. Or really, just the 90s in general. He seems to feel the same way about Wally West and the Flash family. (King is on record that the murderer and victims for Heroes in Crisis were pre-selected and it was his job to craft the story around those choices.)

Personally, I've never had any problem with Bruce being in his late thirties to early forties. To my mind, that's peak Batman--slightly past his physical prime, but he more than makes up for it with the wisdom and skills he's picked up with age. But I tend to think DC should focus more on 'the world's greatest detective' side of things than over-the-top badassery involving hundreds of armed combatants. But if you're going have Batman fight off a thousand ninjas at once, does it really matter if he's thirty or forty? I mean, c'mon, you can't say you were going for realism in the first place!

[millernumber1]

Didio is on record that he doesn't like Nightwing because he feels like Dick Grayson's development accelerates Bruce Wayne's aging process. That makes sense when you think about how the New 52 attempted to narrow the age gap between Bruce and Dick to about five years and sowed a lot of confusion about Dick's Teen Titans years. So I think Didio's instincts tend to run contrary to the kind of progression embodied by the 90s Bat-family. Or really, just the 90s in general. He seems to feel the same way about Wally West and the Flash family. (King is on record that the murderer and victims for Heroes in Crisis were pre-selected and it was his job to craft the story around those choices.)

Personally, I've never had any problem with Bruce being in his late thirties to early forties. To my mind, that's peak Batman--slightly past his physical prime, but he more than makes up for it with the wisdom and skills he's picked up with age. But I tend to think DC should focus more on 'the world's greatest detective' side of things than over-the-top badassery involving hundreds of armed combatants. But if you're going have Batman fight off a thousand ninjas at once, does it really matter if he's thirty or forty? I mean, c'mon, you can't say you were going for realism in the first place!

I completely agree. I don't mind some hardcore bad-assery, but don't pretend that Batman is "just a human like us" if you're going for that. (And I realize that as a Tom King Batman fan I'm kinda breaking my rule here, but what are comic conversations for if not to highlight our inconsitancies?"

[David Walton]

One thing I dislike in that telling is having Bruce comes up with the name "Robin." There was this unfortunate tendency in this era to rob Dick Grayson of agency to the point where all he's ever doing is reacting to Bruce and it's unclear what drives him at all beyond that. I feel like being Robin should be a very active choice from Dick, rather than it being presented as he's drafted into this and kinda just goes along with it.

On the other hand, the story does have Dick Grayson pursue Zucco independently of Bruce.

I don't love that shift — which definitely occurred during O'Neil's editorial reign, especially in Knightfall/Prodigal and beyond — and I think it mostly hurts the characters. I feel like the New 52 was onto something with framing "Robin" like a prestigious internship, more than as a bunch of adopted children. It's a mentorship.

Actually I think the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Spider-Man/Iron Man might be the ideal version of the Robin/Batman dynamic, for me... I don't think those movies capture "my" Spidey, who I prefer as more of the Lee-era rebel/loner than someone who would want to be anyone's protege... they're better Robin movies than Spidey movies, imo.

Batman/Iron Man is paternalistic, and is a fatherly figure, but doesn't need to be housing, clothing, and feeding. Still "Family" but they're not literally dad/son, adoptive or otherwise. Because if Batman is more literally Robin's dad, then basically he needs to be able to say "I love you" to his children. But of course he can't because he needs to look cool, so instead it becomes like this weird Fonzie story point where because Batman is so cool he's slightly broken.

That's why I like the 90s Tim Drake Robin so much, because he does have that extra bit of independence with Jack being his Aunt May. Batman doesn't "own" him. It makes it a bit more of Robin choosing to go into this on his own, rather than inheriting the family business.

Strongly disagree. I love Batman's paternal relationship with the Robins. And those relationships aren't any less unique because they all involve a father/son dynamic.

[David Walton]

I completely agree. I don't mind some hardcore bad-assery, but don't pretend that Batman is "just a human like us" if you're going for that. (And I realize that as a Tom King Batman fan I'm kinda breaking my rule here, but what are comic conversations for if not to highlight our inconsitancies?"

I remember reading an interview with Max Allan Collins and he said one of his big creative disagreements with editorial was that he had a random thug knock the wind out of Batman with a baseball bat. And they told him that wouldn't happen, and he was like, "I don't care if you're Batman or not, you take a baseball bat to the gut, you're not just going to shake it off!"

