In an earlier blog post, commentator Eric reacted negatively to my summation of DC comics these days. Admittedly, I don’t really read a lot of them, so that opinion might not be considered authoritative. Then I ran across this review from the Robot6 site:
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Batman: The Dark Knight Vol. 3: Mad (DC Comics): Poor Batman. His new continuity is only a few years old, and already he’s suffering from threat inflation, so that now seemingly every crime is one that could level Gotham City and every villain a mass-murderer with a three-figure body count to rival The Joker’s.
In this volume — collecting six issues and an annual from writer Gregg Hurwitz’s run on The Dark Knight — it’s The Mad Hatter’s turn for an upgrade. A villain formerly portrayed as either obsessed with hats or with Lewis Carrol’s Alice books or both, depending on the writer, Jervis Tetch here begins his road to villainy by killing a rabbit, then uses a step-ladder to reach the face of an underling who he proceeds to murder by plunging his thumbs into the victim’s eyes. From there, he murders a housewife by bashing her head in with an iron, he kills hundreds—hundreds!—of Gothamites through his mind-control technology, and he then has Batman’s girlfriend killed…by having her beaten to death in front of him.
In response, Batman tears one of the Tweedles’ jaws off, beats the diminutive Hatter until he’s drenched in his villain’s blood, then tosses him into a pond to drown until Alfred reminds him that he can’t kill the Hatter, or else he’ll be no different from him. I don’t think Batman should ever resort to lethal force, but Alfred’s argument isn’t all that powerful as presented here, given that one side of the scale has a madman murdering scores of innocents, and the other has Batman killing said killer.
That’s not the only surprisingly cliched bit of the story, which invents a new origin full of childhood trauma for Jervis Tetch akin to those Hurwitz previously gave The Scarecrow and The Penguin. Batman also decides he loves his current girlfriend, reluctantly reveals his secret identity to her and then, the very next night, one of his foes murders her while attempting to torture Batman’s secret identity out of her.
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Marvel surely has some grim books too (and DC probably has some stuff a TAD less murder and rape crazy), but their most beloved books lately have been the really, really FUN ones like Hawkeye, and Daredevil, and the now sadly cancelled FF, and Wolverine and the X-Men. Indeed, it’s a mark of how good Marvel is these days, that I’m reading (via trade collections at the library) *two* X-Men titles, which I’ve generally avoided for several decades now.
The point is, though, that even if, say, Uncanny Avengers is pretty grim (if arguably better executed) in a DC-ish fashion–although I hear it’s gotten better–it’s still in contrast to the lighter, more fun books. Grim obviously works better as contrast. One character like the Punisher is interesting. Having all your superheroes killing people, though, sort of diminishes the impact.
Also, let me give a plug to the superb horror western comic The Sixth Gun, which everyone should be reading.
