Year One v. Zero Year: Dawn of the Bat (which was better?)

[Frontier]

Year One is basically re-contexualising a more down-to-Earth, gritty yet heroic, Batman for a new era in a neo-noir origin story while also spotlighting Jim Gordon.

Zero Year is basically Batman's origin if it was a Hollywood blockbuster.

[SixSpeedSamurai]

This pole reminds me that I was very disappointed by the animated version of Year One, but I would still be interested in seeing a Year Zero film (preferably in two parts).

I like it, though I'd say the voice actor for Bruce is quite wooden in it.

[MajorHoy]

NOTE: This thread was started back in July 2016.

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With 91 people having voted,

* Year One = 82 votes


* Zero Year = 8 votes

* "They both sucked" = 1 vote

[Gaius]

Earth One.

[Timothy Hunter]

Year One

any creative team who work on Batman will always be under the shadow of Frank Miller and Alan Moore... always.

I'd hardly say that Alan Moore deserves to be in the listing of top Batman writers. To date, Moore has only wrote two stories with Batman as the lead character, Mortal Clay and Killing Joke, both of which are short, simple stories that don't bring much that is new to the table for Batman. Neither

The Killing Joke gets a lot of credit as the start of Barbara Grodon's transformation into Oracle, an identity she adopted in Suicide Squad. Though this wasn't a stroke of genius, but John Ostrander making the best out of a bad situation, because the crippling and sexual assault of Barbara Gordon is a completely gratuitous and tone deaf idea for a Batman comic. While the Killing Joke didn't invent grim and gritty as it was just another story writing the wave of darker Batman stories after the Dark Knight Returns, but it's the only one of those stories that feels completely and utterly miserable.

[JBatmanFan05]

I'd hardly say that Alan Moore deserves to be in the listing of top Batman writers. To date, Moore has only wrote two stories with Batman as the lead character, Mortal Clay and Killing Joke, both of which are short, simple stories that don't bring much that is new to the table for Batman.

Some (or many), including me, might argue against the perceived simplicity or perceived lack of novelty of Killing Joke. Also, Moore also used Batman in Swamp Thing and in some of his Superman work like For the Man Who Has Everything.

So I personally don't object to someone viewing Moore as a top Batman writer. The Killing Joke has proven to be a seminal Batman story, and not just for the Barbara Gordon parts. I admire Moore's ability to have achieved a top seminal Batman story with so few pages of Batman-related/included comics.

[Scott Taylor]

Alan Moore is a great Batman writer, just because his ouvre is so small doesn't mean he sucks at it. I wish he would be invited to write more Batman stories, mainly because of this quote of his (below) and my hope for a more cheery Batman story, for once:

"I’ve never really liked my story in The Killing Joke. I think it put far too much melodramatic weight upon a character that was never designed to carry it. It was too nasty, it was too physically violent. There were some good things about it, but in terms of my writing, it’s not one of me favorite pieces. If, as I said, god forbid, I was ever writing a character like Batman again, I’d probably be setting it squarely in the kind of “smiley uncle period where Dick Sprang was drawing it, and where you had Ace the Bat-Hound and Bat-Mite, and the zebra Batman—when it was sillier. Because then, it was brimming with imagination and playful ideas. I don’t think that the world needs that many brooding psychopathic avengers."

[Vishop]

Year One. It's a definitive origin. Plain and simple yet gratifying for readers to know Gotham City in a nutshell

[Lightning Rider]

I enjoyed Zero Year a lot upon first reading it earlier this year. It's been too long since I've read Year One to vote confidently so I'll give that a re-read at some point.

[MajorHoy]

NOTE: This thread was started back in July 2016.

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With 98 people having voted,

* Year One = 87 votes


* Zero Year = 9 votes

* "They both sucked" = 2 votes