At any rate, it certainly seems silly to me to suggest that a thirty year man can single-handedly take out a thousand ninjas, but no, we totally draw the line at forty! I mean, can't he still take out like eight hundred ninjas at that point if eats his greens and exercises regularly?

[millernumber1]

I remember reading an interview with Max Allan Collins and he said one of his big creative disagreements with editorial was that he had a random thug knock the wind out of Batman with a baseball bat. And they told him that wouldn't happen, and he was like, "I don't care if you're Batman or not, you take a baseball bat to the gut, you're not just going to shake it off!"

At any rate, it certainly seems silly to me to suggest that a thirty year man can single-handedly take out a thousand ninjas, but no, we totally draw the line at forty! I mean, can't he still take out like eight hundred ninjas at that point if eats his greens and exercises regularly?

I think Collins has a point...but I read Batman very symbolically. So I don't mind if he shrugs off a lot, though I'd like him to have some reaction to pain. I think Batman 1989 went too far in that direction, having Batman be pretty darn incompetent, getting beaten by Joker's thugs pretty easily at the end.

I smile at your logical approach to Batman's age. At this point, Batman can do whatever the story wants him to do. I think it mostly matters whether we buy it or not.

[Restingvoice]

Didio is on record that he doesn't like Nightwing because he feels like Dick Grayson's development accelerates Bruce Wayne's aging process. That makes sense when you think about how the New 52 attempted to narrow the age gap between Bruce and Dick to about five years and sowed a lot of confusion about Dick's Teen Titans years. So I think Didio's instincts tend to run contrary to the kind of progression embodied by the 90s Bat-family. Or really, just the 90s in general. He seems to feel the same way about Wally West and the Flash family. (King is on record that the murderer and victims for Heroes in Crisis were pre-selected and it was his job to craft the story around those choices.)

A bit of correction, King already has the plot written, and then he goes to DC asking which three characters he can use as the two suspects and one murderer. DC gave him Wally, Harley, and Booster, but he didn't mention if DC gave him specifics on which character can be used for which role, or if he gets the freedom to choose

[godisawesome]

Didio is on record that he doesn't like Nightwing because he feels like Dick Grayson's development accelerates Bruce Wayne's aging process. That makes sense when you think about how the New 52 attempted to narrow the age gap between Bruce and Dick to about five years and sowed a lot of confusion about Dick's Teen Titans years. So I think Didio's instincts tend to run contrary to the kind of progression embodied by the 90s Bat-family. Or really, just the 90s in general. He seems to feel the same way about Wally West and the Flash family. (King is on record that the murderer and victims for Heroes in Crisis were pre-selected and it was his job to craft the story around those choices.)

Personally, I've never had any problem with Bruce being in his late thirties to early forties. To my mind, that's peak Batman--slightly past his physical prime, but he more than makes up for it with the wisdom and skills he's picked up with age. But I tend to think DC should focus more on 'the world's greatest detective' side of things than over-the-top badassery involving hundreds of armed combatants. But if you're going have Batman fight off a thousand ninjas at once, does it really matter if he's thirty or forty? I mean, c'mon, you can't say you were going for realism in the first place!

Didio wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t combine a marketing first mentality (note: I didn’t say “market” first mentality) with simply bad taste; the Bat books just tend to feel it more by his perplexingly contradictory and just clearly bad decisions.

Like, Nightwing would have been totally safe if Didio realized the monetary value of the character by that point, or had the taste to recognize the quality in the character over the long run. Dick Grayson is in many ways just as much of a standard bearer as many of the JL7 characters. If you were just looking for consistent IPs people would buy, he’d be clocked as one, and there was exactly zero sign that he was cutting into Batman’s market share at all. A cursory glance would show that the Nightwing and Batman IPs are complimentary goods, that assist each other, not hinder each other.

But Didio was convinced that “old” Batman is scary or less interesting to audiences and new readers. This in spite of the fact that since at least the 80’s, Batman was pretty much always portrayed as being in his mid-to-late 30’s in modern times - and that period saw its first real spike around the time Frank Miller produced the first real “Old Man Batman” book , and when Batman managed to eventually surpass Superman in sales, especially once spinoffs were included.

