So I just re-started working at the neighborhood library, and started grabbing Batman (and the largely inferior JLA) graphic novels at random. This lead to a few simple(?) questions.
What’s Commissioner James Gordon’s history? In Batman: Year One, while planning his confrontation with the crooked cop/ex-Green Beret, Gordon comments that it’s been a while since he’s had to kick the crap out of a green beret. Prior to that, I had no idea that Gordon could handle himself in a serious fight at all.
Where’d the new, formerly mute, Batgirl come from? AFAIK, she just popped up between volumes of the NML graphic novels.
In summary, what happened after NML? At the end of volume 4 (the end of the graphic novels) we saw the Joker apparently preparing for yet another showdown with Batman, and Lex Luthor having bought a sizeable chunk of Gotham. Have these story lines been resolved?
1)Gordon is an ex-Chicago cop, & ane ex-MP.
2)Batgirl is the daughter of an assassin. She came to NML to escape her abusive father.
3)Joker killed Gordon’s wife. Luthor tried a massive land grab by destroying all of Gotham’s surviving real estate records, using Bane as a flunky. He failed & has been put on notice by the B-man.
There is an NML vol. 5 you might want to check out.
After the NML ended, much of Gotham was rebuilt by Wayne, Luthor and others (“The Billion-Dollar Build-Up”). Of course, this benefitted the uppercrust sections of the city much more than the slums which still suffer from structural instability left over from the quakes. In the first year or so after the NML, there were several confrontations between those who stayed through the NML (who called themsevles the “Original Gothamites” or “OG”'s) and those who left and came back (dubbed DeeZees by the OG’s), but most of that seems to have settled down since.
Batgirl stars in a fantastic series of her own where some of her pre-NML history has been detailed, although how she arrived in Gotham and how she earned Batman’s trust I think have not been addressed. Definitely grab the Batgirl: Silent Running trade if your library has it.
I think on a whole JLA has been stronger than Batman through the Morrison and Waid runs, all but a few issues of which have been collected. Mark Waid’s issues (43 - 58, 60) were really fantastic, IMO, better (taken as a whole) than anything else done on the title.
Morrisson and Waid both had fantastic runs on the JLA. The way that they constantly raised the stakes to a new level of peril every story arc is fantastic, and Howard Porter’s run as penciller provided stable, steady art that fit the stories perfectly, and his recent departure is a shame.
I really like the NML run on Batman, and I would recomend the novel by Greg Rucka as a quick read that retels the whole (well mostly) story.
[mutters] Stupid, understocked, public library system… [/mutters]
They did, however, have Silent Running, which I did like a lot, though IIRC it still didn’t really say how/why she showed up in Gotham and got Batman’s trust. (OOC, was she in Gotham before or after it was declared NML?)
And regarding my comment on JLA, I think it’s just a result of the graphic novels that I’ve read. With the exception of the Babel one (Tower of Babel? Well, the one where al Ghul gets his hands on Batman’s plans to incapacitate the JLA), it was all pretty formulaic stuff of the form a) super threat threatens earth/JLA/universe, b) threat incapacitates the JLA or, at the very least, fights them to a standstill, and c) JLA juryrigs together a strategy that borders on deus ex machina (giving all humans superpowers?!?) and overcomes the threat.
Now I know that that’s the plot for most comic book trades, but I’d like to see some character development (or at least some better dialogue) along the way. And occasional forays into self-doubt/melancholy on the part of Superman doesn’t really count.
I think the interaction between Batman and the others is funny, and Green Lantern and Flash crack me up. Aquaman and Wonder Woman’s relationship is bizarre and awkwerd (which is good) and Plastic man cracks me up.
As for NML, I liked that arc alot, but found the trades to be prety bulky as a read. I liked the novel alot better, as I’ve said before.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think JLA dialogue is bad - it’s definitely amusing, but it lacks the…meat that Batman (or, AFAIK, any of the JLA member’s solo titles) has. It’s just a little too cartoony, too pat, to have the real emotional or intellectual complexity (um, not to be blunt or anything) that can be found in, say, even a section of a Sandman graphic novel. To put it another way, JLA seems to be too much about the super and less about the human.
Feel free to blame my ignorance on an unforgivably narrow sampling of JLA material if you wish.
Oh no, you’re definitely right as to Morrison’s run, which was all sturm und drang and lots of it, but I thought it was great the way it bowled you over and didn’t let you come up for air. I mean, come on, “THE BLOOD RED GAME OF GODS HAS BEGUN!!!” – how can you not love that stuff? (Also, Morrison understood the Clark/Bruce relationship better than any other writer I’ve ever seen.)
Mark Waid’s run is very different and much more character-based; it’s probably more your cup of tea. The Tower of Babel TPB reprints Waid’s first four issues; the next TPB (Divided We Fall) just came out so you probably don’t have it yet. It’s got the next eight issues and is the best part of of Waid’s run, exploring the tensions created at the end of Tower of Babel as well as developing a terriffically compelling portrayal of – wait for it – Plastic Man. The next TPB, whenever it arrives, will probably finish off Waid’s run with the Terror Incognita arc and the Christmas story he did for issue #60.