Similarly, Didio seems to have showed that he and DC were heavily interested in a minority Batman character, so he kept pushing for new flavors of Batwing when the first one didn’t take off as he’d hoped, and he clearly wants to break into more niche and mainstream markets. But he allowed both Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown’s series to get cancelled, even though Cass was an successful Asian-American character, and Steph was making headway in the TPB lists that were appealing to young adults... and then he exiled both of them because he thought that their mere existence was a threat to Babs returning as Batgirl... which meant that he was also removing *two* characters with disabilities from the Batfamily as well, and right after Morrisonn/Snyder/everyone else had proved that you didn’t have to keep Cassandra in limbo to protect the Batgirl IP.

And I have to say that I think part of his problem isn’t that he hates the 90’s - it’s that he seems to think that Marvel’s artificial and doomed market spike in the 90’s is the way to go, compared to DC’s steady quality at the time. I mean, a lot of his New 52 ideas scream someone who tried to replicate Heroes Reborn, cover gimmicks, editorial-driven and artist-over-writing thinking that crashed the comic market.

Which is part of the reason why the Batman and Flash fans are so easily perturbed and annoyed by him - they were the primary beneficiaries of DC’s writing first focus leading to a string of successful runs that added up as time went on, and both arguably exploded more in the 90’s than other brands.

[millernumber1]

A bit of correction, King already has the plot written, and then he goes to DC asking which three characters he can use as the two suspects and one murderer. DC gave him Wally, Harley, and Booster, but he didn't mention if DC gave him specifics on which character can be used for which role, or if he gets the freedom to choose

I'm pretty sure he got them all handed in the specific roles they filled in the story. (I stand on record as saying that I personally really like Heroes in Crisis, but if Steph had been killed I would probably feel differently - I know how I'd feel if Steph had been in Wally's position...since she basically was in War Games, and I loved her in that, and think if War Games hadn't killed her off, I'd probably think the story was messy, but not necessarily bad - but even though I do like the story, I don't think it should have been published, and I think King is basically in the same spot - he thinks it is a good story, but not one that people wanted, and that was for perfectly legitimate reasons).

[godisawesome]

So apparently John Ostrander wrote some issues of Catwoman, and nobody told me that.

It starts with #72 of her first series, and is set during No Man’s Land, and features an ex-Joker henchman to stupid to realize his superpowers translate kinetic energy into a high until it splinted out to him, Batman defusing an Angry Catwoman mid attack by kissing her, and Catwoman fighting Mercy.

Aside from the fact that it’s when Jim Balent’s art started to go down hill, it’s actually really fun!

[gregpersons]

I remember reading an interview with Max Allan Collins and he said one of his big creative disagreements with editorial was that he had a random thug knock the wind out of Batman with a baseball bat. And they told him that wouldn't happen, and he was like, "I don't care if you're Batman or not, you take a baseball bat to the gut, you're not just going to shake it off!"

At any rate, it certainly seems silly to me to suggest that a thirty year man can single-handedly take out a thousand ninjas, but no, we totally draw the line at forty! I mean, can't he still take out like eight hundred ninjas at that point if eats his greens and exercises regularly?

I agree that Batman should be in his late 30s/early 40s, rather than a decade younger. Tom Brady is in his 40s and still playing in the NFL... in hockey and basketball and baseball, athletes playing into their 40s isn't unprecedented.

Batman should be like John McClane in "Die Hard" — it's not that he's physically unstoppable, but that he can take a beating and still keep going because of his determination and cleverness.

[gregpersons]

Didio wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t combine a marketing first mentality (note: I didn’t say “market” first mentality) with simply bad taste; the Bat books just tend to feel it more by his perplexingly contradictory and just clearly bad decisions.

Like, Nightwing would have been totally safe if Didio realized the monetary value of the character by that point, or had the taste to recognize the quality in the character over the long run. Dick Grayson is in many ways just as much of a standard bearer as many of the JL7 characters. If you were just looking for consistent IPs people would buy, he’d be clocked as one, and there was exactly zero sign that he was cutting into Batman’s market share at all. A cursory glance would show that the Nightwing and Batman IPs are complimentary goods, that assist each other, not hinder each other.

But Didio was convinced that “old” Batman is scary or less interesting to audiences and new readers. This in spite of the fact that since at least the 80’s, Batman was pretty much always portrayed as being in his mid-to-late 30’s in modern times - and that period saw its first real spike around the time Frank Miller produced the first real “Old Man Batman” book , and when Batman managed to eventually surpass Superman in sales, especially once spinoffs were included.

Similarly, Didio seems to have showed that he and DC were heavily interested in a minority Batman character, so he kept pushing for new flavors of Batwing when the first one didn’t take off as he’d hoped, and he clearly wants to break into more niche and mainstream markets. But he allowed both Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown’s series to get cancelled, even though Cass was an successful Asian-American character, and Steph was making headway in the TPB lists that were appealing to young adults... and then he exiled both of them because he thought that their mere existence was a threat to Babs returning as Batgirl... which meant that he was also removing *two* characters with disabilities from the Batfamily as well, and right after Morrisonn/Snyder/everyone else had proved that you didn’t have to keep Cassandra in limbo to protect the Batgirl IP.

And I have to say that I think part of his problem isn’t that he hates the 90’s - it’s that he seems to think that Marvel’s artificial and doomed market spike in the 90’s is the way to go, compared to DC’s steady quality at the time. I mean, a lot of his New 52 ideas scream someone who tried to replicate Heroes Reborn, cover gimmicks, editorial-driven and artist-over-writing thinking that crashed the comic market.

Which is part of the reason why the Batman and Flash fans are so easily perturbed and annoyed by him - they were the primary beneficiaries of DC’s writing first focus leading to a string of successful runs that added up as time went on, and both arguably exploded more in the 90’s than other brands.

I think this is a great analysis but I always wonder, to what degree are some of these decisions actually from Jim Lee? Marvel's "Heroes Reborn" was Lee's baby.

I think Lee is very talented but his taste is definitely questionable (ie: any of his costume designs)

[gregpersons]

I was reading some later "Gotham Knights" issues that I hadn't consumed before, the Scott Peterson and AJ Lieberman issues.

I remember hearing a lot of bad reactions to "Hush Returns" and the Joker's portrayal within that but I thought it was okay enough, I guess. One thing that I was VERY surprised by was that Alfred shoots a man to death??? And Batman helps him beat the charge by faking another man's fingerprints, but the murder itself... happened???

It's in this issue: https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Batman:_G...ights_Vol_1_67

A few issues later, it's revealed Alfred was infected with a Clayface virus by Hush, but there's no indication that Alfred was anything but clear mind when he killed this guy Riley who was attempting to blackmail Batman with proof of his secret identity.

I'm still flabbergasted by it!

[millernumber1]

I was reading some later "Gotham Knights" issues that I hadn't consumed before, the Scott Peterson and AJ Lieberman issues.

I remember hearing a lot of bad reactions to "Hush Returns" and the Joker's portrayal within that but I thought it was okay enough, I guess. One thing that I was VERY surprised by was that Alfred shoots a man to death??? And Batman helps him beat the charge by faking another man's fingerprints, but the murder itself... happened???

It's in this issue: https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Batman:_G...ights_Vol_1_67

A few issues later, it's revealed Alfred was infected with a Clayface virus by Hush, but there's no indication that Alfred was anything but clear mind when he killed this guy Riley who was attempting to blackmail Batman with proof of his secret identity.

I'm still flabbergasted by it!

I am extremely curious if the inclusion of "Hush Returns" was a factor in the cancellation of the omnibus. Because I think LOTS of people would have liked to get the Dini stuff from Tec and Streets of Gotham, but NOBODY but NOBODY wanted Hush Returns.

[gregpersons]

I am extremely curious if the inclusion of "Hush Returns" was a factor in the cancellation of the omnibus. Because I think LOTS of people would have liked to get the Dini stuff from Tec and Streets of Gotham, but NOBODY but NOBODY wanted Hush Returns.

Interesting. I think Hush is an extremely weak character so I can't say I loved either "Hush Returns" or "Heart of Hush" but of those two I thought "Heart of Hush" was the lesser story, tbh!

Anyway, I've never seen any reactions to Alfred murdering someone in cold blood. I really can't believe that made it into the book.

[millernumber1]

Interesting. I think Hush is an extremely weak character so I can't say I loved either "Hush Returns" or "Heart of Hush" but of those two I thought "Heart of Hush" was the lesser story, tbh!

Anyway, I've never seen any reactions to Alfred murdering someone in cold blood. I really can't believe that made it into the book.

Interesting. I really like Heart of Hush.